How African-American Slavery Grew the Free Economies of Europe

This chapter integrates the economic history of capitalism, with its emphasis on freedom and innovation, and the new history of capitalism, with its emphasis on slavery and exploitation. It uses a general equilibrium model of the British Triangular Trade to identify when and where slave or free sectors drove economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Empire. Price movements imply that the expansion of West Indian sugar slavery drove the expansion of British sugar manufacturing in the early eighteenth century; that manufacturing expansion and the industrious revolution in sugar consumption patterns drove the expansion of West Indian sugar slavery in the middle of the eighteenth century. Sugar slavery returns to the driver’s position as Britain approached the abolition of its slave trade in 1807. Price movements also imply that cotton US slavery drove the expansion of British textiles manufacturing between Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1794 and the expansion of American textiles following the establishment of the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813.