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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
The role of slavery in driving Britain's economic development is often debated, but seldom given a central place.
In their remarkable new book, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson 'follow the money' to document in revealing detail the role of slavery in the making of Britain’s industrial revolution. Slavery was not just a source of wealth for a narrow circle of slave owners who built grand country houses and filled them with luxuries. The forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society.
In textile mills, iron and copper smelting, steam power, and financial institutions, slavery played a crucial part. Things we might think far removed from the taint of slavery, such as eighteenth-century fashions for indigo-patterned cloth, sweet tea, snuff boxes, mahogany furniture, ceramics and silverware, were intimately connected. Even London’s role as a centre for global finance was partly determined by the slave trade as insurance, financial trading and mortgage markets were developed in the City to promote distant and risky investments in enslaved people.
The result is a bold and unflinching account of how Britain became a global superpower, and how the legacy of slavery persists. Acknowledging Britain's role in slavery is not just about toppling statues and renaming streets. We urgently need to come to terms with slavery's inextricable links with Western capitalism, and the ways in which many of us continue to benefit from slavery to this day.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Maps and tables
Maps
Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Our approach
Structure of the volume
Notes
1 Slavery and the British economy: how the slave and plantation trades worked and how they changed
The Royal African Company and the rise of private slave traders
The Navigation Acts and the politics of the slave trade
The West Africa trade
The multilateral impact of the slave trade
The Triangular Trade
The plantation trade and the slave trade before 1776
Late century volatility, booms and speculation
The decline of planter power
Decline of the Caribbean?
Notes
2 Slavery and the British industrial revolution: misleading measures
Eric Williams
Why did Williams’ analysis receive such a negative reception in Britain?
Debates on slave trade profitability and capital supply
The profits and wealth of slave plantations
The slave trade and overseas trade
The wider impact of the slave trade and plantation colonies: shipping, financial services and commodity chains
Britain’s gains compared with France and other European rivals
Conclusion
Notes
3 A revolution in consumption: sugar and other plantation products
Sugar imports
Sugar importing, refining and distribution
Shopping and consuming
From luxury consumption to the industrial revolution
Sugar and intoxicants
Tobacco, coffee and other plantation consumer goods
Plantation groceries and the wider economy
Conclusion
Notes
4 Plantation innovation and Atlantic science
The sugar revolution
Invention and innovation
Plantation ‘improvement’
Slavery and scientific collecting
Knowledge in the Caribbean
Plantation management and accounting
Labour intensification
Conclusion
Notes
5 British ‘slave ports’ and their hinterlands: structural and regional transformation
London
Bristol
Liverpool
Glasgow
National and regional perspectives
Slave ports and the industrialization of Britain
Demographic indicators of port-hinterland industrialization
Structural change
Coal and markets
Conclusion
Notes
6 Iron and copper revolutions: metals, hardware and mining
Metals, mining and regional industrialization
Copper
Iron
Guns
Conclusion
Notes
7 Textile revolutions
The impact of Atlantic demand: linen
The impact of Atlantic demand: woollens
The impact of Atlantic demand: cotton
The impact of Atlantic supply: cotton
New World cotton and technological innovation
Capital investment and sources of capital
Textiles and regional industrialization
Explanations for the textile revolutions
Conclusion
Notes
8 Financial capitalism
Credit and Payments Systems
Caribbean mortgages
Dutch and French capital and mortgages
Insurance
Public and private finance
Crises, the state and the Bank of England
Conclusion
Notes
9 Slavery after slavery: legacies of race and inequality
Britain’s continuing involvement with the slave trade after 1807
The slow and incomplete emancipation of slavery in British territories
British involvement in chattel slavery and indentured labour after 1838
British slave ownership compensation
The impact of slavery on Africa and the Caribbean until today
Lasting discrimination in Britain and restorative justice
Conclusion
Notes
10 Slavery, capitalism and the economic history of Britain
Slavery and capitalism: the British experience
A revolution in consumption
Food and raw materials: escaping the constraints of the domestic economy
Slavery and the state
Slavery, the industrial revolution and the long-term development of British capitalism
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1: The growth of the Atlantic trade in enslaved people (numbers taken from Africa b...
Chapter 2
Table 2.1: Geographical distribution of origin of retained imports of England/Britain 1700...
Table 2.2: Geographical distribution of English/British domestic exports, 1700–1798 ...
Table 2.3: Geographical distribution of English/British re-exports 1700–1798 % (tota...
Table 2.4: The ‘diamond-shaped trade’ associated with the British Atlantic sy...
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: Top eight recorded English/British commodity imports (official values) ranked, t...
Table 3.2: Wages and spending on new drinks by class, 1760.
Chapter 4
Table 4.1: Real slave and sugar prices in the western Caribbean in pounds sterling, 1674...
Chapter 6
Table 6.1: Exports of metal goods from London to Africa and the colonies, 1701 (% of total ...
Table 6.2: Share of Atlantic markets in total quantity of British wrought iron and nails ex...
Chapter 7
Table 7.1: Proportions of exports of British domestically produced wool, cotton and linen t...
Table 7.2: British domestic textile exports and Asian textile re-exports to British colonie...
Table 7.3: Sources of British raw cotton imports % and totals in lbs, 1698–1780.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Map 1.1: The British Transatlantic Slave Trade 1563–1810.
Map 1.2: The British trade to individual colonies of the Lesser Antilles, 1563–181...
Chapter 5
Map 5.1: The regional concentration of secondary-sector employment (adult males, excludin...
Map 5.2: The regional concentration of secondary-sector employment (adult males, excludin...
Chapter 6
Map 6.1: The regional concentration of adult males employed in the metals industries, 181...
Map 6.2: The regional concentration of adult males employed in the metal trades and minin...
Chapter 7
Map 7.1: The regional concentration of adult males employed in the textile sector,
c.
...
Map 7.2 The regional concentration of adult males employed in the textile sector, 1817.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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SLAVERY, CAPITALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson 2023
The right of Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5268-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948165
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Maps and tables
Maps
1.1 The British Transatlantic Slave Trade 1563–1810.
1.2 The British trade to individual colonies of the Lesser Antilles, 1563–1810.
5.1 The regional concentration of secondary-sector employment (adult males, excluding mining), 1710.
5.2 The regional concentration of secondary-sector employment (adult males, excluding mining), 1817.
6.1 The regional concentration of adult males employed in the metals industries, 1817.
6.2 The regional concentration of adult males employed in the metal trades and mining combined, 1817.
7.1 The regional concentration of adult males employed in the textile sector, 1710.
7.2 The regional concentration of adult males employed in the textile sector, 1817.
Tables
1.1 The growth of the Atlantic trade in enslaved people (numbers taken from Africa by nationality of vessel to nearest %, with totals) 1676–1850.
2.1 Geographical distribution of origin of retained imports of England/Britain 1700–1798 % (total official values in £000s).
2.2 Geographical distribution of English/British domestic exports, 1700–1798 % (total official values in £000s).
2.3 Geographical distribution of English/British re-exports 1700–1798 % (total official values in £000s).
2.4The ‘diamond-shaped trade’ associated with the British Atlantic system and the Indian Ocean of the eighteenth century in three benchmark decades. Values of trade are per decade, official values, in £millions. Exports include re-exports.
3.1 Top eight recorded English/British commodity imports (official values) ranked, together accounting for between half and two-thirds of the official value of imports.
3.2 Wages and spending on new drinks by class, 1760.
4.1 Real slave and sugar prices in the western Caribbean in pounds sterling, 1674–1804.
6.1 Exports of metal goods from London to Africa and the colonies, 1701 (% of total exports of each good by weight).
6.2 Share of Atlantic markets in total quantity of British wrought iron and nails exported, 1700–1800.
7.1 Proportions of exports of British domestically produced wool, cotton and linen textiles going to the Americas and West Africa, % of total values.
7.2 British domestic textile exports and Asian textile re-exports to British colonies in the Americas and to Africa, 1771, by value and %, and colonial populations, c.1770.
7.3 Sources of British raw cotton imports %, and totals in lbs, 1698–1780.
Acknowledgements
Our main research interest is the history of industrialization, particularly in Britain. Between us, in the past, we have written about artisan manufacture and technological change; shifts in consumption and product innovation; the impact of commodities imported from Asia; and the globalization of Britain’s overseas trade. We have researched the metal trades and the textile industries; regional and structural shifts; demographic changes; the advantages and the limits of quantitative assessments; and the importance of changes in business organization, finance and banking. Although we have considered slavery from time to time in our work, it is only in recent years that we have begun fully to explore the ways in which slavery links to all of these topics.
We have written this book in order to examine those links in detail and to provide an accessible account of the place of slavery in British industrialization. Work on the volume has involved a steep learning curve and a recognition of the immense debt that we owe to a small group of colleagues past and present who have produced excellent studies of Atlantic slavery, the operation of Britain’s trade in enslaved people and the wider impact of slavery on capitalist society. From the classic Capitalism and Slavery thesis of Eric Williams, published in 1944, key works influencing our approach range from the analyses of Richard B. Sheridan and Richard Pares, the demographic work of B. W. Higman, the commercial and financial studies of S. G. Checkland and Jacob Price, to Joseph Inikori’s account of the contribution of Africans to the industrial revolution. These authors led the way in keeping the role of slavery in British economic development alive over many decades when mainstream economic history marginalized its importance. A number of UK, European and US scholars writing since the 1970s and 1980s have added further detail to our knowledge of the operation of the slave trade, the history of slave ports, the wealth produced by slavery and its distribution. In addition to others mentioned below, we must especially acknowledge the research we have drawn upon in the works of David Alston, William Darity, Tom Devine, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, Douglas J. Hamilton, Kenneth Morgan, Nicholas Radburn, David Richardson, S. D. Smith, Barbara Solow, James Walvin and Gavin Wright.
Adding to this list, we are directly indebted to colleagues, with expertise in different aspects of industrialization, slavery and Atlantic trade, who selflessly read and made valuable comments on earlier versions of various chapters and encouraged us in our efforts. We thank them all: Jeremy Adelman, Kristine Bruland, Trevor Burnard, Jan de Vries, Nick Draper, Chris Evans, Miriam Goodall, Aaron Graham, Catherine Hall, Jane Humphries, Mina Ishizu, Philip John, Sebastian Keibek, Tony Lane, Patrick O’Brien, David Ormrod, Mary O’Sullivan, Dexnell Peters, James Poskett, Giorgio Riello, Carolyn Sissoko, Keith Smith, John Styles, Keith Tribe and Nuala Zahedieh.
Our sincere thanks go to Helen Clifford for her work on the references and her reading of the text. We are also grateful to Sebastian Keibek and Leigh Shaw Taylor for providing the mapping data and maps for chapters 5, 6 and 7, and to Karolina Hutkova, Giorgio Riello and John Styles for the data assembled in table 7.2. We alone are responsible for the interpretation of these maps and the table.
Finally, we have had the good fortune of helpful advice from four anonymous readers engaged by the publisher as well as the thoughtful assistance, sequentially, of George Owers, Pascal Porcheron and, above all, Julia Davies and Lindsey Wimpenny at Polity. We own all the faults and errors that remain.
This book includes a number of passages from eighteenth-century primary sources that describe people of African descent in language which is now unacceptable. They also contain negative portrayals of people and cultures. The terms ‘Negro’/‘negro’ and ‘negroes’ were in common usage during the eighteenth century. We retain these and other pejorative expressions within quotations from contemporary primary sources in order to call them out and to convey the racial divisions at the heart of early industrial capitalism.
Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson
October 2022
Introduction
Edward Colston (1636–1721) became the public face of the British slave trade when his statue was thrown into Bristol harbour during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020. Colston had been a member of the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol and deputy governor of the Royal African Company (RAC). Slave trading was his main source of wealth from the 1680s. He later became MP for Bristol and a noted philanthropist, giving more than £70,000 to educational and social causes. In the nineteenth century he was a Bristol legend, celebrated in statuary and stained glass, in landmarks and street names, in the (charitable) Colston Society (disbanded in 2020 after 275 years) and even in a regional bread roll, the ‘Colston bun’.1 ‘The Colston Four’, charged with criminal damage to the statue, were acquitted in a Bristol jury trial on 5 January 2022 to applause from the public gallery. Britain’s leading public historian, echoing their legal defence, suggested that the Four were ‘on the right side of history’.2
Two days after Colston was toppled, the statue of Robert Milligan (1746–1809), a Scottish West India merchant, ship owner and slave factor, was covered with a calico shroud and placard by protesters in London. Mulligan, the main instigator of the West India Docks, had also made his fortune from slavery and plantations. A week later, the statue was quietly removed as part of a wider drive to review all London’s statues with links to slavery.3
At the same time, heated debates about the memorialization of individuals involved in slavery were underway in Scotland, above all in calls for the 46-metre-high Melville Monument in St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh, to be ‘re-interpreted’ or removed. The statue is dedicated to Henry Dundas (1742–1811), the statesman whose advocacy (against William Wilberforce) of ‘gradual’ rather than immediate abolition probably delayed the ending of the British slave trade by fifteen years.4 In south Wales, another area of Britain that benefitted markedly from Atlantic slavery, the 23-metre Picton Monument in Carmarthen became a focus of protest generating a petition, with 20,000 signatories, calling for its removal. Sir Thomas Picton was a British lieutenant general notorious for the ill treatment and torture of enslaved people during his period as governor of Trinidad (1797–1803).5 A marble statue in the ‘Heroes of Wales Gallery’ and a portrait of Picton at Cardiff City Hall were removed in 2020.6
Many British cities, universities, museums, public and private institutions and commercial and financial houses of long standing have, in the last few years, carried out or completed reviews of their connections to slavery. A report by the National Trust, which has in its care many of the fine country houses connected with wealth from slavery, created much controversy.7 Many Oxford and Cambridge colleges and several universities, especially Bristol and Glasgow, have committed resources and made appointments to investigate their connections to the profits of slavery and empire.8 Glasgow University pledged to raise £20 million for a joint Glasgow–Caribbean Centre for Development Research. The Church of England initiated a review of its slave-related statuary in 2021, yet an application to the Church from Jesus College Cambridge to remove a chapel memorial to seventeenth-century slave trader Tobias Rustat was controversially declined by a consistory church court.9 The Bank of England has apologized for its role in the slave trade and for the twenty-five governors and directors who owned slaves. It has removed eight paintings and two busts from public display.10 Reviews by several banks and businesses in the City of London have led to a number of secretive ‘restorative justice grants’ intended to benefit the Afro-Caribbean population in Britain.11
Protest and debate over the commemoration and activities of slave traders and plantation owners operating centuries ago highlight major questions about the origins of Britain’s wealth as well as the foundations of deep-seated racial disparities and racial injustice in Britain and elsewhere. Britain’s early industrial revolution, which has defined her economic, political and cultural identity ever since, was inextricably bound up with the slave trade and colonial plantations. But this has received less attention from historians than has Britain’s celebrated, pioneering role in the abolition of her transatlantic trade in enslaved people (in 1807) and in ending slavery in most British territories (in the 1830s). The extent of Britain’s trade in enslaved peoples, her brutal exploitation of plantation labour and the wealth that these activities brought to British families and wider society have been obscured in favour of a more heroic island story of early economic improvement and cultural benevolence. This has been reflected in school curricula and in the treatment of slavery as a minor subject in the range and sweep of British domestic and imperial history as taught in universities.
In 2022 an engaging popular history of the 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara was published with the title White Debt: the DemeraraUprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery. Despite graduating from elite British educational institutions, the author, as he began his research, was ‘quickly shocked’ at how little he knew:
That it had been British captains commanding British boats operated by British sailors who had transported around 2.8 million captive Africans to the British Caribbean, that it was British families who owned plantations in the Caribbean run by British managers and overseers where hundreds of thousands of enslaved men, women and children were forced to live and die. That it had been British businesses that had transported the cotton, tobacco, sugar and other crops cultivated by the enslaved people to the consumers back in Britain. How was it possible I didn’t know any of this? It was like a national amnesia.12
The bulk of professional historians of Britain were partly to blame for this amnesia, although the history of slavery did gain increasing prominence as part of the rise of social and labour history in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a response to the growing historiography of slavery in the United States at that time. With a few notable exceptions, however, it was largely treated as an aspect of the history of the Americas rather than as a vital element of Britain’s history. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams stood alone in placing the slave trade and plantations centrally among explanations of Britain’s industrial revolution.13 His work was initially largely dismissed, but discussion resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s with debate over profit rates in the slave trade and plantation businesses, and the degree to which those profits directly financed Britain’s industrial infrastructure. Such partial assessments of Williams’ thesis, which were also constrained by the data available at the time, led most historians to give slavery a minimum role, if any, in the economic history of Britain. The gains from slavery accrued not only to elite merchants and wealthy plantation owners but also, by providing incomes and livelihoods, to many others throughout British society. But the widespread connections between the exploitation of enslaved Africans and mainstream British economic history have been avoided by the bulk of historians. The separation of British history from wider colonial and global history sidelined the history of slavery in British research, education and popular consciousness.
Most major works on the industrial revolution since the 1980s have ignored slavery and plantations altogether. Textbooks that currently lead the field concentrate on changes in resource use, capital and labour, internal to Britain, or on the economic benefits derived from favourable ‘inclusive’ politics and institutions. They devote scarcely a sentence to slavery or West Indian plantations.14 Slavery has, however, returned to wider historians’ interests in recent years with the heightened political consciousness of racial inequality in Britain. Historians are also now addressing this subject as part of fresh conceptual frameworks: new histories of consumption and commodity flows; new forms of global history; studies of globalized coercive labour regimes, including modern slavery; and moves, in the USA in particular, to write new histories of capitalism that give central significance to slavery and race.
Apart from new historical frameworks, we also now have a wealth of digitized and searchable primary sources that were unavailable to earlier scholars. In particular, the Legacies of British Slavery database makes it possible not only to trace many British owners of plantations and the enslaved, but their links with other businesses, industries and investments. ‘Slave Voyages’, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, details all recorded slave ships and their human cargoes travelling from Europe to the Americas via Africa.15 Other online data, such as the Cambridge Group’s occupational statistics, make it easier to consider the impact of slave-based Atlantic trade upon Britain’s pioneering industrial regions and sectors.16 New historical frameworks, new sources and the political moment make this the time for a broadly focused book setting out the connections between slavery and the British economy.
We are not experts on the institution or experiences of slavery or on the history of the Caribbean, colonial America or Africa. This is not a book that aims to examine any of those subjects in detail. The economic, social and cultural history of slavery and the inhumane practices of slavery are vitally important subjects but are well beyond the scope of our study. Our approach is that of two historians of Britain’s industrial revolution and of her longer trajectory as an economic power. Our question is: where does slavery fit into this story? This of course requires us to consider aspects of the slave trade within Africa, the operation of chattel slavery, the exploitation of the enslaved and the ways in which the trade in enslaved people and plantation agriculture were organized to maximize and to direct profits, but fuller studies of all these topics must be left to other scholars.
Our approach
Although it had much longer roots, the ‘industrial revolution’ in Britain took place most obviously in the half century following the 1760s. It was marked by (slow) acceleration in the rate of increase of national income and output; by structural and regional shifts in the economy; by urbanization; and by technological and organizational innovation, all of which contributed to increased productivity. New technologies were introduced; steam power was gradually diffused throughout industry; internal transportation was transformed with road improvements, canal construction and railways; manufacturing and commercial organization grew more efficient; new forms of investment and financial intermediation were put in place; and there was a revolution in consumption. The build-up to these changes from the later seventeenth century, and the changes themselves, took place at the same time that Britain became the world’s primary slave trader and a leading exploiter of colonial slave-plantation systems of production. The big question, addressed in this book, is the degree to which these developments were connected.
We do not argue that slavery caused the industrial revolution. Neither do we suggest that slavery was necessary for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain. Even less does our study attempt to estimate that the gains from slavery contributed a particular percentage to Britain’s economic growth, GDP or capital formation in the eighteenth century, as earlier studies have attempted. That is not our purpose, partly because many aspects of the impact of slavery are not measurable in quantitative terms. What we do say is that the role of slavery in the process of industrialization and economic transformation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been generally underestimated by historians, and that it is time for a rounded examination in the light of accumulated research. The slave and plantation trades were the hub around which many other dynamic and innovatory sectors of the economy pivoted. Slavery, directly and indirectly, set in motion innovations in manufacturing, agriculture, wholesaling, retailing, shipping, banking, international trade, finance and investment, insurance, as well as in the organization and intensification of work, record keeping and the application of scientific and useful knowledge. Slavery certainly was formative in the timing and nature of Britain’s industrial transition.
In our analysis we survey a wide range of literatures that are too often generated and read separately from one another. They include studies of consumption habits and tastes; Atlantic science; regional transformations; industrial skills; the impulse to innovate; accounting; business management; and changes in national and international finance. Bringing these subjects together creates a new view of the industrial revolution and of capitalism in Britain.
Structure of the volume
Our first chapter provides a chronology of Britain’s involvement with African slavery over more than three centuries. We follow with a series of themed chapters that represent different areas of connection between the slave trade, plantations and the industrialization of the economy. In the two final chapters, we discuss the longer-term impact of slavery on the British economy and society and on the nature of British capitalism, beyond the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in most British territories in the 1830s.
We start with an overview of how the trade in enslaved people was organized and developed; why and how plantations producing valuable and desirable consumer crops to satisfy European tastes came to use enslaved African labour. Trade, shipping and finance in the Atlantic included the African and Iberian trades and extended beyond to the re-export of textiles imported from Asia and of manufactured goods originating on the European continent. These trades created innovations in international payment and credit systems and in manufacturing, across a whole range of new goods destined for new markets. A central role was played by the state: aggressive mercantilism and warfare extended colonial possessions and trading influence. Here as elsewhere we use the term mercantilism to convey a range of state policies, especially fiscal and military policies (most not unique to Britain) aimed at the extension of trade at the expense of rivals; the maintenance of favourable trade balances; protectionism; and a focus upon colonies as markets for exports and to supply raw materials.17
Eighteenth-century commentary about the Africa trade, slavery and plantations emphasized their vital contribution to the British economy. This, however, got lost, along with historians’ interest in slavery during the nineteenth century, when free trade and the exercise of imperial power in new forms came to dominate the historical imagination. The breakthrough work of Eric Williams in the 1940s might have led to a widespread reappraisal of the role of slavery in Britain’s industrial revolution, but historians of the time were more concerned with the history of abolition and with other factors in the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain. Our second chapter confronts this history and sketches out the broad approach necessary fully to comprehend how slavery impacted upon the nature of the British economy and its industrial transition.
Trade and consumption drove the early British industrial revolution, much of it underpinned by the growing taste, and escalating demand, for sugar as well as other tropical ‘groceries’. Our third chapter surveys how sugar, tobacco, cacao and coffee joined tea from Asia to become the key commodities shifting European consumer taste and culture. These new drinks and foods stimulated new British refining and manufacturing industries. The rituals and equipage surrounding their consumption also brought increased imports of porcelain from China and glass, ceramics and silverware from Europe, which prompted imitative innovation in British industries producing such tablewares for consumers across the social scale. Demand for colonial groceries and for the receptacles used in their consumption hastened a move from household self-sufficiency to wage labour.
West Indian and southern mainland American plantations combined enslaved labour exploitation with agri-business, capital intensity and organizational capability. Our fourth chapter shows how plantation economies utilized seeds and plants, labour, capital, skills and knowledge from across the globe, and made innovations in wind, water and steam power as well as in refining and distilling. The plantation system was part and parcel of the organizational and technological innovations of the industrial revolution.
Britain’s Atlantic ports and their industrial hinterlands are studied in chapter 5. This demonstrates how the increasing power of Atlantic trading caused a geographical reorientation of the country’s industrial focus. The key manufacturing regions of the industrial revolution relied on access to Atlantic port cities, principally Liverpool, London, Glasgow and Bristol, and to the capital and credit that they generated. Most investigations into the causes of the Industrial Revolution focus on the national level and miss the causes and impact of industrial agglomeration in the dynamic industrial regions of the northwest, the midlands, the Scottish lowlands and south Wales that benefitted most from Atlantic orientation.
Regional dynamics were a feature of the heavy, capital-intensive industries of mining, iron and copper smelting, as well as the lighter metal trades, the subject of chapter 6. London and Bristol merchants and banks financed investment in the south Wales coalfield, in Cornish copper mines, in copper refining in the Swansea Valley, in iron refining in south Wales and the west midlands and in coal mining in the northeast for the London market. The metalwares trades from copper vessels to agricultural implements and guns became more diversified and specialized in response to Atlantic markets.
It is to cotton textiles that we usually look to explore connections between slavery and industrialization, but Scottish, Irish and Lancashire linens, west Yorkshire woollens, midlands hosiery and even London’s silks were also important parts of Britain’s textile revolution. Chapter 7 explores links between slavery and the textile sector. New Atlantic demands helped to drive changes in the weight, patterns and quality of cloth, and in the mixing of different fibres. Plantation-produced indigo together with other Atlantic dyestuffs and Senegalese gum (used in printing) were instrumental in creating more colourful patterns and designs. Above all, the qualities of raw cotton from Caribbean plantations aided the product revolution and hastened the great spinning inventions of the jenny, the water frame and the mule. These developments long pre-dated the better-known connection between Lancashire cotton factories and the slave plantations of the American South.
During the process of state-supported Atlantic trade expansion and industrial transformation London became the leading global financial centre, and it is to finance that we turn in chapter 8. The expectation and realization of profits from the trade in enslaved peoples and from the cultivation and importation of plantation products, particularly sugar, underpinned aspects of the early eighteenth-century evolution of the national debt, taxation, the formation of Bank of England policy and the trade in government stock. Plantation investment and shipping also brought innovation in the mortgage and insurance markets, in multiplex financial transfers and in the expansion of commercial credit that linked provincial merchants, manufacturers and banks with the resources of the London money market.
When chattel slavery was ended in British territories (with the exception of the East India Company’s possessions, St Helena and Ceylon) in 1833, compensation of £20 million was paid to slave owners. We address this further financial legacy of slavery in chapter 9. The debts taken on by the British state to pay compensation to slave holders were only finally repaid in 2015. From the records of compensation payments we can see how deeply embedded relationships with slavery and plantations were at many of levels of society and right across the country.18
The ending of the British slave trade and slavery did not mark the end of Britain’s involvement. The inter-colonial slave trade continued, and British investors had interests in plantations and mining operations employing enslaved people in the Americas and Asia throughout the nineteenth century. The plantation system, rather than declining in the wake of abolition, burgeoned globally, based on other sorts of racially based coerced labour, often indentured labour, much of it brought from British and European colonies in the global South in British ships that dominated the trade. Racial capitalism was the other face of European modernization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The legacies of slavery continue in great inequalities of wealth and income both within Britain and between Britain, the Caribbean and West Africa. There is also a great divide between London and its ‘home counties’ and Britain’s former industrial regions, which were created in the time of slavery but which have in the past half century experienced deindustrialization. Overlaying this income and wealth divide are deep racial divisions with their roots in slavery and later imperialism. Labour for the factories, infrastructures and hospitals of Britain’s years of expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s was drawn from her former colonies, notably the Caribbean. These minority workforces, particularly in Britain’s former industrial regions, have faced an unreceptive and often aggressive environment and are now among the poorest in the country.
The relationship between slavery and capitalism has been foundational in US history and historiography since the end of the Civil War. This has been endorsed in recent years by the 1619 Project, which reaches back to the arrival in Virginia of the first enslaved Africans, and by New Histories of Capitalism (NHC), in which slavery is placed at the heart of both US and global capitalist development. We turn in our final chapter to consider Britain’s story in parallel with these North American narratives. We mark out the distinctive connections between slavery and the economy in Britain and within the wider history of a global capitalism that grew out of the west European colonial project and Britain’s role within it.
A common question asked of those who emphasize the impact of slavery on the industrial precocity of Britain is why industrial revolutions did not occur earlier in Spain, Portugal, France or the Netherlands, countries that were also deeply engaged in transatlantic slavery. We address this question in a number of chapters that consider the other factors that Britain had in her favour, though few were unique and many had a close synergy with the development of Britain’s slave-based Atlantic trading system. We argue that Britain was in a position to benefit disproportionately from slavery in the eighteenth century during the period when she dominated the slave trade. The advantage was firmly endorsed by the Atlantic territorial and trading gains of the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic War period, which came at the expense of French and Dutch rivals.
This is an economic history of industrializing Britain with its slave roots examined and acknowledged. State policy, colonial ambitions and slavery brought Europe, the African continent, North America and a group of small islands in the West Indies into a dynamic of capitalist development that proved crucial to the making of the industrial revolution and that also influenced the nature of British capitalism in the longer term. It is the story of Scotland and Wales as much as England, and of regional development alongside the emergence of London as a world financial and trading centre. We ‘follow the money’ generated by the enslavement of Africans and the development of plantations but we also highlight their wider impact on institutions, culture and practices in the making of the modern economy. Plantation output, above all sugar and cotton, shifted consumer tastes and encouraged new manufactures and methods of production. Atlantic demands, underpinned by slavery and plantations, were important to the transformation of manufactures and technologies that drove the industrial revolution. The slave trade, plantations and Atlantic colonialism also brought a revolution in financial services that set the scene for Britain’s future global role. By emphasizing these aspects, our book challenges established views of the role of slavery in Britain’s economic history and in the making of Western capitalism.
Notes
1
Morgan (2004a).
2
See Olusoga (2022a; 2022b).
3
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/2915/9827/8333/lr-misc-docks-milligan-statue.pdf
; Dresser (2007).
4
His legal advocacy had earlier resulted in the abolition of slave holding within Scotland:
https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790–1820/member/dundas-henry-1742–1811
.
5
Picton’s horrific reign as governor of Trinidad was immortalized by Naipaul (1969). In a notorious case Picton was put on trial in London for approving the torture of a fourteen-year-old girl, Luisa Calderón. He had the conviction overturned by arguing that Trinidad was still subject to Spanish law, which permitted torture: Havard (2004).
6
The latter was ‘re-interpreted’ and returned to display in a travel case at Cardiff Museum in 2022.
7
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/addressing-the-histories-of-slavery-and-colonialism-at-the-national-trust
.
8
See report by Cambridge University, for example:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/legacies-of-enslavement-inquiry
.
9
The Guardian
, 22 March 2022:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/23/church-court-rejects-cambridge-college-bid-to-move-tobias-rustat-slave-trader-memorial
.
10
From the 1770s to 1790 the Bank itself owned 599 slaves in Grenada after a defaulted loan made to Alexander and Sons:
The Guardian
, 16 April 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/15/bank-of-england-owned-599–slaves-in-1770s-new-exhibition-reveals
.
11
The secret grants have been governed by non-disclosure agreements: Rawlinson (2020);
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/lloyds-of-london-and-greene-king-to-make-slave-trade-reparations
; Hannah Capella, ‘Glasgow University’s Bold Move to Pay Back Slave Trade Profits’,
BBC News
, 23 August 2019:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49435041
.
12
Harding (2022: 5).
13
Williams (1944/1994).
14
Allen (2009b); Mokyr (2009; 2017); Wrigley (2016); Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). The stand-out exception to these texts about the industrial revolution, one that emphasizes the role of both slavery and the mercantilist policies of the state, is Ashworth (2017). The only detailed account of the industrial revolution giving a principal place to Africans and slavery is Inikori (2002). Findlay and O’Rourke (2007: 227–364) give slavery prominence in a volume covering the last millennium of world trade, but a recent textbook that includes a consideration of slavery and Britain’s industrial revolution relegates it to a ‘background condition’: Koyama and Rubin (2022: 158–60).
15
Legacies of British Slavery:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
. See also Hall et al. (2014). Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database:
https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database
.
16
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Occupational datasets:
https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/occupations/datasets/catalogues/occupationspopulation/
.
17
State policies of the period are often viewed as holding back the development of markets and capitalist society but they can equally be seen as an integral part of their evolution. See Pincus (2012); Rössner (2020: 1–49, 137–68); Ashworth (2017: 105–44).
18
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
;
https://taxjustice.net/2020/06/09/slavery-compensation-uk-questions/
.
CHAPTER 1Slavery and the British economy: how the slave and plantation trades worked and how they changed
In one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic over the course of three centuries.1 Around 11 million reached their initial destinations. Many died during the brutalities of capture, trade and detention on the West African coast and even more from disease, ill-treatment and suicide during the transatlantic passage and in the early weeks after arrival. The trade was initiated in the fifteenth century but accelerated, for Britain especially, after the Restoration. It peaked in the 1780s with the transport of more than 80,000 annually, most to the Caribbean. And it remained high into the 1860s, well beyond the abolition of the British trade in 1807.2 British traders were leading players in the Atlantic trade in enslaved people as early as the 1670s; they dominated the trade between the 1740s and 1807, when they accounted for around 40% of total shipments from Africa.3
Labour shortages, alongside profitable opportunities for mining in South America and an abundance of fertile land for agricultural crops, encouraged a growing use of enslaved labour in the Americas. Expansion of the slave trade meant that enslaved labour became a cheaper option than wage labour or indentured servants.4 Rapidly escalating European demands for tropical produce, particularly sugar, in the eighteenth century lay behind the accelerating growth of the slave trade after the Peace of Utrecht (1713). Meeting such demands required new forms of specialized labour-intensive plantation agri-business. Sparse indigenous populations were heavily depleted by disease and extermination after the arrival of Europeans, and neither settler populations nor indentured servants and transported convicts satisfied the prodigious demand for arduous manual labour in disease-ridden tropical conditions. Enslaved workers were preferred by planters because they were cheaper and could be more harshly exploited. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery and the plantation system of production were key to developing the resources of the Americas.5
Table 1.1:The growth of the Atlantic trade in enslaved people (numbers taken from Africa by nationality of vessel to nearest %, with totals) 1676–1850.
Date
Great Britain
France
Netherlands
Spain Uruguay
Portugal Brazil
Northern colonies/United States
Baltic states
Total
1676–1700
38%
4%
12%
<1%
41%
<1%
3%
718,200
1701–25
38%
11%
7%
0
43%
<1%
<1%
1,089,100
1726–50
38%
18%
6%
0
36%
2%
<1%
1,471,800
1751–75
43%
17%
7%
<1%
27%
4%
1%
1,926,200
1776–1800
37%
22%
2%
<1%
34%
3%
2%
2,008,400
1801–25
15%
7%
<1%
9%
62%
6%
<1%
1,877,700
1826–50
0
4%
<1%
23%
73%
<1%
0
1,771,300
Totals
3,102,000
1,372,000
419,100
585,500
4,971,000
304,500
108,600
10,862,700
Source: Adapted from Eltis and Richardson (2010: 23) and
https://www.slavevoyages.org/
.
Although enslaved domestic workers were common in urban and rural locations, in North America the enslaved worked mainly on tobacco plantations in Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region) and on rice and indigo plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. In the Caribbean they laboured on sugar, coffee and cocoa plantations, but sugar was by far the most important crop. Barbados (settled from 1627) was initially the foremost sugar colony alongside Saint Kitts (from 1624), Nevis (from 1627), Montserrat and Antigua (both from 1632). But Jamaica (captured from Spain in 1655) became Britain’s largest and most valuable West Indian sugar colony in the eighteenth century. From the 1730s Jamaica was at the forefront of the development of large sugar estates and plantations.
Map 1.1: The British Transatlantic Slave Trade 1563–1810.
Source: Based on Eltis and Richardson (2010: 32). Figures of embarkations from Africa destined for Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean are from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org). Proportions of enslaved African peoples embarked from different parts of Africa and destined for different areas across the Atlantic are indicated by the thickness of the arrows.
Most of the enslaved aboard British vessels were absorbed by British colonies, but a high proportion was sold on to the Spanish colonies. By the 1680s between a third and a half of slaves arriving in Jamaica was trans-shipped from the slave entrepôt in Kingston to Spanish America largely in exchange for silver. At the Peace of Utrecht Britain gained the right under the Asiento legally to supply slaves to Spanish America. The South Sea Company alone supplied 65,000 Africans to Spanish America between 1714 and 1739, with 70% passing through Jamaica. Although the Asiento expired in 1739, slave supply to Spanish and to other non-British territories in the Americas remained a large component of the British trade. Between 1702 and 1775, 2,090 ships discharged 497,736 slaves at Kingston, of which around 28% went on to foreign colonies in exchange for draught cattle, indigo, cacao and bullion. Bullion worth £3 million was sent to the Bank of England from Jamaica and other islands between 1748 and 1765 alone: a significant element of the trade.6 The slave trade between Jamaica and Spanish America as a whole may have contributed as much as £1 million annually to Britain’s national income between 1692 and 1775. By 1795–7 a third of the enslaved peoples landed in Kingston were shipped on to Cuba and Saint-Domingue (then under British occupation).7
Map 1.2: The British trade to individual colonies of the Lesser Antilles, 1563–1810.
Source: Based on Eltis and Richardson (2010: 32). Proportions of enslaved African peoples destined for different islands of the Lesser Antilles are indicated by the thickness of the arrows.
By the mid-eighteenth century the supply of enslaved labour in Britain’s North American colonies was sustained by natural increase and internal trading. Most slave shipments in the eighteenth century, and particularly at the height of the trade in the second half of the century, thus went to the expanding plantation systems of the Caribbean and Brazil, where high and increasing rates of slave mortality, especially on sugar plantations, demanded constant replacement.8
The Royal African Company and the rise of private slave traders
The policy of the British state after the Commonwealth was to ensure that the proceeds of British colonies accrued only to citizens of the British Empire. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was granted a monopoly of the British slave trade in 1663 which transferred to its successor the Royal African Company (RAC) after 1672. This monopoly gradually removed the Dutch as large-scale suppliers of slaves to the British colonies. The RAC alone transported an estimated 84,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas between 1680 and 1692. From the start, however, the Company was unable to meet the demand for slaves and lacked the power to enforce its monopoly. It was forced to share the trade with licensed private traders and with ‘interlopers’. Private trading grew markedly from the 1690s: between 1698 and 1707 independent merchants sent 376 vessels to Africa from London alone, compared with 128 from the RAC. In Jamaica in the same period they landed 35,718 enslaved African people compared with the Company’s 6,854.9 In 1698 the RAC’s monopoly was rescinded.10
The British slave trade from an early stage was a credit trade based upon trust, personal bonds and bills of exchange. These all favoured wealthier private traders who had taken over the bulk of the trade by the 1720s.11 It was they who developed credit and trading practices into a credit system that benefitted the British trade over that of its European rivals.12 Although not wound up until 1752, the RAC struggled to compete with private traders largely because it failed efficiently to collect debts arising from slave sales.13 Fluctuations in the prices received for plantation products, together with gluts and shortages of slave supply caused by wars, weather and seasonal factors, affected the prices received for slaves and the need for credit. The RAC commonly extended credit for two or three years.14 Merchants trading on their own account and employing trusted ships’ captains and resident middlemen to conduct credit sales in the Caribbean generally proved better than the RAC at managing their liquidity.15
The Navigation Acts and the politics of the slave trade
Monopoly was central for merchants in the commerce of the Atlantic. The British Navigation Acts (1651–96) enabled traders and the state to gain a disproportionate stimulus from foreign trade. Under an Act of 1660 all trade to and from the colonies was restricted to English or colonial ships, and at least three-quarters of the crew, including the captain, had to be English. This encouraged a great expansion of the merchant navy over the course of the following century and a half. By the 1780s Britain had roughly 50,000 merchant seamen and a million tons of shipping.16 In addition, the most valuable colonial imports, almost all from the Caribbean, were ‘enumerated’. This required them to be landed first at an English or colonial port even if destined for a foreign market. An Act of 1663 stipulated that foreign goods (with strategic exclusions such as with enslaved people, Madeira wine and salt for the North American fisheries) had to be shipped to colonial markets via England. This provision much favoured the sale of British manufactures in colonial markets by increasing the relative costs of foreign competition.17
Scotland was included in the Navigation Acts after the Union with England in 1707, enlarging the domestic market for plantation products and providing lucrative opportunities for Scottish merchants and importers. Glasgow came to specialize in the tobacco trade with Virginia. Scottish factors opened stores in the Chesapeake, where they sold imported manufactures and bought tobacco for shipment.18 Monopoly kept other countries out of Britain’s Atlantic trading zone, or greatly increased their costs of engaging. The result for Britain was possession of the largest free trade area in the world for almost two centuries, before the repeal of the Acts in 1849.
The Navigation Acts were a vital support in the rise of London to replace Amsterdam as the leading European entrepôt and international financial centre in the early eighteenth century. Many London merchants, often with origins in the provinces or in Scotland and with mercantile connections around the Atlantic basin, developed interlocking activities in the slave and sugar trades, in banking and finance, in shipping, military contracting, and in government funds.19 The Navigation Acts, reinforced by the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch Wars of the later seventeenth century, helped to precipitate the decline of Dutch commercial dominance. It was the French rather than the Dutch who became the main eighteenth-century trading rivals of the British in the staple trades of the Caribbean and in the trade with Spanish America.
Early British sugar planters were hostile to the Navigation Acts because their sugar had first to be transported to England before it could be sold elsewhere. They could not therefore compete effectively in the European sugar market, and the British home market was not yet absorbing enough of their output. Circumstances changed in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Sugar production expanded rapidly throughout the West Indies to meet an explosion in European demand. It grew fastest in the propitious soils of French-owned Saint-Domingue, and French, Dutch and Portuguese sugar all remained cheaper in Europe than British sugar. The planter oligarchy in the British sugar island legislatures, however, was able to use its power to prevent foreign sugars being illicitly shipped to Britain via British colonies. The burgeoning British domestic market thus belonged to British-shipped sugar alone.20
Sugar consumption in England increased much faster than on the European mainland due both to rising real incomes and to a shift in consumer preferences for new hot sugared beverages of tea, coffee and chocolate, along with new tastes for distilled liquors relying on sugar: rum, punch and gin. Rapid expansion of the home market and competition from Saint-Domingue sugar virtually ended British sugar re-exports to foreign markets; they declined from 40% in 1713 to only 5% in the mid-1730s.21 But the West India interest in the British Parliament succeeded in creating increased monopoly power for British sugars in colonial markets. The Molasses Act of 1733 levied prohibitive duties on foreign sugar, molasses and rum imported into the American colonies. Though not always adhered to, the 1733 Act was endorsed by the Sugar Act of 1764: together they substantially increased the market for British sugars in North America. The Molasses Act also barred French sugar, rum and molasses from Ireland and insisted that all sugars imported into Ireland conform with the Navigation Acts. Ireland’s trade with the French colonies thereafter declined sharply; instead, Ireland became a vital market for British sugar, taking the greater part of England’s sugar re-exports after 1733.22 West Indian sugar exports to Britain increased in value by 237% between 1714 and 1775, rising to £3.24 million per annum in 1771–5.23
By 1770, at a time when recorded British Caribbean sugar exports had expanded to 97,000 tons, 90% was retained in Britain, with much of the rest re-exported to Ireland, leaving the French as the major sugar suppliers to continental Europe until the loss of Saint-Domingue in 1791.24 The protected market provided by the Navigation Acts and later legislative protections meant that British sugar consumers effectively paid a subsidy to growers and traders because consumers had access only to British sugars, at higher prices than those in continental Europe. Nevertheless, over the eighteenth century, the British consumed around a third of all sugar imported into Europe.25
The state supported overseas trading activity with military force throughout the eighteenth century, especially in the Americas. Between 1660 and 1815, Britain was at war for seventy of the 155 years. Most wars were fought entirely at sea and most involved trading rights and colonial possessions in the Atlantic. After 1713 the main adversary was France, and disputes always involved the key Caribbean and Spanish trades. Spending on the navy, from shipbuilding and munitions to the provisioning of voyages, stimulated the economy. The Royal Navy by the mid-eighteenth century maintained a wartime fleet of over 300 vessels, most purpose-built but many captured.26 War imposed dangers for merchants and increased the cost of insurance and convoys, but it also brought opportunities of greater profits for those merchants who could carry ‘Letters of Marque’ from the government; ‘Letters of Marque’ allowed merchants to capture enemy shipping and to retain the proceeds.27
Wars in defence of the American colonies and naval action to enforce the Navigation Acts relied on increased government spending and taxation. Tax revenues rose by a factor of fourteen between 1688 and 1815, making the British second only to the Dutch as the most heavily taxed population in Europe.28 The rise of the excise tax on consumer goods, alongside customs, as a major source of essential revenue created a regressive element in the tax system because it raised the prices of many basic goods. It also created a bureaucracy of inspection of production standards, weights and measures (for consumer goods and essential manufactures) that increased both efficiency and innovation in the manufacturing sector.29
The West Africa trade
London was the main slave-trade port in Britain and the main entrepôt in Europe for the African trade in the seventeenth century. Bristol was Britain’s second port, trading in enslaved peoples from the 1680s. However, as early as the 1740s, Liverpool became the leading slave-trading port not just in Britain but in Europe, accounting for 80% of the British trade by the end of the century. Liverpool expanded as a slave port because it had good connections with the sources of both domestic and imported commodities to satisfy African demands, including access to the Isle of Man contraband trade up to 1765. It also developed a group of large, well-established and specialized slave merchants, with close connections to London finance houses.30
Merchants traded British, European and Asian manufactured commodities for enslaved people in West Africa. African demand varied by region and shifted over time as English traders moved southwards to avoid competition and to exploit new sources of supply of enslaved peoples at the Bight of Biafra, Old Calabar, Cameroon and Gabon.31 West Africa’s share of direct English exports by the late eighteenth century (excluding re-exports) was around 4%, but added to this were goods made in England that arrived in West Africa via other European ports. Some branches of British manufacturing depended heavily upon African markets. Africa was second only to the American colonies as a destination for wrought iron exports in the eighteenth century. Both the Carron and Coalbrookdale companies had warehouses in Liverpool to supply the trade. Britain supplied brasswares, iron and copper goods, and guns to West African markets, and Africa took nearly a quarter of British cotton exports at the peak of this trade in the 1790s.32
Asian and European goods were also much in demand in African markets. They were acquired by London importers, then purchased by slave traders in the outports. Historians rarely consider how significant the re-export trade to Africa was in expanding Britain’s Asian and European trade. Between 1699 and 1800 Asian textiles were the largest single item in the trade to Africa, comprising 27% of all goods and 40% of all textiles exported there. Swedish bar iron, German linens and Danish, Dutch and German munitions also featured prominently in the re-export trade to Africa.33
