The British West Indian Sugar Economy

The British West Indian sugar economy was, for two centuries, the single most important sector of the British imperial economy. The 3,000-odd sugar plantations of Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, British Guiana, and British Honduras produced, in the 1770s and 1780s, perhaps 80,000 tons of sugar a year — the largest single source of British re-exports, and the principal commodity in the Atlantic trade. The wealth that the West Indian sugar economy generated, and the enslaved labour on which that wealth depended, financed the British merchant class that in turn financed the Industrial Revolution. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), argued that the relationship was direct and causal. The argument has been the subject of a long and serious scholarly debate, and the debate is itself the most useful way of understanding the historical importance of the West Indian sugar economy.

As Robin Blackburn has shown in The Making of New World Slavery (1997), the British West Indian sugar economy was, in scale, organisation, and profitability, the prototype of the modern tropical commodity economy. It was also, in its dependence on enslaved labour, the prototype of the “racialised” labour regime that Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), has described as the most extreme form of unfreedom.

The Plantation System

The British West Indian plantation system was established in the seventeenth century on the basis of land appropriated from Indigenous Carib and Arawak peoples and labour imported from West Africa. The earliest substantial British settlements were in Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), and Montserrat (1632). The 1655 English conquest of Jamaica, followed by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick (which ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France and confirmed the British possession of Jamaica), gave the British the largest single island in the Caribbean and the foundation of a plantation economy that, at its late-eighteenth-century peak, employed perhaps 300,000 enslaved Africans.

The sugar plantation was a forced-labour camp with a particular economic logic. The capital cost of a typical Jamaican sugar estate in the 1770s was perhaps £10,000 to £15,000, of which perhaps half was the “value” of the enslaved labour force. The annual surplus produced by the enslaved — what we would now call the rate of exploitation — was, by the calculations of the economic historians Kenneth Pomeranz and Stanley Engerman, comparable to that of the most profitable investments in the British industrial economy. As Pomeranz argued in The Great Divergence (2000), the profitability of the plantation was the necessary condition for British industrial capital accumulation in the eighteenth century. The argument is contested; the data are not.

The Sugar Trade and the Slave Trade

The British Atlantic slave trade, which supplied the West Indian plantations, was one of the largest single components of British overseas trade in the eighteenth century. The trade was conducted principally by the Royal African Company (1672–1750) and by a substantial number of private British, Bristol, and Liverpool merchants. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, established at Emory University in 2008, has identified some 3.4 million African embarkations on British ships between 1660 and 1807. Of these, perhaps 2.7 million survived the Middle Passage. Hugh Thomas, in The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (1997), has described the trade as the largest forced migration in human history before the twentieth century.

The 1807 Slave Trade Act, which received the Royal Assent on 25 March 1807, prohibited the British slave trade throughout the British Empire from 1 May 1807. The 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, which took effect on 1 August 1834, abolished slavery itself (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/abolition-slavery-act-1833/]). The 1833 Act provided for the payment of £20 million in compensation to slave-owners (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/compensation-payments-slave-owners/]) and for a system of “apprenticeship” that obliged the formerly enslaved to continue to work for their former masters for a period of years.

Eric Williams and the Slavery-Capitalism Thesis

The most influential single work on the West Indian sugar economy is Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Williams, a Trinidadian historian who served as the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 to 1981, argued that the British West Indian sugar economy was the principal source of the capital that financed the British Industrial Revolution, and that the abolition of slavery was the consequence of the decline of the West Indian sugar interest in the face of the rising industrial capitalism of Britain.

The Williams thesis has been the subject of a long and serious scholarly debate. Selwyn Carrington, in The British West Indies during the American Revolution (1988), defended the thesis in its essentials. Seymour Drescher, in Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977), challenged it: Drescher showed that British slavery was profitable until the moment of abolition, and that abolition was the consequence of a substantial moral and political movement, not of a decline of the economic interest. David Brion Davis, in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), placed the abolition movement in the context of the broader Atlantic revolutions. The debate is unresolved. What is not in dispute is that the British West Indian sugar economy was, in scale and profitability, the prototype of the modern tropical commodity economy, and that its history is essential to the history of modern capitalism.

The Decline of the West Indian Sugar Economy

The 1880s were the turning point. The beet-sugar industry of continental Europe — developed in the Napoleonic era, protected by European tariffs, and rapidly mechanised in the 1870s and 1880s — overtook the cane-sugar industry of the West Indies as the principal supplier of the British sugar market. The 1880s dominance of beet sugar was the structural cause of the long decline of the British West Indian sugar economy. The 1931 Imperial Preference Act, the 1932 Ottawa Agreements (see [/british-empire-economy/currency-and-finance/imperial-preference-trade/]), and the 1957 Imperial Preferences Act were attempts to arrest the decline through tariff protection. They failed.

The 1960s decolonisation of the West Indies — Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962, Barbados in 1966, and the rest over the next two decades — was the political conclusion of a process that was already economic. The independent West Indian sugar industries depended on the European sugar-protocol regime of the Lomé Convention (1975) and the Cotonou Agreement (2000). The 2006 reform of the European sugar regime, the 2017 abolition of EU sugar production quotas, and the ongoing disputes over the Cotonou successor agreements have left the surviving Caribbean sugar industries (notably in Belize and Guyana) in a precarious position.

A Primary Source: Williams on Slavery and Capitalism

Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), wrote: “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and the slave trade. … The profits of the slave trade provided one of the main streams of capital accumulation which financed the Industrial Revolution. … The British capitalists of the eighteenth century, therefore, owed their position to the slave trade and slavery. … The abolition of the slave trade and of slavery was a necessary concomitant of the development of industrial capitalism.” The passage has been disputed, refined, and qualified, but it has never been ignored.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British West Indian sugar economy has been transformed since the 1940s. Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) opened the modern debate; Drescher’s Econocide (1977) and Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) established the moral and political dimensions; Blackburn’s two-volume history (The Making of New World Slavery, 1997, and An Unfinished Revolution, 2011) has synthesised the older and newer literatures. The unresolved question is the relative weight of economic and moral causation in the abolition of slavery; the consensus, as James Walvin has argued in The Slave Trade and Its Abolition (2013), is that the answer depends on the specific colony and period under consideration.

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