SLAVING'S economic contribution to the Atlantic system has proven a slippery beast, simultaneously of sensible significance but difficult to measure. Examination of the economics of slave trading on the scale of an “Atlantic system,” often mixed with the function of slavery in America, a closely related but analytically distinct economic sector, has until very recently focused narrowly on its direct contribution to the most dramatic and portentous development in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Atlantic economy: Britain's transition to industrial capitalism. Now, however, Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman have productively both broadened the range of economic effects relating slavery and slave trading to European growth and expanded the focus beyond the boundaries of separate imperial systems to explore the entire Atlantic system as an integrated economic unit extending from the banks of the Zambezi, Plate, and Mississippi – if not also the Indus – to the Bank of England. A paradoxical leitmotif that emerges from this recent work, if not a dominant theme, is that the economic significance of slavery and the slave trade lies not in their centrality to the course of British or European economic growth, where others have sought it and that they demonstrably lacked, but precisely in their marginality to the main currents of economic growth and development around the Atlantic.

Slaving was marginal to the Atlantic economy in structural terms, in a sense not so much inconsistent with formal analysis of a fully market economy as one highlighting the institutional aspects of a mercantilist system fraught with monopoly, privilege, and other imperfections.