Although the quotation above represents a radical departure from earlier economic assessments of the Atlantic slave trade, it shares with them an almost universal assumption: that the real significance of the Atlantic sugar triangle lay in its contribution to the productive capacity of Europe. Thus, concluding that only consumers “benefited” is tantamount to reducing the slave trade to economic triviality. This view of import trades has informed historical understanding not only of the factors leading to industrialization in Europe but also of those apparently retarding similar development in the Third World, including Africa and the West Indies (Bairoch 1975: 198–99).

If the best-known aspects of African slavery remain the horrors of the middle passage and the travail of plantation life in the Americas, recent work has nonetheless provided some important reminders of the Old World ramifications of slavery (Miller 1988; Meillassoux 1986; Miers and Roberts 1988; Manning in press-a). Millions of slaves were sent from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in households and plantations in North Africa and the Middle East and suffered heavy casualties on their difficult journey. Millions more, captured in the same net as those sent abroad, were condemned to slavery on the African continent. The mortality of captives in Africa, therefore, included not only losses among those headed for export at the Atlantic coast but the additional losses among those destined for export to the Orient and among those captured and transported to serve African masters.

The question is absurd—of course there was an industrial revolution, as obviously as there was a French Revolution—but let me take it seriously. It is absurd because it is counterintuitive—intuition based on the obvious differences between developed and underdeveloped economies, between industrial and agricultural areas, between cities and villages, between factories and farms, between industrial workers and peasants, differences which point unambiguously to the revolutionary nature of industrialization—and because it can be asked only with a heroic disregard of the massive historical evidence for the existence of the industrial revolution. Other phrases used to describe it—“the great transformation” (Polanyi 1985), “the great divide” (Tawney 1982), and “the great discontinuity” (Hartwell 1971)—also underline its revolutionary character, in terms of the break with the past, the changing of the economy, and the making of a new society quite different from that which preceded it.

How might a discussion of the ending of the Atlantic slave trade in relation to the development of European racism illuminate the question of who gained and who lost? The question can be approached at three levels. The first concerns the degree to which the racial attitudes of Europeans were affected by the process of termination. The second would be how the people of Europe and of Afro-America were affected by the termination itself. The third and broadest aspect would be the long-term effects of that complex process. It seems to me that the answers become more speculative as the scope of potential impact broadens, as the discussion moves from a concern with attitudes and ideology to social conditions, as the geographical scope broadens, and as the temporal dimension to be considered expands to encompass the twentieth century. The first level, the relation of the processes of abolition to racism, is the primary focus of this paper; a few brief remarks on the second and third issues are reserved for the conclusion.

The atlantic slave trade remains oddly invisible in the commentaries of historians who have specialized in the sources and causes of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiosity contrasts sharply with the perspective of eighteenth-century strategists who, on the eve of the industrial revolution, placed great stock in both the trade and the colonial plantations as vital instruments for British economic progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, once described by the imperial historian Charles Ryle Fay (1934: 2–3) as Britain’s major “spokesmen” for the eighteenth century, both placed the importation of African slaves into the Americas at the core of their visions of the requirements for national expansion. Fay (ibid.: 3) also described both of them as “mercantilists hardening into a manufacturers’ imperialism.” For such a “manufacturers’ imperialism” to be a success, both Gee and Postlethwayt saw the need for extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies.