Slavery: did it make us rich?

“An awful lot of people” today seem to believe that slavery made Britain rich, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. It is, if you think about it, a strange claim. Slavery has existed since the dawn of time. Britain exploited slaves only for a couple of hundred years, and then abolished slavery. Yet there is a feeling Britain benefitted from it uniquely – and was “uniquely wicked”. The Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, has recently taken to challenging this belief, arguing in a speech last month that the UK’s wealth is not entirely down to slavery and colonialism, and “white privilege or whatever”. Far more important, she suggested, were Britain’s institutions – its democracy, rule of law, free markets and banks. She was, of course, shouted down. But if you don’t believe her, take a look at “Imperial Measurement”, a new paper from the Institute of Economic Affairs, by the economist Kristian Niemietz. He concludes that, even at its height, colonial trade only comprised a “small proportion” of Britain’s economy: from 7% to 15% of GDP. Slavery was even less lucrative. At its peak, the income from sugar plantations contributed no more than 2.5% of the UK economy – less than sheep farming or brewing.

So Britain ran an empire for centuries that, at its height, occupied nearly a quarter of the world’s land area, said Will Hutton in The Observer.

Yet the economic impact was “negligible”? Pull the other one. In the 18th century, Lancashire emerged as Europe’s pre-eminent cotton manufacturing area. All this began a few miles from Britain’s largest slave port, Liverpool, and the factories used barbadense cotton from Barbados and other slave plantations in the West Indies. Of course, inventions – the spinning jenny, the water frame – made manufacture at scale possible. But the finance for investing in these expensive machines came from Liverpool merchants whose fortunes “originated in transatlantic trade”. Slavery lies “at the heart” of Britain’s early industrialisation: it had an important role in shipping, banking and insurance. “No one argues that slavery caused the Industrial Revolution.” But to “minimise and abstract” it, as Niemietz has done, is wrong.

Slavery was abhorrent, said Doug Stokes in The Critic. But the record shows that it was a fairly small sector. In 1792, the busiest year of the British slave trade, there were 204 slave ships of a total 14,334 registered in Britain. It made some people rich; but it doesn’t explain Britain’s wealth. Without slavery and the sugar industry, the economic historian Joel Mokyr remarked, “Britain would have had to drink bitter tea, but it would still have had an Industrial Revolution, if perhaps at a marginally slower pace”.