Capitalism and Slavery

This landmark study of the transatlantic slave trade by pioneering economic historian Eric Williams offers a boldly revisionist view of racism, imperialism and emancipation.Tracing the rise and fall of slavery through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Williams examines how the trade laid the foundations of global capitalism and fuelled Europe's industrial development. He reveals how racism arose as a result, providing a means of rationalising a profoundly immoral but lucrative practice. And he lays bare the economic self-interest that drove the early abolitionists, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.'If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test' Seymour Drescher