Capitalism and Slavery
- Author Eric Williams
- Narrator Bill Andrew Quinn
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 8 hours and 37 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Capitalism, Economic history, European history, Racism and racial discrimination, Slavery and abolition of slavery.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since.
Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.
'It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it' Sathnam Sanghera
'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker
© Eric Williams 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
-
A classic critique
Guardian -
Groundbreaking
New York Review of Books -
A landmark study
Wall Street Journal -
It’s often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it.
author of Empireland -
This book, recommended to me by a Jamaican fellow-student in 1968, changed my view of the world. It was the first time I was brought up hard and fast, face to face, with how modern Britain developed off the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the wealth created from the labour of slavery
Michel Rosen -
The slave trade built capital for the slave-owning Empire, on which the Industrial Revolution was formed. The slave trade was abolished not because of moral outrage but because of a decline in returns. Slavery and capitalism are linked, and Williams launches a full frontal attack on it in this classic, which first appeared almost a century ago. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to know more about the Caribbean.
author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
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