Thursday, April 01, 2004

Posted here Thursday, April 01, 2004 at 9:53:42 AM     From: H-Net Reviews <books@H-NET.MSU.EDU>; H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-LatAm@h-net.msu.edu (February 2004) Selwyn H. H. Carrington. _The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810_. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xxii + 362 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-2557-5; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8130-2742-X. Reviewed for H-LatAm by Matt D. Childs, History Department, Florida State University The Caribbean Strikes Back: Eric Williams Redux In one of the latest books in a long historiographical tradition, Selwyn Carrington tackles the relationship between the abolition of slavery and the rise of capitalism. Carrington's book should contribute to a scholarly debate that will likely intensify, as the bicentenary of the British abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated in 2007. His study builds upon the foundational work of Eric Williams's _Capitalism and Slavery_ (1944), which argued that Caribbean sugar plantations funded British industrialization that, in turn, made slavery an outdated mode of production. Subsequently known as the "Williams Thesis," the Trinidadian-born and Oxford-educated historian delivered the coup de grace to studies that explained emancipation through hagiographies of British abolitionists. Williams powerfully concluded: "The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless."[1] While other scholars had been working on economic explanations for abolition prior to Williams, none had stated the issue so bluntly and with such bold confidence as the Caribbean nationalist and future president of Trinidad and Tobago, much to the vexation of his imperial colleagues in Britain.[2] ********