Capitalism and Slavery

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. – Sathnam Sanghera * 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. – Monique Roffey * author of The Mermaid of Black Conch *
Wherever you stand on the legacies of slavery and colonialism, Williams’ elegant, passionate analysis is simply inescapable. Essential reading for anyone who really cares about history. – Trevor Phillips
A vital, urgent read. A forensic examination of the system behind systemic racism. Eric Williams succinctly sets out how racism, and all its implications, injustices and inhumanities, was a harrowing repercussion of slavery, invented as a justification for lining a few dead men’s pockets – Nick Hayes * author of Trespass *
There can be no effective understanding of modernity and the post-colonial world without an engagement with Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. This is where the rubber hits the road. – Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies
No historian of colonialism or slavery can ignore Eric Williams. This book endures as a seminal moment in the historiography of the British Empire – Michael Taylor * author of The Interest *

Eric Williams (1911-1981) was a pioneering historian and politician born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. He graduated with first-class honours from St Catherine’s College, Oxford in 1935, and completed a DPhil in History in 1938. His dissertation, ‘The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,’ was published as Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, while he was a professor at Howard University. In 1956, Williams founded the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s first modern political party. He led the country to independence from the British and became the nation’s first prime minister in 1962.

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