How is that back on topic? I thought the thread was about Uganda.
And whether a piece of work is seminal is not at all subjective. You cannot have a serious discussion on the economics of slavery without referencing Williams's work. His work was and is widely acclaimed but Britain refused to make it available in Britain until a couple decades later. I wonder why...
Yes, you can have a serious discussion about it without referencing Williams work - I have already done so in this topic. Why do you think his work from 1944 is still vital in the discussion? His work not being available is probably a combination of racism and the still-existent British Empire considering itself somehow a "civilising" influence on the world. As I've mentioned earlier, the British Empire is still seen as something that did good by the British public due to the pro-colonial education and mindset of the elites of this country. That's not to say there isn't considerable dissidence with this concept, especially from the Left in this country, but the feelings were much more intense in the 1950s, and this was the same time in which MI6 were disrupting independence movements in the colonies, so it's sadly no great surprise that his work wouldn't be published.
This is irrelevant to whether the arguments have merit of course. I've stated my interpretation on the current evidence - Slavery and colonialism were essential to Britain's rise indirectly, through empowering and enriching those who had an incentive to protect private property and enterprise in the economy, undermining the monarchy and supporting Parliament. North and Weingast (1989) were some of the first to make this point, which has been built upon by a number of authors since (North especially built his theories into New Institutionalism, of which I am a subscriber, that talked about the importance of socio-cultural and political "institutions" (the norms by which we live and order society) in the development of nations). The evidence for direct impact is not good - the profits of slavery and the empire were simply too small compared to our GDP. Maintaining an empire is incredibly costly, one of the reasons Adam Smith argued against it, and it's likely that the burden of maintaining the world's largest and most powerful navy on one of the world's not-so-impressively-sized islands undermined the financial benefits to teh state. O'Brien's 1982 paper on the contribution of the "periphery" to growth notes that the profits of colonialism and slavery are often exaggerated. Commerce between Europe and the Rest of the World was relatively small between 1450 and 1750, with the vast majority of trade and financial flows between European nations. He found that it wasn't a "uniquely profitable field of enterprise" - even by 1790 only 4% of Europe's GDP was exported ot the Rest of the world, with imports on a similar scale. Even if we assume a very large 50% profit margin (much higher than likely) and 50% reinvestment rate (again ludicrously high) we still end up at 1% of GNP, which is less than 10% of the gross investment of the time. Some have even argued that the colonies were a net drain (something I strongly disagree with) - Thomas (1968) compared the social rate of return to the bond rates at the time and found the return was less for colonies (2%) than the bond rate (3.5%), which led him to conclude that Britain would have been better off without colonies. Coelho (1973) specifically looked at the West Indies, and found that Britain paid a price over the world average for its sugar imports from the Caribbean.
Moreover, if Slavery was essential to Industrialisation then Portugal should have industrialised years before the UK - 10% of the population of Lisbon were slaves and they were involved in slave trading from at least 1445 (due to proximity to the Islamic traders of NW Africa). They received papal legitimacy for this in 1455 with
Romanus Pontifex, and managed to ship 4.5 million of the 9.4 million slaves between 1500 and 1870 (depending on which figures for African Slave trading numbers you take). They nicked the plantation model from Cyprus and Crete (Venetian practice), which later disseminated to the other European colonial powers.
On Great Britain, Crafts and Harley (1985) successfully argued that too much weight was being given on the cotton industry, which whilst being the fastest growing was not representative of the broader economy. This led to much slower growth rates - 0.52% per capita per year between 1801-1831. Basically the evidence pointed to a much later benefit to the British Economy - after 1840 - than Williams would have been aware of.
To summarise my personal position - both the biggest benefits and the most devastating costs of slavery and colonialism were found in the way it shaped societies on both sides. Rent-seeking and exploitation were encouraged, leading to systems of governance predicated on corruption in the colonies, simply existing to the aggrandisement of a select elite of British society. In Britain, this elite were the reason a constitutional monarchy was instituted, limited the power of the executive and affording (as a by-product) citizens of the United Kingdom (after it formed in 1776) freedoms unavailable to those on Continental Europe. Britain's huge navy kept safe trade routes around Europe and parts of the colonial empire, facilitating long-distance trade that would again benefit those who would be essential in the Industrial Revolution. Simultaneously, Black African slaves were ground into dust to service the needs of this grotesque masquerade, predicated on a new (or old) system orientated around the accumulation of capital, in order to improve your wealth free from the risk of expropriation by the state (which for the non-noble was a major concern before). In India, Britain inserted itself at the top of the caste system, making use of an already exploitative system for its own benefit, whilst moving labour around through indenture servants as if they were cattle or capital. The whelping pups of the noble and merchant elite went to India to fatten their wallets at the expense of the local populations, and took their ill-gotten gains back to Britain where they financed the major advancements of our time.
Hopefully, that clears up any misunderstandings, assuming people read my damn posts
