There is still a tendency amongst some to interpret slavery as racially determined. This is a gross falsification of history. As Eric Williams wrote in his Capitalism and Slavery: 'Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowy identned witn tne Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: racism was the consequence of slavery.' Gibson Wakefield pointed out in the mid-19th century that the reasons for slavery 'are not moral, but economical circumstances; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production'.
The role and importance of slavery in the growth of both American and European capitalism was crucial. As Marx emphasised in a letter to P.V. Annenkov: "Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industrialism today as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery no cotton; without cotton no modern industry…... Slavery is .... an economic category of the highest importance.
Slavery, and especially the slave trade, played a crucial part in making England the industrial workshop of the world. English industry and commerce underwent a vast expansion in the early 17th century based on the revenue from the slave trade and the importation of raw materials from the colonies. British racism and imperialism are not phenomena peculiar to the 20th century, but outgrowths of European expansionism from the 15th century onwards. The conquest of the New World - rich in raw materials and spacious in land, but lacking the manpower for its effective exploitation -necessitated a source of labour. It was this economic need which dictated the transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands to the New tremendously from the low cost materials cultivated and extracted by slave labour in the New World.
For instance, the growth of the textile industry was an important factor in the development of British capitalism outbreak of the American Civil War, Britain drew from the Southern States four-fifths of all her cotton imports. It was also profits from slave-trading. particularly those acquired via Liverpool, which provided much of the capital for the industrial growth of Lancashire, particularly Manchester. COMMERCIAL Britain was the first European nation eventually to ban slave trading by her subjects. She also took it upon nerse to persuade other European nations to follow her example. But contrary to what we find in school history books, Britain did this not out of philanthropy or even self-righteousness, but for sound commercial reasons.
sovereignty.
Although most European nations (1861-1865) and the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil (in 1886 and 1888 respectively) that the trade actually came to an end.
With the aim of transforming Africa into a peripheral extension of Europe, to service the European economies with cheap raw materials and provide an outlet for excess production, the abolition of slave-trading was followed by a scramble for the land and people of Africa - -WHICH in its execution was as brutal as the Slave-trading which preceded it Between 1884 and 1898 the soil of Africa was largely apportioned by the European nations amongst themselves. 'By what right', asked the 19th century African nationalist Holy Johnson, 'except that of might, do they instal themselves in any part of the continent, thereby violating the territorial integrity of Africa and depriving traditional authorities of their plus the self-declared right of capitalism to seek and attain the factors of production at the lowest financial cost regardless of the price paid in them. accoule human terms. The scramble for Afric was the scramble for land and people to be devoured by a system whose ultimate sole motivation was that of profit and industrial expansion.
These economic plunderings of imperialism totally disrupted the economies of the colonies - in fact. they led directly to the process of the development of underdevelopment. It is this process which has resulted in the poverty of these economies today. It is this fact that has forced men and women from these countries to seek employment abroad. In other words, black immigrants are here because British imperialism was there and created the con ditions in which their economies could not support their inhabitants.
Secondly the importance of emphasising the economic foundations of slavery as opposed to that view which conceives of it as a racial phenomenor human history explicable in terms of the subjugation of one race by another - is not merely an academic point. Without understanding the of slavery and the racism which devel oped out of it, the racial twist which Williams mentions leads to a moralisation of the oppression of blacks which in effect politically paralyses MORALIST A moralist conception of black oppression - one which views black oppression as merely the consequence of white prejudice - leads logically to the solution' of constantly appeal ing to the moral sense of the oppressor, which is identified as the white race. Hence the liberation of blacks becomes a matter of changing the attitude of whites, without placing the different attitudes and interests of different classes of whites within the context of the socio-economic relations of capitalist society The other logical conclusion of a moralist conception of black oppres sion is that the struggle for the liberation of blacks is fought simply on a race basis, as opposed to a class basis which takes racism and the added dimensions of black oppression into PREJUDICES Neither of these approaches can succeed, because they extract racism and pose it as an independent relation
----- pull-quotes -----
SCRAMBLE Yes, it was the right of might,