Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: C Knick Harley
Author-Workplace-Name: University of Oxford, St Antony's College
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Title: Slavery, the British Atlantic Economy and the Industrial Revolution
Abstract: Modern economic growth first emerged in Britain about the time of the Industrial Revolution, 
with its cotton textile factories, urban industrialization and export orientated industrialization. 
A period of economic growth, industrial diversification and export orientation preceded the Industrial 
Revolution. This export orientation revolved around an Americanization of British trade for which the 
slave colonies of the Caribbean were central. The Eric Williams’ explored the extent to which this 
export economy based on West Indian slavery contributed to the coming of the Industrial Revolution. 
His claim that profits from the slave trade were crucial to the Industrial Revolution has not stood 
up to critical evaluation. Nonetheless, modern speculations regarding endogenous growth plausibly 
postulate that manufacturing, urbanization, and a powerful merchant class all have a favourable impact 
for growth. These hypotheses need careful consideration.
What set the British colonial empire aside from its rivals was not the quality of its sugar colonies 
but the involvement of the temperate colonies on the North American mainland. Unlike the slave colonies 
created to exploit staple exports, English emigrants to the northern mainland sought to establish 
independent settlement. These colonies lacked staple products and residents financed imports by 
exploited opportunities the empire provided providing for shipping and merchandising and compensating 
for the lack European market for the timber or temperate agricultural products by exporting to the 
sugar colonies which, in turn, concentrated on the export staple. The British Empire was unique and 
its development provided an important and growing diversified and relatively wealthy market for British 
manufactured goods that all other empires lacked. Although the mainland colonies financed their imports 
of British manufactured goods by intergrading into the slave-based British Atlantic, it seems likely 
that in the absence of opportunities in the slave colonies the mainland colonies would have imported 
similar amounts of British manufactured goods.
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Length: 40 pages
Creation-Date: 2013-04-01
Number: _113
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/12739/harley113.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_113