A Response to Philip Plickert’s Attempt to Absolve Capitalism
Especially since the publication of Eric Williams’ groundbreaking work Capitalism and Slavery, which first appeared in 1944 and sheds light on the contribution of slavery to the development of capitalism, bourgeois representatives have been trying to refute this connection. Instead of refuting the facts, they produce their own myths about a supposedly more rational capitalism after the end of colonialism and have been going round in circles for almost a hundred years – as Philip Plickert does in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).[1]
In the FAZ, Plickert writes about the supposedly influential but unproven left-wing narrative of the profitability of the slave economy in the sounding category “Sunday economist”, although it is not clear whether he is referring to the slave trade, the plantation economy, colonialism as a political enterprise or the whole complex. Basically, he could have saved himself the article or shortened it to the sentence: “For the colonial empires not only brought profits, especially for plantation owners and wholesalers, they also caused enormous costs.”
Who pays, who benefits?
This banal statement that the transatlantic slave economy was profitable for private investors, but not for the state budget, especially in times of increased war activity and rising military expenditure, is anything but new. Above all, the two things are inseparable, as the military protection of trade routes and plantation estates against indigenous populations, rebellious slaves and rival powers ensured the conditions under which plantation owners and wholesalers could make profits. To this day, it is not uncommon for states to adopt deficit budgets in order to bail out one bank or another large corporation in times of crisis or to wage war.
Under the section “High military expenditure”, he points out the high tax burden that the rearmament entailed. Even at the time, socialists such as August Bebel condemned the fact that the general public should pay for the expeditions of capitalists from, for example, the German East African Company. However, this is not an argument against their profitability, but an indication that losses are socialized under capitalism, while profits flow into private pockets. If you look at the rearmament currently taking place, which is causing exorbitant increases in expenditure and special funds for the Bundeswehr (the German army) in the three-digit billion range, you are inclined to ask what the real contrast to the present is. After all, this expenditure is being financed by current or future taxes, while arms companies are enjoying record profits financed by the state.
Old arguments to whitewash European capitalism
The debate is therefore not new, nor are the arguments put forward, which Eric Williams, mentioned by Plickert, was already confronted with in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery. In this work, Williams presents the contribution of slavery and the plantation economy to the development of British capitalism for the first time in a coherent study.[2]
So why is this old debate being reopened now? Plickert himself writes:
In the wake of anti-racist movements such as “Black Lives Matter”, the colonial legacy, or rather the neo-colonial exploitation, oppression and underdevelopment of African countries by imperialist powers, is also coming to the fore again.
The colonial revisionism that Plickert pursues has various strands. He himself represents a liberal strand that insists on the advantages of free markets and doubly free wage laborers, even with the old Adam Smith. The latter wants to absolve “pure” capitalism of the crimes of slavery and colonialism. However, liberal revisionism is usually accompanied by a revanchism from the right, which forms the second strand and goes so far as to weigh up the disadvantages and alleged advantages of colonialism against each other.
If you now declare colonialism to be a negative business, you kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, the capitalist world system as it exists today is presented as the more rational form compared to earlier imperialist expansionism. The masses in Niger, for example, who know very well why they are calling for an end to Western dominance with slogans such as “France dégage”, could only smile wearily at this. No one, not even Plickert, can really believe that today’s system is any less oppressive than earlier “excesses” in the face of increasing conflicts over the redivision of the world among the major imperialist powers, including regional (proxy) wars.
If we were to assume, as the author would have us believe, that the age of imperialism was over, we would have to explain why the countries that liberated themselves from colonialism in the twentieth century through long struggles are still underdeveloped today. The gap between them and the developed capitalist countries has widened even further in recent decades.
Now one could assume that even after political independence, the economic dependence of the neo-colonial world on and the continued political (and often military) influence of the imperialist countries did not end. The development of capitalism was and continues to be linked to the underdevelopment of these parts of the world. Authors such as Walter Rodney dealt with this question in depth.[3]
If this is denied, however, the only other explanations that remain are those that tell of structural problems in countries in implementing capitalism “sensibly” more than half a century after independence, or of personal character traits of political leaders or even more or less clearly racist assumptions that it is somehow in the nature of Africans that they have not yet “caught up”. In any case, the cause must not lie in the functioning of the capitalist system.
The less reality corresponds to the influential bourgeois narrative of a more rational capitalism, the more one must insist on it, so that people in imperialist countries such as Germany do not question what interests Germany is pursuing in West Africa, the South China Sea, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and so on.
Finally, we may ask why such a loss-making business as slavery was maintained for centuries by all the major European powers. Instead of explaining alleged myths, we can only speculate as to what explanation Plickert would provide for this, because he does not, but you should probably figure out for yourself that there is no rational explanation for this.
This is doubly surprising given that the slave trade and the associated production of goods and their transport, as well as the extensive military operations, had a decisive influence on the emergence of the modern system of accounting, finance, insurance and credit and the centralization of the nation states that were being formed. But the conclusion should be that today’s major European powers had nothing to do with the old colonialism and turned away from it out of pure reason.
Secondly, it is an argumentative underpinning of the narrative of European superiority. There is a real debate about which factors influenced the development of English and European capitalism and to what extent – incidentally, especially in Marxist circles, which at least share a rejection of capitalism. It is not a new insight that Venetian and Genoese trading capital financed the first expeditions of the 15th century or that the highly indebted Iberian royal houses did not send people like Columbus on their voyages out of a thirst for adventure, but with tangible economic goals such as the development of bullion deposits.
The narrative of the unreasonableness of slavery has an even more fundamental effect: it reinforces the superiority of today’s developed capitalist countries, which – since slavery was a loss-making business – have developed in the direction of this system not because of it, but despite and against it, i.e. through their own efforts.
The contribution to the development of capitalism
Plickert’s dubious presentation can be found in many sentences, such as this one: “The bulk of British foreign trade was with Western Europe and North America, much less with the colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and India.” He probably chose the above vagueness about what exactly he was criticizing on purpose, so as not to collapse his woolly argument, but here’s where it gets straight wrong. Firstly, Ireland and North America were important parts of the British colonial empire and secondly, even after the British colonies in North America became independent, a significant amount of trade went to the states that had plantation economies, i.e. slavery (as did trade with Brazil and Cuba, both significant slave economies until the end of the nineteenth century).
British capitalism thus continued to supply its workers with cheap sugar, coffee, tobacco and cotton textiles from slave plantations long after the formal abolition of slavery in its own colonies (due to the loss of North America, the increasing exhaustion of the Caribbean colonies and the failed attempt to conquer Saint Domingue [Haiti]) and the slave trade in order to keep domestic wages as low as possible.
After Britain ended the slave trade in 1807, it would take until 1834 for slaves to be formally freed in the British colonies. However, slaves over the age of six were bound to their former masters and their plantations by an “apprenticeship” system for between six and twelve years, where they were obliged to work ten hours a day before they were allowed to leave. Far from creating a system of free wage labour comparable to Europe in the British colonies, the rulers switched to a system of indentured labour. This meant that workers from Asia (especially India and China) were obliged to work for a master in multi-year contracts, in a relationship similar to the previous slavery. Not only did they have to earn the costs of the passage, but minor offenses and fines could quickly lead to the contracts being unilaterally extended and the bond to a plantation being extended to up to ten years.[4]
But not only that, British slave owners received princely compensation with the abolition of slavery. The law passed in 1833 to free the slaves provided for a payment of 20 million pounds, which is equivalent to around 16.5 billion pounds today adjusted for purchasing power.[5] The repayment of the loan itself was financed by colonial taxes, that lead to the freed slaves to work for the compensation of their release by the British government.
If we take the full picture, i.e. the real and not imagined colonial trade, we see that the ratio of exports from Britain to Europe averaged 3,201,000 pounds in 1699 – 1701[6] compared to 3,617,000 pounds for the years 1772 – 1774. For Ireland, America, Africa and Asia the ratio for the same period is 672,000 pounds to 4,870,000 pounds only 75 years later.[7] However, exports were only one side of the coin. As indicated in the previous paragraphs, the import of cheap agricultural products from the slave plantations played an important role in the domestic reproduction of workers at the lowest possible price.
It was the historically unique combination of primarily English capital, black labour (slaves) from Africa and the appropriated land in the New World that led to the rise of capitalism in northwestern Europe, especially Great Britain. The agrarian capitalism that developed in England from the 15th century onwards would have faced an existential crisis in the seventeenth century had it not been for colonialism. The masses deprived of their means of subsistence by capitalist development in the countryside were unable to find employment, putting a strain on welfare and destabilizing the English system. Hundreds of thousands of them were forcibly sent to the colonies as indentured labourers or “criminals” and vagabonds until the eighteenth century. The development of the plantation economy and with it shipbuilding and other important industries then provided the kick-start for English industrial capitalism. From the eighteenth century onwards, the surplus rural population was absorbed by this industry, leading to a unique boom in the English and later the British economy as a whole. The transatlantic triangular trade, in which raw materials obtained through slave labour from the overseas colonies were supplied to English industry, which then used the goods and profits to buy black slaves in Africa and export these and other goods to the colonies, was a necessary condition for the existence of European, especially British, capitalism today.
Ralph Davis concludes that about a third of English industrial production for the period as a whole was exported, an important part of which was the growing colonial market against a stagnating European market.
If we want to make statements about the contribution of the slave economy to the development of European capitalism, time periods are important. The eighteenth century in particular was decisive for the leap from agrarian capitalism to industrial capitalism in England. With the development of capitalism and ongoing industrialization in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onwards, these markets became more important than the colonies. The type of exports is also important here, for example the domestic demand for iron increased sharply in eighteenth century England, but also in the colonies, where exports corresponded to 13-19 percent of domestic consumption.[8] The export of cotton textiles corresponded to 15 – 50 percent.[9]
Until Prussian sugar production took the lead in the world at the end of the nineteenth century and was one of the causes of the decline of the Cuban plantation economy, the latter was the largest sugar producer with an annual production worth up to one hundred million US dollars. Cuba was a Spanish colony based on the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of black slaves. A highly profitable business for the producers, a loss-making business for the Spanish state, which had to wage war on the island against insurgents for many years, precisely to defend the profits of the plantation owners, in whose interests the Spanish government was acting.
In one of his comprehensive works, Robin Blackburn writes that the simple accumulation of wealth is a secondary aspect of “primitive accumulation” “since capitalist industrialization required an appropriate framework of institutions and production relations capable of converting wealth into capital.”[10] According to Marx, capital is command over human labour, including an unpaid part that forms the basis of capitalist profit. This labour was imported into the colonies from Africa by black slaves after the destruction of the indigenous population in the Americas, before giving way to pure wage labour. Through the international and later colonial trade early merchant capital turned from „buying cheap and selling dear“ using international price differentials into modern capital that subsumed human labour in the production process from Asia to the Americas.
One could recommend Plickert to read the important books by Blackburn, who has extensively studied and evaluated the arguments on both sides. Even if one were to follow the flimsy reasoning of his article that colonialism and slavery were only partially profitable (in fact, he argues in the affirmative, even if the profits were small according to his account), at least one thing should be clear: Colonialism was the political form that the expansion of capitalism took, starting in Europe. And not only that, despite sometimes higher, sometimes lower profit rates, the slave economy helped to establish modern wage labour in England. It drove the separation of the emerging proletariat from the land, where goods for daily needs were still partly produced alongside wage labour by supplying clothing, food, etc. via the market through cheap imports from the colonies – in addition to increasing agricultural productivity in England itself.
The subjugation of Africa, the Americas and large parts of Asia, which resulted in the direct military and political domination of the colonies from the end of the nineteenth century, was the process by which these parts were incorporated into the emerging capitalist world. If Plickert and his ilk insist on the only existing rationality in liberal markets and wage labour, they should at least acknowledge that slavery and colonialism were the precondition for forcibly establishing the underlying mode of production worldwide.
[1] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wirtschaftswissen/der-kolonialismus-war-kein-gutes-geschaeft-19881907.html
[2] As “coincidence” would have it, such an article appears at a time when Williams’ arguments have again been dealt with intensively in English-language publications and the book Capitalism and Slavery itself is currently being prepared for its first German edition by our Manifest Verlag, publishing house.
[3] For example in his main work How Europe underdeveloped Africa.
[4] See, among others, Rodney, Walter. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
[5] Blackburn, Robin: The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. Verso London, 2011. p. 457. and https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-news/britains-colonial-shame-slave-owners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition/
[6] All sums of money are historical and do not correspond to today’s prices.
[7] Ralph Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade 1700-1774’, Economic History Review, Second Series, 15,1962
[8] Paul Bairoch, ‘Commerce international et genèse de la révolution industrielle anglaise’, Annales, XXVII, 1973
[9] Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 185; exports from Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade
[10] Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, Verso 2010, p. 527
