This “Great Transformation,”[5] to use Karl Polanyi’s expression, is explained in the mainstream literature in terms of internal forces in England¾ agricultural improvement, population growth, chance endowment of coal and iron ore, progressive social structure, and/or accidental development of technology ¾ with no serious examination of the contribution of African peoples[6]. Over half a century ago, Eric Williams had attempted to show the contribution of Africans on the basis of profits from the slave trade and slavery, and the employment of those profits to finance England’s industrialization process.[7]This well known Williams thesis has been attacked repeatedly since it first appeared in 1944.[8] I have shown elsewhere that the British slave trade was more profitable than the critics of Williams would want us to believe, but argued at the same time that the emphasis on profits is misplaced.[9] I believe the contribution of Africans to the transformation of England’s economy and society between 1650 and 1850 would be best demonstrated in terms of the role of the slave-based Atlantic World economy in the transformation process. This paper presents a summary of my attempt to date in that direction.

The logical structure of the argument may be briefly stated. The analysis centers on the economics of international trade during the transformation process. It is argued that the growth of England’s international trade during the period was a critical factor in the process and that the evolution of the Atlantic World economic system, with its expanding multilateral trading network, was at the center of this enlarged international trade. The analysis begins, therefore, with tracing the development of the Atlantic trading network, estimating its growing volume and value over time, and assessing the contribution of diasporic Africans in the Americas and those of the African continent. Following this, England’s transformation trajectory is outlined and fitted into England’s quantitative and qualitative operation in the Atlantic World trading system, and the relative weight of the Atlantic World slave economy is determined in several ways. Important in the exercise is a comparative regional analysis of the development of England’s major regions over the period, which helps to bring out in sharp relief the central factors in the process.

I use the terms, Atlantic world and Atlantic basin, interchangeably to define a geographical area that includes Western Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and Ireland), Western Africa (from Mauritania in the northwest to Namibia in the southwest, comprising the two modern regions of West Africa and West-Central Africa), and the Americas (comprising all the countries of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States of America, and Canada). Before the middle decades of the fifteenth century, these three broad regions of the Atlantic basin operated in isolation one from another, although there were indirect trade relations between Western Europe and Western Africa through the merchants of the Middle East and North Africa. The Atlantic Ocean was then a relatively quiet sea, the Mediterranean being the main center of water-borne international trade in the world at the time.[10] Also at this time, the Atlantic basin economies were all pre-industrial and pre-capitalist. The vast majority of the populations on both sides of the Atlantic (East and West) were engaged in subsistence agricultural production ¾ the bulk of the output being consumed directly by the producers without reaching the market. Elaborate craft production, which was largely part of agriculture, also existed in the regions, making it possible for the basic needs of the people to be internally met in the main.

A major factor constraining economic development in large areas of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century was limited opportunity to trade. Even in Western Europe, where trade had grown most considerably, trading opportunities had become increasingly limited by the sixteenth century. In the first place, inadequate local resources did not permit overall population size to go beyond a certain level, as the crisis of the fourteenth century shows. Secondly, the Mediterranean-based network of international trade, of which Western Europe had been an important part since the twelfth century, began to decline after the Black Death and "by the late fifteenth century, only small parts of it retained their former vigor."[11] Thirdly, the growth of nation-states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, none of which was powerful enough to impose its will on the others, led to an atomistic competition for resources among the states of Western Europe.[12]This further limited trading opportunities within Western Europe as competition among the nation-states tended to encourage the growth of self-sufficiency, each state employing protective measures to stimulate domestic industrial production.[13]

In the course of the sixteenth century these policies were formalized, with their emphasis on the balance of trade. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were further extended and consolidated, severely limiting the growth of trade, based entirely on European products, among West European nations. Because of its geographical size and the extent of its human and natural resources, policies aimed at national self-sufficiency were most elaborately developed in France. They reached their highest level of development under Colbert in the seventeenth century. The English system also developed extensively from 1620 to 1786.[14] It was these restrictive practices, together with the other factors limiting trading opportunities in Western Europe — in particular, the problem of inland transportation cost in pre-industrial economies — which led to the general crisis of the seventeenth century.[15]

The foregoing evidence indicates strongly that the movement of West Europeans into the Atlantic, where commodity production offered immense opportunities for trade expansion, was initially triggered by the diminishing extent of the market accessible to West European traders and producers. The expansion of trade and the growing commercialization of socio-economic life in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages had given rise to influential merchant classes. As trading opportunities ceased to expand after the Black Death, the interests of the merchant class coincided with those of impoverished members of the nobility (especially in Portugal) searching for new sources of income and with the growing needs of the rising states for revenue from trade to provide a major push for trade motivated exploration.

Ultimately, these West European economic and political entrepreneurs were not disappointed. From the middle to the last decades of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese explored and established trading posts on the western coast of Africa, trading mainly gold but also establishing slave-worked plantations and producing sugar on islands off the African coast. Then came the jewel of West European expansion ¾ the exploration and colonization of the Americas from 1492. The subsequent integration of Western Europe,Western Africa, and the Americas in a single trading system ¾ the Atlantic world trading system ¾ considerably extended the production and consumption possibility frontier of the societies in the Atlantic basin through the widening of the range of resources and products it made available.

But there was a problem. Given the rudimentary transportation technology of the time, unit cost of production in the Americas had to be sufficiently low for American commodities to bear the cost of trans-Atlantic transportation and still secure large markets. This meant large-scale production requiring far more workers than family labor. Yet no market for legally free labor in any region of the Atlantic or elsewhere could provide such labor in the quantities and at the prices required at the time. For one thing, population to land ratios and the development of division of labor had not yet reached levels in Europe and Africa that could give rise to a large population of landless people forced into conditions that would encourage them to migrate voluntarily in large numbers to the Americas. On the other hand, because land was abundant in the Americas, legally free migrants from the Old World were unwilling to work for others; rather, they took up land to produce on a small scale for themselves, usually subsistence production in the most part. The widespread destruction of the Native American population resulting from European colonization worsened the problem as it further increased land/labor ratios in the Americas: With less than half a million Europeans in all of the Americas between 1646 and 1665,[16] the destruction of the Indian populations meant that average population density in the Americas was less than one person per square mile in the seventeenth century.

Consequently, large-scale production in the Americas depended largely on coerced labor for several centuries. Initially, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were forced to provide such labor. For silver mining and the provisioning of the European colonists, coerced Indian labor was relatively successful in Spanish America.[17] But it was unsuitable in most other areas of production. As the Indian (Native American) population declined, the production of commodities in the Americas for Atlantic commerce came to rest almost entirely on the shoulders of forced migrants from Africa. Subsisting partly on the provisions from the small plots they stretched themselves to work in their leisure time, their labor cost to the slaveholders was below subsistence cost. Hence, because of the cheapness of their labor and the scale of production they made possible, prices of the American commodities fell sharply over time in Europe. Products, such as tobacco and sugar, moved from being luxuries for the rich to every day consumption goods for the masses in rural and urban areas. The falling prices of raw materials, such as cotton and dyestuffs, contributed greatly to the development of industries producing for mass consumer markets.

It is thus no surprise that commodity production in the Americas for Atlantic commerce expanded phenomenally between 1501 and 1850, increasing from an annual average of £1.3 million in 1501-1550 to £8.0 million in 1651-1670, £39.1 million in 1781-1800, and £89.2 million in 1848-1850.[18] The estimated percentage share of these commodities produced by diasporic Africans in the Americas is put, respectively, at 54.0, 69.1, 79.9, and 68.8.[19] Based largely on the American commodities, the annual value of multilateral Atlantic commerce (exports plus re-exports plus imports of merchandise and commercial services) grew equally explosively during the same period: from £3.2 million in 1501-1550 to £20.1 million in 1651-1670, £105.5 million in 1781-1800, and £231.0 million in 1848-1850.[20]

Because the imperial nations of Western Europe integrated their American colonies into their mercantilist arrangement, the American products by law had to go to the respective European mother countries — Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Holland — through which other European countries received them as re-exports. European products from non-mother countries going to the American colonies also had to go through the same mother countries as re-exports. In this way, through direct and indirect stimulation, intra-European trade expanded at rates that were a multiple of the rate of growth of Atlantic commerce itself, and the Americas became a major factor in the commercialization of socio-economic life in Western Europe between 1500 and 1800. As one writer has noted, "Because much of the increase in trade within Europe [between 1350 and 1750] was related to overseas colonies and markets, it is difficult to separate long-distance and intra-European trade."[21]

Between 1650 and 1850, England’s international trade was the main beneficiary of the expanding multilateral Atlantic commerce and intra-European trade. Two major factors were responsible for this. One was England’s naval power which enabled the country to protect and expand its American territories at the expense of other European powers, especially France and Holland, and secure advantageous treaties with Portugal and Spain, treaties that practically linked English trade to the dynamic forces emanating from Portuguese Brazil and Spanish America. The other is the unique role of British America (especially New England and the Middle Atlantic territories) in the network of trade which developed over time among the economies of the New World. On this point, my analysis of the evidence has led me to the following conclusion:

These developments in northern mainland British America, dependent on trading opportunities provided by the plantation and mining economies of the Americas as they did, created an important development zone with the capacity to suck incomes from the plantation and mining zones, and with social structures and an income distribution pattern which gave rise to mass consumption of manufactured goods. Because of colonial arrangements and cultural attachment, the incomes gathered in the hands of producers and consumers in northern mainland British America were spent on imports from Britain. . . . This was a unique phenomenon in the Atlantic basin. No other European power was similarly situated during the period.[22]

The course and character of socioeconomic change and industrialization in England between 1650 and 1850 show clearly the importance of the developments in the Atlantic World already outlined. For several centuries preceding the seventeenth century, the wool trade with Northwest Europe and population growth had been the central factors in the process of change in England’s economy and society, especially in the southern counties. Commercialization of agriculture and the development of woolen textile manufacturing as an import substitution industry, with its main market in Northern and Northwest Europe, were the major accomplishments of this early process. The development of political institutions, particularly the evolution of an effective parliamentary system of government, were also important achievements. By the mid-seventeenth century, although the growth of the woolen industry had significantly reduced England’s dependence on Northwest Europe for manufactures, the country still lagged behind the major centers of manufacturing in the Low Country and the GermanStates. From the late seventeenth century, the woolen industry faced difficulties at home and in North and Northwest Europe: exports to the latter stagnated as the states there developed their own industries, while growing import of Oriental cottons and silks encroached on the industry’s domestic market in England. What is more, England’s population had moved back and forth since the subsistence crisis of the fourteenth century, unable to break through the six million ceiling imposed by available resources. From the Restoration (1660) to the early decades of the eighteenth century, major changes in economy and society came from agricultural improvement, leading to significant export surpluses in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the growth of service incomes connected with entrepot trade.

The additional foreign exchange accruing from the agricultural export surplus and from the export of services in the entrepot trade helped to pay for imported manufactures, which expanded the domestic market for manufactured goods and created the necessary conditions for import substitution industrialization on a broad front in the early decades of the eighteenth century.[23] Thus, the early years of the industrialization process in eighteenth-century England centered on efforts by English entrepreneurs to develop local industries aimed at capturing the domestic market for manufactures created largely by the developments of the decades 1650-1740. But, like the more recent import substitution industrialization process in the non-Western world, the domestic market of the small economy of eighteenth-century England could not sustain long-run expansion of manufacturing needed for a radical transformation of the organization and technology of industrial production to successfully complete the process. The early expansion quickly reached the limits of the pre-existing domestic market. Thereafter, manufacturers struggled to secure markets overseas.

As already mentioned, the pursuit of mercantilist policy by the states of Northern and Northwest Europe, as they built up their own industries, foreclosed those regions as major markets for the products of the developing English industries. In fact, England’s traditional manufactured export to Northern and Northwest Europe, woolen textiles, declined absolutely from approximately £1.5 million in 1701 to £1.0 million in 1806.[24] It was in the Atlantic world that those industries found their export markets. Sustained growth of sales on the Atlantic markets created growing employments in the export manufacturing regions and those linked to them, which stimulated population growth, ultimately overcoming the ceiling imposed for centuries by England’s agrarian society. Growing population, concentrated in urban centers with growing incomes from employment in industry and commerce, combined with export demand to create the general environment for the transformation of the organization and technology of manufacturing in the export industries between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, making it possible for the process to be successfully completed.

This view of England’s industrialization is borne out by the regional character of the process. Several regions in southern England had been involved in proto-industrialization (the so-called putting out system) since the sixteenth century and earlier. East Anglia and the West Country had been major centers of agricultural and industrial development long before the eighteenth century. For several centuries they were the main centers of the woolen industry, with export markets in Northern and Northwest Europe. Similarly, from the sixteenth through the seventeenth century, the Weald of Kent was a major proto-industrial region, producing glass, iron, timber products, and textiles. More than 50 percent of the blast furnaces in England by 1600 were in the Weald. For centuries the southern counties remained far more developed in agriculture, manufacturing, and social organization, while the northern counties, especially Lancashire and Yorkshire, remained extremely backward in agriculture, manufacturing, and social organization. Feudal elements were still to be found in the agrarian structure and society generally in Lancashire in the seventeenth century. Because of these differing levels of development, the ten richest counties in England were continuously in the south between 1086 and 1660.

Between 1660 and 1850 the regional distribution of manufacturing and wealth in England was radically transformed. Lancashire became the leading region in large-scale mechanized manufacturing, with the cotton textile industry, machine and machine-tools production, all concentrated there. Second to Lancashire in large-scale mechanized manufacturing was the West Riding of Yorkshire, where the woolen industry now concentrated, away from the earlier centers in East Anglia and the West Country. These two northern counties were followed by the West Midlands in large-scale mechanized manufacturing. In fact, the Industrial Revolution was, first and foremost, a phenomenon of these three English regions. Meanwhile, the earlier leading agricultural and proto-industrial regions in the south failed to transit to modern industrialization. They had to wait to be pulled into the modern era by the dynamism of the leading regions following the construction of the railroads and the creation of the Victorian empire, both of which were the products of mechanized industry.[25]

The reasons for the changes in the economic fortune of England’s regions, outlined above, are to be found in the geographical reorientation of England’s international trade between 1650 and 1850. As England’s export markets in Northern and Northwest Europe stagnated, the Atlantic markets became the main outlets for English manufactures. These new markets were captured largely by producers in the northern counties and the West Midlands. Thus, while the latter counties’ manufacturers served expanding export markets, those in the southern counties had to contend with stagnating export markets. These differing experiences also had repercussions for the growth of the domestic markets in these two sets of regions. Growing employment in manufacturing and commerce led to growing population and rising wages in the export manufacturing regions, while population and wages stagnated in the second set of counties. Hence, the domestic market grew much faster in the former than in the latter counties.

An important fact to note in this scenario is the regional nature of the markets in England before the railroad age. The eighteenth-century transport improvements, particularly the canals, were strongly regional in their impact, thus limiting effective competition at home among England’s manufacturers to the regional economies served by these regional transportation networks. Thus, the fast growing regions had their expanding export and domestic markets to serve, while the lagging regions had their stagnating export and domestic markets to serve. It is no surprise that changes in organization (the factory system) and technological innovation were concentrated in the fast growing regions of Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the West Midlands.

The evidence is thus clear enough that the slave-based Atlantic world economy was a critical factor in the transformation of England’s economy and society between 1650 and 1850. It is pertinent to note that apart from the contribution outlined in this paper, England’s shipping, marine insurance business, and credit institutions owed much of their development during the period to the operation of the Atlantic world market.[26] Their development helped to establish England’s supremacy in international trade in commercial services in the nineteenth century. It is clear from the comparative regional analysis that mainstream arguments based on agriculture, social structure, and population have little empirical foundation. Agricultural improvements and progressive social structures were attained very early in the southern counties of England, while Lancashire and Yorkshire retained much of their feudal backwardness. Yet it was these backward counties that produced the Industrial Revolution instead of the agriculturally and socially progressive southern counties. And they did so without depending on the agricultural south for market or for labor, the bulk of their manufactures being exported to Atlantic markets and much of their labor was internally generated through natural increases, as shown earlier. Similarly, mainstream argument concerning accidental development of technology will not wash, given the evidence of our comparative regional analysis. The correlation between rapid technological advancement and large-scale manufacturing for growing mass markets abroad and at home in the northern counties, on the one hand, and between technological stagnation and small-scale manufacturing for stagnant export and domestic markets in the southern counties, on the other, is just too strong to be accidental.

A question frequently asked is why, if the slave-based Atlantic world economy was so important, France,Holland, Spain, and Portugal¾ the other West European powers involved in the Atlantic world trading system ¾ did not industrialize like England. The difference is clear from our evidence. None of these other countries effectively combined naval power and commercial development like England. Hence, England secured the plum territories in the Americas and at the same time entered into advantageous treaties with other powers to gain access to the resources from their American colonies. Not only did British America control the lion’s share of commodity production and trade in the Americas, but also England was far more intensively involved in the operation of the entire Atlantic world economic system than any of the other countries did. In per capita terms, the exposure of England’s economy and society to the developmental weight of the Atlantic world market was several times greater than any of the other countries experienced. It should be mentioned, however, that all these other countries gained immensely from the operation of the slave-based Atlantic world economy during our period. Even the GermanStates and Northern Europe that were not directly involved still benefited from the growth of trade within Europe generated by the Atlantic world trading system. The critical difference we have emphasized is that England got the lion’s share and so launched the first Industrial Revolution in the whole world.