The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Europe
The impact of the slave trade on Europe is another area of historical controversy. Some historians of the slave trade are keen to stress the ways in which the trade had significant economic effects in the home countries. However, historians of European industrialisation have often given little attention to the contribution of the slave trade, although there are exceptions. Readers are left asking themselves: is there any way of reconciling such approaches?

At the centre of the debate is the economic transformation of Britain. During the eighteenth century, Britain became the first country in the world to “industrialise”, in terms of an unprecedented economic shift towards manufactures and commerce, and the progress of technology. These were also years of large British involvement in the slave trade. So were these two trends related?

Undoubtedly the slave trade affected the British economy in a number of ways. The British cotton mills, which became the emblem of the “Industrial Revolution”, depended on cheap slaved-produced cotton from the New World; cotton would have been more costly to obtain elsewhere. British consumers also benefited from other cheap and plentiful slaved-produced goods such as sugar. The profits gained from the slave trade gave the British economy an extra source of capital. Both the Americas and Africa, whose economies depended on slavery, became useful additional export markets for British manufactures. Certain British individuals, businesses, and ports prospered on the basis of the slave trade.

However, this is a long way from saying that the slave trade was the main cause of Britain’s “industrialisation”. British economic advance was made possible by many other factors, including the progress of agriculture, the advance of technology, the stability of political institutions, the local availability materials such as coal, and a culture that was conducive to innovation and enterprise. It is tempting to conclude that, had the slave trade not existed, Britain and the rest of Europe would still have “industrialised” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although the exact trajectory would have been altered.

Two further points are worth considering. First, had the slave trade been the “magic bullet” that led to industrialisation, Portugal should have been a leading industrial power, in view of its long engagement in the trade. In practice, the reverse was true: Portugal was one of the most backward industrial economies in Europe. Second, even if the slave trade was important to Europe’s economic development at a certain stage (perhaps the eighteenth century), this importance must have been on the wane by the time that the trade was abolished in the mid-nineteenth century, because abolition seemed to have little negative impact on Europe’s economic advance. Instead, in the decades that followed, industrialisation marched on, spreading to new parts of Europe, and experiencing new waves of technological progress.

On this basis, might one conclude that the most significant and grave consequences of the Europeans’ involvement in the slave trade lay in Africa and the Americas, rather than in Europe itself?

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