The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Barbara Solow (review)

Solow provides important insights for understanding the economics of slavery in the Americas. This posthumous volume brings together some of her seminal publications based on her research throughout the past twenty-five years. It well deserves to be collected in a convenient volume for scholars who study slavery in the Americas. The central theme is the significance of the institution of slavery in modern economic development. Always written with a brilliance and flare, Solow’s work ably outlines the basic features of slavery as a system and economic structure. Although her analysis is heavily weighted toward British and North American history, her explanation of slavery’s underpinnings in economic terms applies to any society in any time period.

The book includes seven chapters about the economic consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The first examines the development of capitalism and the role of slavery from the beginnings of sugar production in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa to its introduction into the Americas. It provides a perceptive appreciation of Williams’ hypothesis about the close association between capitalism and slavery.¹ In the second chapter, she explores the role of forced colonization through slavery as a mechanism for development in places with an abundance of land, as in many parts of tropical America after the decimation of the indigenous population through disease and colonial conquest.

Her third chapter, which is published for the first time in this book, engages the debate between Williams and his critics, especially Drescher.² She convincingly argues that Williams provided significant insights into the transition from slavery to abolition that have been supported by recent research. Her chapter about why Christopher Columbus failed, considers the development of the Americas without slavery. This counterfactual approach allows Solow to explore the entrepreneurial experimentation of various European colonial powers in the development of the sugar complex in the Americas and the tangential extensions of slavery into other spheres of economy and society. In her chapter about Caribbean slavery and the growth of the British economy, she examines the Williams thesis in greater detail, particularly in relation to the criticisms of Engerman and Thomas, employing an econometric analysis that uses a Cobb-Douglas production model to establish levels of profits related to the sugar industry.³ She demonstrates in her final chapter that the British experience in the Caribbean benefited from the transition to a plantation economy. In her penultimate essay, also published in this volume for the first time, she explores the theories of Karl Marx and American economic growth based on slavery.

Conspicuously absent from this book is the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa, its states, its societies, and the economy. Solow’s insights cry out for a discussion of the transformations that occurred in Africa as a result of the modernization and industrialization of Western Europe and the Americas. How did technology and economies of scale affect Africa, and what was their role in the origins of the enslaved population? Although this question apparently never occurred to her, it is relevant for the historiography of the Atlantic world.

Solow is not the only scholar who has ignored Africa in this respect; the general silence raises important conceptual issues. Was Africa even part of the Atlantic world, other than as an ocean filled with people to enslave? Was Africa such a vacuum of meaning and history that its economies are not worth exploring? A volume dedicated to the issues that Solow has addressed in her scholarly career might at least have provided an introduction to global issues that go beyond an Atlantic that stops short of the African coast. In addition to the two new chapters in this collection, Solow would have done well to include a third one dealing with the African side of the equation. Other scholars will have to pick up where she left off.