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The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

David Eltis  and
Stanley L. Engerman
David Eltis
Affiliation:
Peofessor of History at Queen's University, Research Lecturer at the University of Hull, England, and Research Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Email: eltisd@qilver.queensu.ca.
Stanley L. Engerman
Affiliation:
John H. Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Email: enge@troi.cc.rochester.edu.
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Extract

John Stuart Mill's comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 123 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2000

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