British industrial wealth derived directly from American slave labor

Evidence

We speak of the blood-cemented fabric of the prosperity of New Orleans or the Havanna: let us look at home. What raised Liverpool and Manchester from provincial towns to gigantic cities? What maintains now their ever active industry and their rapid accumulation of wealth? The exchange of their produce with that raised by the American slaves; and their present opulence is as really owing to the toil and suffering of the negro, as if his hands had excavated their docks and fabricated their steam-engines. Every trader who carries on commerce with those countries, from the great house which lends its name and funds to support the credit of the American Bank, down to the Birmingham merchant who makes a shipment of shackles to Cuba or the coast of Africa, is in his own way an upholder of slavery: and I do not see how any consumer who drinks coffee or wears cotton can escape from the same sweeping charge. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 570

Categorization

• XREF: Merivale’s 1839 lecture prefigures both Marx and Eric Williams; connects to the Williams thesis debates that so shaped Robinson’s historiography. — connects to: American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; American cotton built on expropriated land and slave labor powered the English Industrial Revolution
• QUESTION: Merivale anticipated Marx’s link of slavery to capital accumulation by nearly three decades of publication — worth tracing who influenced whom in Oxford political economy.