Capitalism’s own matured interests destroyed the slave system it had built.

Evidence

The attack falls into three phases: the attack on the slave trade, the attack on slavery, the attack on the preferential sugar duties. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery in 1833, the sugar preference in 1846. The three events are inseparable. The very vested interests which had been built up by the slave system now turned and destroyed the system. The humanitarians, in attacking the system in its weakest and most indefensible spot, spoke a language that the masses could understand. They could never have succeeded a hundred years before when every important capitalist interest was on the side of the colonial system. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 786

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Core Robinson thesis: the slave system was destroyed not by humanitarianism but by capital’s own internal development — a dense causal claim central to the whole book.
• XREF: Directly extends the Williams thesis on capitalism and slavery; connects to the Arcades/primitive accumulation discussion and to Eric Williams’s ‘Capitalism and Slavery’.