Industrial capital dismantled the slave system it had built once slavery became unprofitable

Evidence

In England, the decline of the profitability of British West Indian sugar in the second half of the eighteenth century was countered by an effort to end the slave trade. Without the trade, Williams recounts, it was believed that France’s colonial economy would collapse. English capital, that is its emerging industrial faction, was no longer obligated to a colonial empire. “Colonial independence was cheaper.” Free trade and capital accumulation had become the means of further capitalist development, relegating primitive accumulation to a secondary role. Industrial capitalists and their humanitarian ideologues, initially costumed in nationalist Francophobia, were by the end of the eighteenth century prepared to meet West Indian interest on the field: … 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…, 785

Categorization

• XREF: Recapitulates the Williams thesis (capitalism as cause of both slavery’s rise and fall) that Robinson critiques throughout.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the shift of capitalism from primitive to free-trade accumulation as phases of the same developmental logic.