The slave trade financed Britain’s industrial revolution while underdeveloping Africa’s economies

Evidence

Still, enough of the African laborers remained in the colonies of North America and the Indies to play a significant role in the development of the English imperial economy. The “triangular trade” in slaves, as Eric Williams asserted, broadened the “home market” by stimulating the production of British manufactures that English merchants exchanged in Africa for Black workers. Once in place, these workers formed the labor for British tropical production, craft work, and extractive industries. The end result was capital accumulation for the advance of productive forces in England and Europe (the Industrial Revolution), for the growth of staple industries in northern America (fisheries, food crops, etc.), for timber, ship-building, and textiles, and for the expansion of colonization and settlement. The concomitant, however, was the degradation of these African peoples and their social institutions when touched by that trade, and, as Walter Rodney has argued, the underdevelopment of Africa’s economies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 600

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Eric Williams’s ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ thesis — the claim that Atlantic slavery bankrolled British industrialization — which is a foundational pillar of the Black radical economic argument. — connects to: Bauer denied the slave trade caused African underdevelopment by citing preexisting endemic slavery — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 401; American cotton built on expropriated land and slave labor powered the English Industrial Revolution
• ADDENDUM: Complements the sacrificial-labor framing in ‘On Sacrifice’: here the coerced labor of the enslaved is simultaneously capital and cosmological foundation for the industrial world-system.