Re: Mercantilism: Britain & Spain (was Re: the role of forcedlabor)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine:

>I was *not* asking what Eric Williams was thinking. I was asking
>your own opinion, briefly.

I'm saying that Eric Williams' argument still holds, though later
economic historians have been contesting it (see
<http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2000IV/msg00807.html>).  Don't you
agree?

>You said that "The doctrine of laissez faire did not come to be put
>into _practice_
>until later" (meaning 1848). What should we deduce from your
>statement with respect
>to chattel slavery?

A quite complex development that cannot be summed up in a short post.
See Chapter 10 "'The Commercial Part of the Nation' and Slavery" of
_Capitalism and Slavery_ for British capitalists' policies to slavery
in Latin America, the American Civil War, etc.  Suffice it say that
they were a combination of "lucrative humanity" & opportunism, as
Eric Williams notes gleefully; after the abolition of West Indian
slavery, British capitalists, generally speaking, said, "Leave the
slave trade alone, it would commit suicide," while the former slave
owners of the West Indies held "the humanitarian torch" & protested
against "a system of man-stealing against a poor and inoffensive
people," pleading for an adoption of "more decisive measures than any
that have hitherto been employed to stop the foreign slave trade; on
the effectual suppression of which the prosperity of the British West
Indian colonies...ultimately depend(s)" (Williams, _Capitalism and
Slavery_, pp. 172-6).

In short, the abolition of West Indian slavery helped Britain break
out of its own mercantilism; and laissez faire helped the British to
gain supremacy over Latin America, benefiting from the breaking down
of Spanish mercantilism.

Laissez faire is the doctrine that has helped only the first
industrializers (the UK & then the USA) _after_ they developed their
own nascent industries through mercantilism (e.g., recall that the
Navigation Acts of England -- the first of them enacted by Oliver
Cromwell's government in 1651 -- were originally aimed against the
Netherlands, Britain's true competitor.  Britain, however, could not
very well enforce mercantilist duties & regulations on its North
American colonies, eventually losing them altogether through the
American Revolution.  The British loss of North American colonies,
Williams argues, had an indirect effect on the abolition of West
Indian slavery: "The withdrawal of the thirteen colonies considerably
diminished the number of slaves in the empire and made abolition
easier than it would have been had the thirteen colonies been English
when the cotton gin revivified a moribund slave economy in the South"
[_Capitalism and Slavery_, p. 123-4]).

Let us also not forget how the British used rhetorical opposition to
slavery in the Scramble for Africa....

Yoshie