BITTERSWEET ISLES^119mother was then expected to work in the field with the baby on her
back. The law stipulated fines for killing a slave, greater of course for
someone else's slave than one's own, but since correction was always
legitimate, a brutal master had littie difficulty escaping penalty.
And so on and on in a ceaseless round of torment and humiliation.
The occasional humanitarian masters were far outnumbered by others
who saw them as a danger to society and wealth. Nor did good mas
ters last forever: death, departure, a change of manager, and the bear
able could become unbearable. Slave societies could not afford to
encourage kindness and leniency. On Barbados, Quakers were fined
heavily for bringing blacks into their churches, thereby according them
a measure of humanity and an unwarranted sense of sabbath. Rest?
Rest was for people who did not have to work.
The demographic data tell the story. Caribbean slaves died faster
than they reproduced.
The significance of sugar cultivation for the development of an At
lantic (intercontinental) economy and the industrialization of Europe
has long been debated. At the simplest level, some have argued—most
prominently Eric Williams—that slave trade profits and the exploitation
of slave labor watered the garden of a nascent capitalism, or, to use an
other metaphor, "fertilized the entire productive system of the coun
try."^12 On a more complex level, the reasoning is Adam Smithian: "The
slave-based Atiantic system provided England with opportunities for
the division of labor and for the transformation of economic and so
cial structures.... "^13
The Williams thesis has drawn fire and praise, for good and bad rea
sons. Initial response was largely negative, as might have been ex
pected; but this "almost monolithic opposition has been challenged in
recent years by new research, analysis, and interpretation." Some of this
reaction reflects "the intellectual and moral ferment generated by the
revolt against colonialism and the rise of new nations and the civil
rights crusade, together with the bitter memory of the slave trade and
slavery."^14 The aim, as for Williams himself, is to remind complacent,
empire-proud Britons of their debt to Africa. If Britain made of itself
the "first industrial nation," it did so on the whiplashed backs of its
black slaves.^15
Critics of Eric Williams have been put off by his materialist (Marx
ist) premises: he reduces everything, they say, to economic motives
and interests.^16 True enough; but after all, the planters were in it for the
money. More cogent have been the empirical attacks on Williams: his-