BITTERSWEET ISLES^121On the other hand, the increase in the size of the market made a dif
ference. (We are not talking profit here but volume.) Africans and
Americans wanted products made by repetitious techniques that lent
themselves to mechanization. Take cotton. An infant industry at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, British cotton was inadvertendy
protected by the so-called calico arts, directed against Indian goods;
and although it was still far behind wool in the middle of the century
when inventors first tried to mechanize spinning, it was much bigger
than before and rising fast, in part on the strength of sales to the plan
tations. So, when wool proved difficult, the inventors tried cotton;
and they succeeded.
The question still remains whether the Atlantic system played a de
cisive role in stimulating this revolutionary change; or to put it in the
contrafactual terms currentiy popular among economic historians,
whether the Industrial Revolution would have taken place without it.
The answer, I think, is clearly, yes, it would have. The crucial changes
in energy (coal and the steam engine) and metallurgy (coke-smelted
iron) were largely independent of the Atiantic system; so was the at
tempt initially to mechanize wool spinning.
But without slavery, industry would have developed more slowly.
That in itself is not a strong statement. One could say that of any in
crement of demand: more is better than less. The operative question
is, how much more slowly? Here one has to look at industrial exports
as a component of demand and Atlantic exports as part of all. Viewed
statically, that is, as a series of still photos, the export market was sub
stantially smaller than the home market; and sales to America, an even
smaller part of home market plus the traditional export markets in
Continental Europe. Viewed dynamically, however, like a motion pic
ture, exports were growing faster than home demand, and Atiantic ex
ports much faster than those to European buyers. They mattered. In
the words of Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman: "It would be hard
to claim that [widening of the market owing to plantation profits was]
either necessary or sufficient for an Industrial Revolution, and equally
hard to deny that [it] affected its magnitude and timing.... Had all
emigration to the Western Hemisphere been voluntary and none co
erced, the British economy and its North American colonies would
have developed more slowly."^21
The question remains, then, how much more slowly? But that's
about it.
(Of course, that will not be the end of the story, because other ide
ological positions are riding on this kind of historical debate. Third