April 7, 2022 23sugar and other slave-grown commodi-
ties, along with the slave trade itself, in
turn drove all kinds of highly profitable
ancillary activities that employed large
numbers of Britons, from rope making
to shipbuilding, from firearms and iron-
works to banking, from textile produc-
tion (for two very different markets: to
clothe both slaves and their masters) to
insurance and finance. It was the cas-
cading wealth derived from this partial
list of booming slavery- related busi-
nesses that made London the leader in
financial services and the biggest city in
Europe in the eighteenth century, with
more than 750,000 residents—over
200,000 more than Paris and six times
larger than Vienna or Madrid. As a re-
sult, Scanlan writes, “trade made the
empire; slavery made trade.”To capture the essence of all of these
money-making activities even moredamningly: “Slaves. Cotton. Sugar.
This country’s nothing but an off-shore
laundry for turning evil into hard cur-
rency.” The line comes from the pop-
ular television series Succession and is
quoted in Sathnam Sanghera’s Empire-
land: How Imperialism Has Shaped
Modern Britain.
The contribution of slavery to Brit-
ish wealth was not limited to things
measured as trade or easily captured
in the bookkeeper’s ledger. As the an-
thropologist Sidney Mintz pointed out
in his classic work Sweetness and Power
(1986), in the eighteenth century sugar
plantations, kept running by the en-
slaved, were important precursors of in-
dustrialization. Not only were they much
larger than almost any other type of pro-
duction common to Europe at the time,
they operated on the basis of clear spe-
cialization of regimented labor working
under severe time pressure and relied
on the synchronization of multiple com-
plex operations, anticipating the modern
factory. These operations included not
only planting, weeding, and harvesting,
as well as the management of a large
enslaved workforce, but also the highly
time-sensitive boiling and “purging” of
the cane juice into molasses and sugar.
They were brutal, Scanlan writes, but
also among “the most prosperous, heav-
ily capitalised and mechanised work-
places of the pre-industrial era.”
To grasp the full import of Scanlan’s
statement that slavery in effect made
the empire, though, one must move
even further away from classical eco-nomics. He argues, for example, that
it was the creation of new productive
economies in the New World, and
above all in the West Indies, that fa-
cilitated the political stitching together
of what became the United Kingdom.
The story of white indentured servants
in places like Barbados in the early sev-
enteenth century, at the very outset of
the sugar boom, is well known, at least
to historians of slavery and empire.
In that era, before they were replaced
after midcentury by enslaved Africans,
whites of varying backgrounds, some
economically desperate, others merely
chancers seeking their fortunes in the
booming plantation world, supplied
much of the energy and no small por-
tion of the labor that launched these
complex, wealth-generating operations.
This outpouring of Johnny New-
Comes, as they were sometimes called in
the popular culture of the time, relieved
some of the destitution in England thatresulted from enclosure laws that barred
commoners from access to vast tracts of
land beginning in 1604. The West In-
dies (and the American mainland) thus
became a vital “escape valve” at a time
of tremendous social upheaval. “For
the enslaved, the British empire was a
prison,” Scanlan writes. “For many Brit-
ons, the slave empire opened a path to
‘British liberty.’” For those whites who
survived, one might add, passage to “the
islands,” and the slave regime being built
there, also constituted an enormous eco-
nomic opportunity and a historically
unique social upgrade, in which they be-
came part of a new racial master class.
No less important was the way that
this new emigration outlet became a
locus of self-reinvention and wealth
creation for the already well-off, thus
serving as a vital catalyst in the consol-
idation of a still-fragile union encom-
passing what are now the British Isles.
Scanlan writes that the West Indies
(as well as the then much less wealthy
American mainland) were open to the
migration of a managerial class of Scots
and Irish in a way that England in the
mid-eighteenth century was generally
not: “The Americas offered ambitious
Scots and Irish a new place to earn
their fortune and secure land for them-
selves far from an England where Celts
often got a chilly reception.” At an
elite social level, the demand for pro-
fessional services, especially from the
lawyers who ran plantations on behalf
of absentee owners, and the opportuni-
ties for striking it rich through enslave-ment, sugar, and other commodities
were especially important in forging
unity within Britain:The profits of trade and slave-
holding drew wealthy English,
Scots and Irish landowners and
merchants closer together, and
provided ambitious and edu-
cated young men, especially from
Scotland, with a steady source of
employment.The trade in enslaved Black bodies
from ports in Scotland and the constant
cycling through the Caribbean islands
of the Scottish professional class com-
bined to help make Glasgow the unoffi-
cial second capital of Britain’s lucrative
Atlantic empire, in Sanghera’s phrase.
Scots and Irish who made a fortune
in slavery could also acquire a proper
London address, which gave them so-
cial entrée to England’s elites, helping
to establish a single political class.A further way that the British Em-
pire was built can be explained by the
thesis of the late American sociologist
and political thinker Charles Tilly that
“war makes states.” Scanlan’s book
joins a growing body of historiography,
including my Born in Blackness (2021),
that argues that the English, and subse-
quently British, states grew in admin-
istrative capacity and robustness as a
direct consequence of prolonged mili-
tary contests with the Dutch, the Span-
ish, and especially the French over who
would dominate the slave trade and the
plantation economy centered in the
West Indies.
War with France, Scanlan notes,
whether alone or in coalition, lasted
for nearly the entire eighteenth cen-
tury, and much of it explicitly involved
slavery, although this is seldom em-
phasized in standard accounts of the
period. In British narratives, for ex-
ample, the Seven Years’ War largely
took place in Europe. In the United
States, in contrast, it is mostly remem-
bered as the French and Indian War,
a fight for control of the Ohio River
Valley, a story enlivened for Ameri-
can readers by the appearance of the
young and not-yet-surefooted George
Washington. For the French, however,
an important rationale behind the war
in continental America involved tying
down their British rivals there to pre-
vent them from taking over France’s
West Indian colonies.
As Scanlan points out, William Pitt
the Elder urged Parliament to borrow
as much money as the government’s
creditors would allow in order to mus-
ter and deploy huge numbers of troops
in a conflict that became truly global.
British victories were won from Nova
Scotia to the Philippines, but the rich-
est prizes were concentrated in the
Caribbean: Guadeloupe, Dominica,
Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Tobago,
as well as Spanish Havana, all of which
were vastly more lucrative for Euro-
peans than the American mainland.
After Pitt’s navy seized Guadeloupe
in 1759, Britain imported more slaves
there in two years than France had
since the beginning of the century.
As a result, by 1761, this small island
led all of London’s possessions in
the export of sugar, cotton, rum, and
coffee.
Despite all this, a diminishment and
trivialization of the place of slavery inHMS Tourmaline, a flagship of the West Africa Squadron; engraving by
Josiah Robert Wells after a sketch by H.P. Neville, 1876The Illustrated London NewsFrench 22 24 .indd 23 3 / 9 / 22 5 : 00 PM