On the economic importance of the slave plantation complex to the British economy during the eighteenth century: a value-added approach

Abstract

There has been a long-standing debate on the global importance of the African external slave trades. While many scholars believe these to have been detrimental to African development, they were clearly a determining factor in the development of the Americas. What role they played for the European colonial powers is, however, hotly debated. This article contributes to the debate by estimating value added in the Triangular Trade and the American plantation complex. The article empirically studies the case of British connections to the African slave trade and the American plantation complex during the eighteenth century, since these have been the focus of much previous scholarly debate. The estimates suggest that these trades grew substantially over the period, reaching a magnitude equivalent to about 11% of the British economy by the early nineteenth century.

Slavery and the Dutch economy, 1750–1800

“…31 Others, such as Klas Rönnbäck, have reopened the debate on the contribution of slavery to British GDP in ways that are quite similar to the one explored in this article, examining the different links in the commodity chain. 32 One positive side effect of their approach is that it turns the debate outward from myopic discussions on the relationship between Britain and its Atlantic complex towards other European countries that profited from Atlantic slave-based activities. A narrowing of the debate on slavery's relationship to capitalism to the question of its relationship to the Industrial Revolution in Britain easily obscures the many other forms in which European nations, and in a wider sense the development of capitalism as not only a system of production but also of trade, finance and societal organisation, potentially benefited from Atlantic slavery.…”

Swedish East India trade in a value-added analysis, c. 1730–1800

“…In recent years, there have been various attempts at studying the creation of value-added in historical transnational value-chains, for example in the transatlantic slave-and colonial goods trades (Combrink, 2017; Eltis & Engerman, 2000;Fatah-Black & Van Rossum, 2015;Rönnbäck 2014Rönnbäck , 2018. A value chain, according to the leading theorists Raphael Kaplinsky and Mike Morris 'describes the full range of activities which are required to bring a product or service from conception, through the different phases of production […] to final consumers' (Kaplinsky & Morris, 2001, p. 4).…”