The Lancashire cotton industry was rapidly converting from water power to coal. The world would follow suit and by the late twentieth century, 85 per cent of all the energy used by humankind would come from fossil fuels. It was fossil fuels that eventually made slavery – along with animal power, and wood, wind and water – uneconomic. Wilberforce’s ambition would have been harder to obtain without fossil fuels. ‘History supports this truth,’ writes the economist Don Boudreaux: ‘Capitalism exterminated slavery.’
