Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

New commercial outfits like the Company also became critical innovators in the sense that they were formed on the basis of association of capital by disparate investors, not unlike a modern corporation. This is just one of many ways that the slave trade of this era, as it ramped up quickly, would drive the modernization of business, politics, and society in Mother England, while steadily touching a wide variety of associated industries, including banking, shipping, and insurance. More than has been recognized, slavery even contributed to the emergence of a system of rival political parties, Whigs and Tories; to the growth of the City of London as a financial center; and to the blossoming of British power and prosperity more generally. In the words of the late historian of Atlantic slavery Joseph C. Miller, plantations, monopoly companies, and new sugar colonies like Barbados constituted “controlled laboratories for early investment and management,” that were responsible for “creating golden modernity from monarchical lead.”