Capitalism & Slavery Quotes

“slavery was an economic institution of the first importance. It had been the basis of Greek economy and had built up the Roman Empire. In modern times it provided the sugar for the tea and the coffee cups of the Western world. It produced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism. It made the American South and the Caribbean islands.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Slavery was not born of racism; racism was the consequence of slavery”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery

“the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympa- thetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was "beginning to reckon prosperity in terms of pounds sterling, and . . . becoming used to the idea of sacrificing human life to the deity of increased production.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior. “In each case,” writes Bassett, discussing North Carolina, “it was a survival of the fittest.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed!”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery

“The Negroes had been stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labor had created.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery

“Negro slavery, thus, had nothing to do with climate. Its origin can be expressed in three words: in the Caribbean, Sugar; on the mainland, Tobacco and Cotton. A change in the economic structure produced a corresponding change in the labor supply. The fundamental fact was “the creation of an inferior social and economic organization of exploiters and exploited.”98 Sugar, tobacco, and cotton required the large plantation and hordes of cheap labor,”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“The reasons for slavery, wrote Gibbon Wakefield, “are not moral, but economical circumstances; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production.”13 With”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Negro slaves, one-twentieth of the population in 1670, were one-fourth in 1730. “Slavery, from being an insignificant factor in the economic life of the colony, had become the very foundation upon which it was established.” There was still room in Virginia, as there was not in Barbados, for the small farmer, but land was useless to him if he could not compete with slave labor. So”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“The plantation economy had no room for poor whites; the proprietor or over-seer, a physician on the more prosperous plantations, possibly their families, these were sufficient. “If a state,” wrote Weston, “could be supposed to be made up of continuous plantations, the white race would be not merely starved out, but literally squeezed out.”105 The”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“the Indian slave was inefficient. The Spaniards discovered that one Negro was worth four Indians.22 A prominent official in Hispaniola insisted in 1518 that “permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for labor, instead of natives, so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms.”23 The future staples of the New World, sugar and cotton, required strength which the Indian lacked, and demanded the robust “cotton nigger” as sugar’s need of strong mules produced”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“The first instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World involved, racially, not the Negro but the Indian. The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man’s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life. Accustomed to a life of liberty, their”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Expansion is a necessity of slave societies; the slave power requires ever fresh conquests.17 “It is more profitable,” wrote Merivale, “to cultivate a fresh soil by the dear labour of slaves, than an exhausted one by the cheap labour of free-men.”18 From Virginia and Maryland to Carolina, Georgia, Texas and the Middle West; from Barbados to Jamaica to Saint Domingue and then to Cuba; the logic was inexorable and the same.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

“Under certain circumstances slavery has some obvious advantages. In the cultivation of crops like sugar, cotton and tobacco, where the cost of production is appreciably reduced on larger units, the slaveowner, with his large-scale production and his organized slave gang, can make more profitable use of the land than the small farmer or peasant proprietor.”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery