Capitalism and Slavery

Oct 6, 2024 9:23 AM

Author:Eric Williams,Bill Andrew Quinn

Brought to you by Penguin.

Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since.

Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.

'It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it' Sathnam Sanghera

'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker

Reviews

A classic critique

—— Guardian

Groundbreaking

—— New York Review of Books

A landmark study

—— Wall Street Journal

It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it.

—— Sathnam Sanghera , author of Empireland

This book, recommended to me by a Jamaican fellow-student in 1968, changed my view of the world. It was the first time I was brought up hard and fast, face to face, with how modern Britain developed off the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the wealth created from the labour of slavery

—— Michel Rosen

The slave trade built capital for the slave-owning Empire, on which the Industrial Revolution was formed. The slave trade was abolished not because of moral outrage but because of a decline in returns. Slavery and capitalism are linked, and Williams launches a full frontal attack on it in this classic, which first appeared almost a century ago. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to know more about the Caribbean.

—— Monique Roffey , author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

Wherever you stand on the legacies of slavery and colonialism, Williams' elegant, passionate analysis is simply inescapable. Essential reading for anyone who really cares about history.

—— Trevor Phillips

A vital, urgent read. A forensic examination of the system behind systemic racism. Eric Williams succinctly sets out how racism, and all its implications, injustices and inhumanities, was a harrowing repercussion of slavery, invented as a justification for lining a few dead men's pockets

—— Nick Hayes , author of Trespass

There can be no effective understanding of modernity and the post-colonial world without an engagement with Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery. This is where the rubber hits the road.

—— Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies

No historian of colonialism or slavery can ignore Eric Williams. This book endures as a seminal moment in the historiography of the British Empire

—— Michael Taylor , author of The Interest

Groundbreaking and inspiring - a gripping, brilliantly original analysis of British slavery, racism, and the enduring legacies of imperialism

—— Fara Dabhoiwala, Princeton University

Since Capitalism and Slavery was first published some eighty years ago, no writer on the subject has been able to ignore it. It is a true classic

—— Hakim Adi, University of Chichester , author of Pan-Africanism: A History

A superb book about the history of the transatlantic slave trade that basically became a manifesto for the independence of Williams's own country ... Williams is an extraordinary figure, particularly if you're interested in the way certain kinds of observations of injustice can motivate research by historians that, ultimately, lead to massive political change.

—— William A. Pettigrew, Professor of History, Lancaster University

Few books stand the test of time and remain a catalyst for continuing historiographical debate. Capitalism and Slavery on all accounts is one of these rare books.

—— Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities & Critical Theory and Inaugural Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, Brown University

Capitalism and Slavery sparked a scholarly conversation that has yet to die down. In many ways, the debates it generated are more vibrant now than ever and promise to be a lasting touchstone for historians well into the future.

—— Guy Emerson Mount, assistant professor of African American history, Auburn University , Black Perspectives

Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as Capitalism and Slavery.

—— Steven Mintz, Professor of History & member of the Society of American Historians, the University of Texas at Austin

Williams's masterwork is so rich with ideas and historical insights that it still speaks to today's historiography.

—— Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Houston

It is a work of conceptual brilliance, intellectually mature, bold, incisive, and immensely provocative... Capitalism and Slavery will remain a historical treasure.

—— Colin A. Palmer, Dodge Professor of History and African American studies at Princeton University

One of the most learned, most penetrating and most significant [pieces of work] that has appeared in this field of history.

—— Henry Steele Commager, Professor of History, New York University

Eric Williams's study identifies many of the sinners and the sins committed in the building of British and global capitalism ... Capitalism and Slavery makes us stare down that history and compels us to seek redress from the relevant culpable parties

—— Professor William A. Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics, Duke University

Ypi excels at describing the fall and aftermath of Albanian communism from the perspective of her childhood . . . rich and remarkable

—— Literary Review

Essential reading. Lea Ypi's gorgeously written text - part memoir, part bildungsroman - tells a very personal story of socialism and postsocialism. Poignant and timely

—— Kristen Ghodsee , Jacobin

Vital . . . an extraordinary memoir of social upheaval and historical change in 1990s Albania

—— Huck

A powerful and thought provoking memoir . . . wonderfully human, it is a story of missed opportunities, disillusionment and hope that ultimately invites readers to ask themselves what it means to be free

—— Katja Hoyer , History Today

This vivid rendering of life amid cultural collapse is nothing short of a masterpiece

—— Publishers Weekly

Remarkable and highly original . . . Both an affecting coming-of-age story and a first-hand meditation on the politics of freedom

—— Caroline Sanderson , Editor’s Choice, Bookseller

A probing personal history, poignant and moving. A young life unfolding amidst great historical change - ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life

—— Tara Westover, author of Educated

Unique, insightful, and often hilarious. . . Albania on the cusp of change, chaos and civil war is the setting for the best memoir to emerge from the Balkans in decades

—— Craig Turp-Balazs , Emerging Europe

A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope

—— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece and the best book I've read so far this year

—— Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance

—— Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

—— David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

—— Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

—— Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

—— Noel Malcolm, author of Agents of Empire

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

—— Ivan Krastev, author of The Light that Failed

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

—— Martin Hägglund, author of This Life

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

—— Vivian Gornick, author of Unfinished Business

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

—— Shami Chakrabarti, author of On Liberty

A funny and fascinating memoir

—— White Review, Books of the Year

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

—— The Irish Times

A remarkable story, stunningly told

—— Emma Duncan , The Times

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

—— Hannah Proctor , Red Pepper

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

—— New York Times

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future

—— Charles King , Washington Post

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