It also makes criticisms of the historiography of the British Empire of the period: in particular on the use of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 as a sort of moral pivot; but also directed against a historical school that saw the imperial constitutional history as a constant advance through legislation.
"[1] The applicability of the economic arguments, and specially in the form of so-called Ragatz–Williams decline theory, is a contentious matter to this day for historians, when it is used for the period around the American Revolutionary War.
On the other hand detailed economic investigations of the effects of slavery on the British economy, in particular, the aftermath of abolition, and the commercial hinterland of the Atlantic trade, are a thriving research area.
[10][11] An emphasis on constitutional history led at Oxford, as Behm puts it, to "enthusiasm for social and moral reform [...] in an atmosphere already permeated by 'constitutional progress' as shorthand for centuries of world-historical advance".
[14] Williams had been made aware of the potential importance of Coupland to his academic career by Joseph Oliver Cutteridge, the ex-British Army officer who was director of education in Trinidad and Tobago.
After a period of unsuccessful job applications, he had been appointed assistant professor at Howard University, an historically black college, in Washington D.C.[2] A close colleague there, who wrote a foreword to Williams's The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), was Alain LeRoy Locke.
[20] An attempt by Williams to have his dissertation published in the United Kingdom through Fredric Warburg failed: the undermining of the humanitarian motivation for the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was found unacceptable, culturally speaking.
[24][25][26] The secondary sources bibliography, after commending works by Ragatz, mentioned The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763 (1917) by the American historian Frank Wesley Pitman.
[30] The bibliography also cites The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James for its priority in giving in 1938 a statement (in English) of the major thesis of Capitalism and Slavery; and a master's dissertation from that year by Wilson Williams at Howard University.
[31] The book, besides dealing with a passage of economic history, was furthermore a frontal attack on the idea that moral and humanitarian motives were key in the victory of British abolitionism.
The centenary celebration of the 1833 Act that took place in the United Kingdom in 1933, in Kingston upon Hull, where William Wilberforce was born, was a public event in which Coupland made these ideas explicit, supported in The Times by G. M.
These interacted with the rise of evangelical antislavery and with the self-emancipation of slave rebels, from the Haitian Revolution of 1792–1804 to the Jamaica Christmas Rebellion of 1831, to bring the end of slavery in the 1830s.
[30] Dividing up the period c.1780 to 1832, by the end of the triangular trade in 1807, Williams wrote that "The abolitionists for a long time eschewed and repeatedly disowned any idea of emancipation.
Early American reviews by historians ranged from enthusiasm, with Henry Steele Commager, to expressed reservations from Elizabeth Donnan and Frank Tannenbaum.
[22] Ryden, writing in 2012 and relying on some citation analysis, spoke of three waves of interest in Capitalism and Slavery over the previous four decades and more, the first being associated with a largely critical review article of 1968 by Roger Anstey.
[39] Writing in 1994 in A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century World History, Tadman stated that: "A revised version of the Williams thesis (of economic and class self-interest leading to abolition) seems to have much explanatory power.
"[42] Billy Strachan, a leading Black civil rights activist and communist in Britain, credited the book with heavily influencing his world outlook.
[49] David Richardson (1998) finds Williams's claims regarding the Industrial Revolution are exaggerated, for profits from the slave trade amounted to less than 1% of domestic investment in Britain.
[51] In a major attack on the propositions brought forward by Williams, Seymour Drescher in Econocide (1977) argued that the United Kingdom's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for the nation, but instead from the moral outrage of the British public which could vote.
Noting that Williams provided both argument and illustration, while ignoring slavery in the United States, he considers the schematic ultimately "mechanical and unsatisfactory".