PODCAST: TRADE TALKS, "Did Britain’s slave trade help drive its industrial revolution?"

Image source: Trade Talks website

Description:

Economic historians have had a long-running debate as to whether Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and its holding of the enslaved on colonial plantations contributed to its industrial revolution.

Discussions over reparations also benefit from improved understanding of the extent to which some countries, especially enslaving countries like Britain, benefited from this horrendous practice.

Stephen Redding joins this week to explain some new research that quantifies just how big those benefits were, both for local industrial development in Britain and for the British economy as a whole.

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Host: Chad Bown (Peterson Institute)

Guest: Stephen Redding (Princeton University) explains new research that reveals how Britain’s historical economic development benefited tremendously from the country’s involvement in the brutal transatlantic slave trade and its slave holdings (26:53).

References

Heblich, Stephan, Stephen J. Redding, and Hans-Joachim Voth. 2022. Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution. NBER Working Paper No. 30,451, September.

Nunn, Nathan and Leonard Wantchekon. 2011. The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa. American Economic Review 101(7): 3221-3252.

Solow, Barbara L. 1985. Caribbean slavery and British growth: The Eric Williams hypothesis. Journal of Development Economics 17 (1–2): 99-115.

Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. UNC Press Books.

   More information and a transcript are available on the podcast website of Trade Talks.