Plantation slavery and the slave trade are often invoked as damning indictments of classical liberalism – proof that the liberal conception of individual liberty and the free market co-existed with and were perfectly compatible with African slavery.
This view can be traced to centuries of Marxist historiography, to mainstream economic history responding to an agenda shaped by Marxist ideas, and is now found in the works of the New Historians of Capitalism who contend that slavery shaped liberal capitalism and provided the institutional DNA of modern market-based societies – determining their organisations, practices, and values.
This view has had enormous influence, permeating academic scholarship, university curricula, popular histories, television documentaries, and podcasts.
This analysis has been challenged, but the critiques have operated like a ratchet, slowing the narrative’s momentum but not changing its overall direction. Hence, the dominant view that liberal capitalism and slavery are intertwined remains in place.
To reframe the debate a systematic and comprehensive alternative explanation of the origins and operation of slavery is needed. This project will provide that alternative.
It will use public choice theory and entangled political economy to present a new explanation of British slavery – reflecting the fact that American slavery was, in origin, British slavery.
It will show that British slavery emerged from a political economy in which the state socialised the costs and concentrated the benefits on planters and traders able to win political favour – the antithesis of a free market system.
The project will advance scholarship and reshape public understanding through a landmark book, a podcast series, an online learning course, and a programme of civic outreach events. These outputs will promote a narrative that shows slavery was a creation of state power, rent seeking, and political privilege, not free markets and liberal individualism.
