Capital Gains Cost Basis


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Capital Gains Cost Basis

Capital Gains Cost Basis

In 1944, Caribbean historian Eric Williams wrote a book that appalled many British historians. His work, Capitalism and Slavery, charged that the praise given to British abolitionists had been misguided and overblown. Williams argues against historians such as Reginald Coupland, author of The British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933), who contended that the abolition movement in England in the late 18th and early 19th century was, first and foremost, a humanitarian crusade. Williams attempts to debunk this myth by showing that the rise of the British abolition movement coincided with the fall from preeminence of the slave trade and its importance to the British Empire.

The British West Indies, in the mid-18th century enjoyed a monopoly in the sugar trade. However, in the late18th century, as the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain, laissez faire began to gain more credence among British industrialists. Industries such as woollen, cotton, and metallurgy, which once supported the slave trade, denounced it and other restrictions such as tariffs. British capitalists no longer saw the importance of the slave trade and, in 1807, the British government abolished the slave trade. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.

Historians, Humanitarian Rhetoric and the Abolition of Slavery

Instead of focusing on the humanitarian rhetoric of abolitionists, Williams looks at the the contribution of the slave trade to the development of British capitalism. He suggests that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle-class to a decline of the West India interest on one hand, and a change in the needs of an increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other. He argues that the campaign for abolition was inextricably linked with the middle-class campaign for free trade. The work attempts to place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism as exemplified by Great Britain, and the black slave trade, black slavery, and the great colonial trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.