A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 19). This blog is a continuation of review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Chapter 8: Profits
These various forms of activity, loosely defined as trade, were highly profitable. The British started off their accumulation with piracy but the biggest profits were to be made in the slave trade. As Professor H. Merivale put it in a lecture at Oxford University in 1840: “What raised Liverpool and Manchester from provincial towns to gigantic cities? Their present opulence is as really owing to the toil and suffering of the Negro as if his hands had excavated their docks and fabricated their steam engines.” And Walter Rodney says: “The actual dimensions are not easy to fix, but the profits were fabulous. John Hawkins made three trips to West Africa in the 1560s, and stole Africans whom he sold to the Spanish in America. On returning to England after the first trip, his profit was so handsome that Queen Elizabeth I became interested in directly participating in his next venture; and she provided for that purpose a ship named the Jesus. Hawkins left with the Jesus to steal some more Africans, and he returned to England with such dividends that Queen Elizabeth made him a knight. Hawkins chose as his coat of arms the representation of an African in chains.”
The famous Bengal Plunder
After the British won the Battle of Plassey in India in 1757, their attention shifted to a great extent from the West Indies to India. The famous Bengal Plunder began to arrive in London soon after, and its arrival coincided with what is generally considered to be the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain. It has been estimated that the total British plunder of India between 1757 and 1815 amounted to £1,000 million; the national income of Britain in 1770 was about £125 million. Direct tribute payments alone through the East India Company approximated £1 million in some years.
The value of the gold and silver taken from Latin America
Ernest Mandel, in his book Marxist Economic Theory, adds up the value of the gold and silver taken from Latin America up to 1660, the booty extracted from Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company from 1650 to 1780, the harvest reaped by French capital in the 18th century slave trade; and the profits from slave labor in the British Antilles and from a half-century of British looting in India. These, Mandel says, are only the most substantial amounts for which figures, of a sort, are available. But they add up to over a billion pounds sterling, or ‘more than the capital of all the industrial enterprises operating by steam which existed in Europe around 1880’. For Britain alone, the profits from operations in the West Indies and India between 1760 and 1780 was probably more than double the amount of money available to invest in the new industries of the industrial revolution.