Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Did overseas slave-holding by Britons accelerate the Industrial Revolution? We provide theory and evidence on the contribution of slave wealth to Britain's growth prior to 1835. We compare areas of Britain with high and low exposure to the colonial plantation economy, using granular data on wealth from compensation records. Before the major expansion of slave holding from the 1640s onwards, both types of area exhibited similar levels of economic activity. However, by the 1830s, slavery wealth is strongly correlated with economic development - slave-holding areas are less agricultural, closer to cotton mills, and have higher property wealth. We rationalize these findings using a dynamic spatial model, where slavery investment raises the return to capital accumulation, expanding production in capital-intensive sectors. To establish causality, we use arguably exogenous variation in slave mortality on the passage from Africa to the Indies, driven by weather shocks. We show that weather shocks influenced the continued involvement of ancestors in the slave trade; weather-induced slave mortality of slave-trading ancestors in each area is strongly predictive of slaveholding in 1833. Quantifying our model using the observed data, we find that Britain would have been substantially poorer and more agricultural in the absence of overseas slave wealth. Overall, our findings are consistent with the view that slavery wealth accelerated Britain's industrial revolution.

Keywords: industrial revolution; overseas slave-holding; slavery wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F00 J15 N63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2022-11-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/118034/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution (2023)
Working Paper: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution (2023)
Working Paper: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution (2022)
Working Paper: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution (2022)
Working Paper: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:118034

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