Adam Smith on Colonial Slavery: The “Love of Domination” in a Mercantile System

Ana Paula Londe Silva

A chapter in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including a Symposium on David Gordon: American Radical Economist, 2022, vol. 40A, pp 141-155 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: Adam Smith recognized that slavery, despite its economic disadvantages, was the rule rather than the exception in the eighteenth-century commercial society. How did he explain the massive employment of enslaved Africans in the American and Caribbean colonies? Several scholars have been highlighting that Smith attributed the persistence of slavery to an almost natural inclination of humanity toward tyranny and dominion. However, the mere reference to the love of domination is not enough to fully answer the question above. This paper addresses another feature of Adam Smith’s account of Atlantic slavery: the relation between the love of domination and the mercantile policies regulating colonial trade. We conclude that Smith saw the extraordinary profitability arising from such policies as an enabling condition to the massive employment of slave labor in the sugar and tobacco colonies.

Keywords: Adam Smith; slavery; colonies; colonial trade; domination; mercantile system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rhetzz:s0743-41542022000040a010

DOI: 10.1108/S0743-41542022000040A010

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