 This is a response to a recent video of Paul Cockshott's, in which he critiques an essay by a certain Nick Wright. Cockshott makes a strong argument that plantation slavery played at best a marginal role in the rise of capitalism. His video makes many excellent points and is a useful corrective to a currently prominent left liberal discourse. Nonetheless, I think he downplays the economic importance of slavery rather too much. Here, I attempt to outline a theory deriving it from Adam Smith of how slavery was indeed instrumental in the birth of capitalism, while incorporating as much as possible Cockshott's important observations. Most of Cockshott's critiques are incontrovertible. These include his treatment of J.S. Mill, his dating of the rise of liberalism to the 1820s, and his critique of the idealist tendencies in Domenico Lusardo's book on liberalism. Cockshott is certainly right that improvements in agriculture were a prerequisite to industrialization. He is also right to emphasize the importance of enclosures in England and the Highland clearances in Scotland in divorcing the primary producers from the means of production and thereby making a waged labor force. Cockshott's most important contribution in his video, to my mind, is to point out that most critiques of capitalism in our day do not surpass liberal ideology and that they fall far short of Marx. In order to argue against liberalism, Nick is accusing it of supporting or economically relying on slavery. It accepts the actual moral foundations of liberalism and he then criticizes liberal capitalism for allegedly resting on a hypocritical violation of these moral principles. Now, this is very different from the Marxian position, which is that capitalist exploitation arises from the very enforcement of liberal principles of freedom equal right rather than their violation. Let us hear from Cockshott directly about the role or lack thereof which slavery played in the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Did slaves build any of these things? Canals, railways, mills? You only have to ask the question to see how ridiculous it is. No, all of the fixed capital, all the plant and machinery on which the English and Scottish industrial revolutions was based was built by local waged workers. None of it was built by slaves. The slaves that were owned by the British slave-earning class were in the West Indies and they were forced to grow sugar. Sugar was a luxury product that was sold to the upper classes, to the gentry, and it is very hard to construct a theory by which upper class sugar consumption causes industrialization. I proposed exactly to construct a theory whereby upper class sugar consumption causes industrialization and for this theory I turn to Adam Smith. Smith paints the following portrait of a pre-capitalist class society. A tartar chief, the increase of whose herds in stocks is sufficient to maintain a thousand men, cannot well employ that increase in any other way and in maintaining a thousand men. The rude state of his society does not afford him any manufactured produce, any trinkets or baubles of any kind for which he can exchange that part of his rude produce which is over and above his own consumption. The thousand men whom he thus maintains, depending entirely upon him for their subsistence, must both obey his orders in war and submit to his jurisdiction in peace. He is necessarily both their general and their judge and his chieftainship is the necessary effect of the superiority of his fortune. On the other hand, in an opulent and civilized society a man may possess a much greater fortune and yet not be able to command a dozen people, though the produce of his estate may be sufficient to maintain and may perhaps actually maintain more than a thousand people, yet as those people pay for everything which they get from him as he gives scarce anything to anybody but in exchange for an equivalent. There is scarce anybody who considers himself as entirely dependent upon him and his authority extends only over a few menial servants. But how is this transition between the two societies affected? What all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have affected the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufacturers gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus of their lands and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. For the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority. So, foreign trade makes available luxuries and the temptation of these luxuries lures the aristocracy of a feudal society to dismiss the retainers. Luxuries thus weaken the political position of landowners and make available a certain amount of erstwhile flunkies to now seek their fortune as wage laborers in town. Foreign produced commodities do not, however, fall like manna from heaven, but instead were, to a large extent, produced by slaves in Caribbean plantations, by loosening feudal social relations, by turning retainers into wage workers, and, yes, by providing slave owners with purchasing power with which some of them employed wage workers, slavery played a key role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In an indicative thought experiment, Cogshot one-sidedly stresses the use value of sugar as against its exchange value. By apparently denying that increased purchasing power can induce increased production, he even comes close here to endorsing Sey's law, which Marx certainly rejected. Now, as a thought experiment, suppose the EU gave Niger free for 40 years or 50 years two sugar lumps per head of population. Would that cause Niger to become industrialized? Obviously not. Certainly Cogshot is right that a mere donation of sugar to Niger would not lead to industrialization, but the comparison is far-fetched. The production of sugar by slaves in Caribbean colonies, of course, worked much differently. The surplus product in the form of sugar would, of course, have been consumed by... The surplus product in the form of sugar would have been consumed by aristocrats with the sweet tooth, but the slave colonies were not producing much of the subsistence and means of production necessary in the sugar colonies. So the production of sugar would have been a stimulus to these industries back home in England. And as Smith emphasized, the availability of luxuries as an outlet for the purchasing power of the rich allowed them to dissolve the feudal social relations by releasing their retainers. Thus, someone building ships or producing grain for that matter would have found that he had cheap wage labor available in the UK and demand for his products augmented by the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. I admit that my argument is entirely schematic and I would invite you in the comment section below to say whether you think it's plausible.