Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy

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This article traces the long-run contribution of the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas to the rise of the capitalist global economy. It demonstrates the two-stage evolution of the global economy—the rise of the nineteenth-century capitalist Atlantic economic system (the nucleus of the global economy), the first stage, and the extension of that system to Asia and the rest of the world, the second stage. It shows that the establishment of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy was a function of the growth of multilateral trade in the Atlantic basin that resulted from the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, on which basis the major economies of the Americas, especially the US economy, and Western European economies, especially the British economy, achieved structural transformation, which included the British Industrial Revolution and its new technologies. Led by Great Britain, the advanced economies of the Atlantic world employed the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, economically and politically, to extend the Atlantic capitalist economic order to Asia and the rest of the world to constitute the hierarchically structured capitalist global economic order.