To what extent did African slaves contribute to the Industrial Revolution in Britain?

What could be more British than a sugary cup of tea? Has there ever been a more usual or ubiquitous occurrence in up to date communal life (until recently) than clouds of tobacco smoke? Wasn't the post-rationing hurry for sweets characteristically British? The utilisation of luxury staples, especially sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee and sweets - is part of the distort and weft of British life. Yet each and numerous more of these customs are British only by adoption. The peculiarly British culture affiliated with these staples evolved in a somewhat short time span of time and engaged products imported from the very for demonstration of colonial town and trade, at a time of expanding mass utilisation at home. All took origin approximately in the years 1600-1800; i.e. in the time span which glimpsed the development of a mighty British imperial and international swapping presence. They were in effect one outcome of Britain's emergence as an hard-hitting international power, but in the method they altered the environment of household British communal life forever. (Berg and Hudson 24-50)

Today Western societies take for allocated bargain and readily-available products plucked from the far perimeters of the world and air-freighted to our localized shopping centres for our nourishment and pleasure. Yet the annals of the utilisation of tropical exotica assists to interpret key components of British communal life that are of interest both for comsumers and manufacturers alike. Why, for demonstration, did the British become adhered to sugary tea (quite different tea-drinkers in tea's native Chinese habitat)? And why did the British arrive to like their sweets very powerfully enhanced (in consuming pattern primarily, subsequent as solid consuming chocolate), when the indigenous Central American buyers had blended it with flavours and chillies? Why too were those key arenas of eighteenth 100 years male sociability - the coffee dwelling and the tavern - shrouded in clouds of tobacco smoke?

The response of course lies in the eighteenth-century British pre-eminence as Atlantic slave traders, and the financial significance of British slave colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Armies of Africans and their local-born descendants toiled, out of view and usually out-of-mind, to convey forward sugar (and rum) from the luxuriant isles, and tobacco from the Chesapeake - all for the delight (and profit) of ?uropeans. (Coleman 15-19) Africa held the key. In the phrases of one mid-eighteenth-century commentator, Africa could yield slaves `by the thousands, nay millions, and proceed on doing the identical to the end of time'.

The Atlantic slave trade continues strangely unseen in the commentaries of historians who have focused in the causes and determinants of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiousness compares harshly with the viewpoint of eighteenthcentury strategists who, on the eve of the developed transformation, put large supply in both the trade and the colonial plantations as crucial devices for British financial progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, one time recounted by the imperial historian ...