Reexamining a seminal work on British capitalism and Caribbean slavery and its continuing reverberations in the twenty-first century

Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), with its insightful and provocative theses about the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the growth of the British economy and the Industrial Revolution, has proved an enduring and controversial book. Never out of print since its publication, it is constantly being reevaluated and reassessed in the light of changing scholarship and new understandings of race, slavery, and capitalism. Recent years have seen considerable interest in the topics that first motivated Williams’s lively and polemical work. The essays in this collection dissect the links between the existence of racial slavery in the Americas, the concomitant rise of capitalism, and the vital role of both slavery and capitalism in the making of the modern world—essential topics not just in the reevaluation of Williams’s ideas for the twenty-first century but as areas of fierce interest and even fiercer debate in contemporary intellectual life.