Through a stunning series of events in early nineteenth-century Britain — Parliament’s ban on the slave trade after 1807, its manumission of some 800,000 enslaved subjects in the West Indies in 1834, and its termination of the subsequent “apprenticeship” system in 1838 — the world’s preeminent slave-trading power transformed into one dedicated to industrial capitalism, wage labor, and abolition. Even more shockingly, the demise of slavery occurred without a democratic revolution or serious challenges to Britain’s aristocratic, imperial system.

Ever since, scholars have debated how exactly this happened — as well as the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Writing in the 1940s, Eric Williams, the Oxford University–trained historian and future president of Trinidad and Tobago, vigorously rejected both the prevailing lionization of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce and the efforts of free market liberals to separate the emergence of industrial capitalism from the slave system. British industrialists, Williams argued, had tolerated slavery when and where it was in their material interest to do so. The barbarous system had only declined when it became unprofitable. “British capitalism had destroyed West Indian slavery,” he concluded, “but it continued to thrive on Brazilian, Cuban and American Slavery” — and, he pointedly added, with little dissent from the humanitarian abolitionists.

Williams’s economic decline thesis has since lost favor among academics. But his early pronouncement that slavery funded the industrial revolution, and that antislavery promoters of free trade harbored distinctly unhumanitarian motivations, has inspired something of a renaissance among today’s scholars of slavery and capitalism.