| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002)

AS THE TITLE of this major study suggests, Professor Inikori has a two-fold argument. He is interested in why there was an Industrial Revolution and why it still matters. He argues the historical contribution of Africans and their descendents in the Americas was essential to the success of the world's first industrialization. African labour powered the plantation economies. Africa and the slave economies of the Americas constituted the primary markets for English industrial production. The trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities called into being vital shipping and financial services. Without this multi-faceted African contribution, Inikori argues England would not have industrialized. The lesson he draws for the present is that industrialization through import substitution requires international trade. He contrasts successful economic development strategies of select Asian economies in the late 20th century with failed strategies in Africa and Latin America to conclude that the English model is still relevant.

After a brief introduction, which stresses the centrality of international trade, Inikori provides a staple-based overview of English economic development since 1066. What interests him most is the regional nature of economic growth and the remarkable disjuncture between differing areas over the longue durée. So, medieval and early modern growth were both dependent on foreign trade, but they did not provide the basis for the Industrial Revolution. What that basis was is the subject of a long review that divides the historiography into three temporally distinct schools. Up to the 1940s he describes a Commercial Revolution model as dominant. It considered trade as the central factor. The second school, presented as an almost monolithic approach within economic history until the 1980s, focused on internal, largely technological, factors. By contrast, the recent scholarship of importance, consisting of Professors Inikori, Solow, Engerman, and O'Brien and colleagues, has, we are told, demonstrated the primacy of external trade in what were highly regionalized areas of growth. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the external trade of England, 1700–1850, with those of South Korea and Brazil, 1960–1990.

Inikori then explores four related themes: slave-based commodity production, the English slave trade, the relative importance of shipping, and finally financial services. He deals with slave-based production first, through a survey of the secondary literature, because he has to establish that this wealth creation by Africans preceded English expansion. Mercantilism did not prevent international trade; rather, it rewarded those who best combined commercial and military force. Inikori has long been engaged in a debate over quantification of the slave trade. Despite some rather specious extrapolations, I found his survey of sources and their many problems sound. Certainly his revised estimate, that the English traded 4,215,250 people, merits careful consideration. Many did not survive the Middle Passage and Inikori's discussion of the number of vessels lost at sea highlights an aspect of the trade significant for his discussion of both shipping and financial services.

Inikori makes extensive use of shipping registry data to show the linkage between English shipping and the trades in slaves and slave-produced commodities. These figures are, however, only available for the last nineteen years of the English slave trade. For the first 235 years he relies far too heavily on the anecdotal evidence of an occasional statistical estimate. His discussion of financial intermediaries suffers from a similar imbalance, compounded by serious misunderstandings of how credit functioned. He fails, for example, to take into account differences in the turnover time between inland and foreign bills and therefore seriously over-estimates the relative importance of external trade in the development of English banking.

Inikori establishes that by the end of the 18th century England dominated the slave-based economies of the Atlantic world. Unquestionably this relationship affected all aspects of English economic life, but this does not mean that either English shipping or financial intermediaries were simply by-products of this relationship. Temporal coincidence is not cause and effect.

Inikori concludes his study with a survey of African-produced raw materials imports and industrially manufactured exports. Here, Inikori seems not to be aware of the problems with available quantitative estimates. He uses, for example, Nick Crafts' figures on output, value added, and raw materials from 1770 to 1830, to show the latter's continued importance, but Crafts' estimates assumed a constant ratio for these variables over this entire period. Although he does recognize the problem of Ralph Davis with treating food imports as distinct from raw materials, as if sugar need not be refined; he did not use available data to correct the problem. As a result, the scale and change over time of African-produced inputs to industrializing England are never properly assessed. The analysis by major product group of exports to Atlantic markets, which he defined as Africa, the Americas, and the Iberian peninsula, shows these regions' importance, With the exception of the metal trades, however, he does not establish the relative importance as consumers of Africans and their descendents, presumably because it is not necessary for his larger argument that industrialization by import substitution requires trade.

Inikori reduces the Industrial Revolution to a question of technological breakthroughs dependent on foreign markets. Since change is a response to external stimuli, there is no need to examine internal factors. This greatly facilitates both levels of his argument. English industrialization is explained by expanding foreign trade, without ever having to explore the nature of local, regional, or national markets. Any changes in social and gender relations of production and reproduction within England are simply ignored. So too is any research informed by Raphaël Samuel's idea that English industrialization combined hand and machine tools within an uneven development that created far more workshops and manufactories than factories. Now it is easier to write history if you simply ignore all the innovative work for the past 25 years that disagrees with you, but this was not the reason for Inikori's extraordinarily selective reading. If he had allowed internal factors to be considered in the English case, then he would not have been able to make the leaps to present-day South Korea and Brazil, for their historical specificity would have needed to be considered as well. In short, his reductionist definition was necessary in order to make possible, if not plausible, his timeless model.

A sad and profoundly disturbing contradiction lies at the heart of this work. Professor Inikori consciously opens the book with a tribute to an earlier generation of progressive Afro-American scholarship: C.L.R. James, Abram Harris, and Eric Williams. The sub-text running throughout the work is a laudable attack on Anglo-centric racism. The care Inikori takes in counting slaves strongly suggests he thinks slaves count. They do; unfortunately, no African makes history here. Instead, agency is accorded to ahistorical economic forces. Towards the end of the work, Inikori asks why plantations developed in the Americas rather than in Africa. After a descriptive sketch of failed Dutch and English attempts in Africa, he concludes they had simply not proved feasible. It never occurs to him that this would have meant no slave trade and therefore no slave-trade profits. C.L.R. James would never have committed such an oversight, but historians are in history and Professor Inikori's capitalist faith is at one with the New African Partnership for Economic Development proposed by the G8.


Robert C.H. Sweeny Memorial University of Newfoundland

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