June 22, 2012Dear Sir,Re: Capitalism and Slavery. The article in the Bermuda Sun dated June 15, 2012 by Bob Stewart refers. That article was entitled “It’s wrong to suggest capitalism was built on slavery”. I do not question the veracity of the facts that he includes in his article but I do question his interpretation of those facts. My first concern is the general use of wealth and money as interchangeable measures of a country. It is clear to anyone who is following the healthcare debate in the United States that many persons consider the overall well-being of the citizenry as a better measure of the wealth of a country than its GDP per capita. On the first measure, all of Western Europe along with Canada surpass the United States. The United States beats them only on the second measure of GDP per capita; but it is also the country that has a greater difference in income between the rich and the poor, a lower life expectancy for its citizens and a higher infant death rate than any of these other countries. Which countries are truly wealthy then?Getting back to the relationship between capitalism and slavery, there is no question in my mind that the money generated by the sugar plantations in the Caribbean enabled England to accumulate capital. This capital was used in turn to provide funds to build the machinery which was invented by Watt, Arkwright and others at the beginning of the industrial revolution. This machinery was used to weave cotton and provide cheap mass-produced clothing to Englishmen. The cotton they used was produced in large quantities by the slaves in the southern United States, so that England was able to undercut the import of cotton cloth from India. The wealth produced by these cotton manufacturers encouraged other industrial development. It would appear then that the industrial revolution and capitalism were supported by slavery at several points in the process. Wilberforce was only able to convince England to stop slavery when the industrial revolution had developed far enough to produce sufficient wealth for England that it overtook slavery and sugar in importance. The 19th Century philosophical arguments to which he refers left out the bigger picture of political influence based on the source of wealth in the country.With respect to his comments about why certain countries stopped slavery later than others, but are still poorer than those others today, I would suggest that he reads ‘Why Nations Fail; The Origins Of Power, Prosperity And Poverty’ by Daron Acemoglu, published 2012 Crown Publishing Group. This book hypothesises that lack of prosperity is affected mainly by the existence of a small wealthy elite who have sufficient political power to inhibit the development of new technologies that increase the prosperity of the general population while cutting into their own wealth. I think the relatively poor countries to which he refers exhibit that characteristic of a small politically powerful wealthy elite. He is reminded as well of the 17th and 18th century enclosure arguments in England that pitted a small elite against the rest. It was these enclosure processes that forced the common man into destitution thus providing the manpower for the start of the industrial revolution and the relative decline in the influence of this elite; an unintended consequence.JT CHRISTOPHERWarwick