Slavery was downright essential to mercantilism in eighteenth-century Great Britain. This was because mercantilism depended on the use of colonies to produce raw materials, particularly cash crops, for the mother country. These cash crops, with sugar being by far the most important, represented a major source of revenue for Great Britain. Other important cash crops included tobacco, rice, and indigo. These crops were imported by British merchants, and, theoretically at least, had to be carried...
Slavery was downright essential to mercantilism in eighteenth-century Great Britain. This was because mercantilism depended on the use of colonies to produce raw materials, particularly cash crops, for the mother country. These cash crops, with sugar being by far the most important, represented a major source of revenue for Great Britain. Other important cash crops included tobacco, rice, and indigo. These crops were imported by British merchants, and, theoretically at least, had to be carried on British ships. Slaves were absolutely essential to the production of these crops, which formed the foundation of the colonial British economy. Enslaved people labored on the sugar plantations of Barbados, the rice fields of Carolina, and the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake producing the goods upon which the colonial economy depended. Even the slave trade itself was crucial to mercantilism, as the state, through the granting of monopolies, became not only the biggest consumer of cash crops and seller of manufactured goods, but the biggest supplier of labor as well.
Without the support of African slave trade, how well would Great Britain's economic policy have worked?
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