Slavery in the British Empire and its Legacy in the Modern World

Adopting a much-needed class analysis, Cushion lays bare the human costs of ‘the business of slavery’. The book skilfully links the histories of capitalists and workers in Britain and the Caribbean, tracing the dynamics of profit-seeking and exploitation, resistance and solidarity, on both sides of the Atlantic. A lively and well-researched confrontation with Britain’s colonial past and its ongoing legacies.

–Kate Quinn, Associate Professor in Caribbean History, Institute of the Americas, University College London and Editor, Black Power in the Caribbean

A must-read for anyone wishing not only to understand empire but to change it! This fresh new look at slavery in the British Empire is coming at a very relevant and necessary time as it clearly showed how the business of slavery is deeply connected to the business of capital, providing an important contribution to the current debate on reparations for slavery and even the issue of climate change. Cushion has courageously placed a Marxist analysis as central to understanding the construction of the British Empire by particularly looking at the political economy of slavery. He takes the reader on a systematic historical journey through the form and content of the dialectic relationship between the systems of empire and slavery which gave rise to the emergence of industrial capitalism.

–Ozzi Warwick, Chief Education and Research Officer of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union, Trinidad and Tobago

Highly topical and an important contribution to the study of slavery in the British Empire as well as addressing its long-term effects.

–Gad Heuman, Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick, author of The Killing Time, and editor of ‘Slavery & Abolition Journal’

Possibly the closest we have to Eric Williams’s classic work Capitalism and Slavery, re-loaded for anti-racists and anti-imperialists in the twenty-first century…it deserves the widest possible readership.

-Christian Høgsbjerg, Senior Lecturer in Critical History and Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton, and author, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain

Steve Cushion does not mince his words in this short, selective, and highly readable Marxist account. Documenting the history of some of slavery’s promoters, defenders, benefactors, and critics, he leaves little room for doubt as to the centrality of slavery in forging and financing British capitalism and empire.

-Jean Stubbs, Professor Emerita, London Metropolitan University, Co-Director of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project

Slavery in the British Empire will help to educate our international working-class movement… Progressive trade unions, political parties, movements and civil society organisations can use this book for political education programmes for working class people of the world—and a very good book for our struggles for Reparations.

–David McDenny JP, General Secretary, Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration (Barbados)