Consider the arguments that Eric Williams advances in _Capitalism and Slavery_:
***** The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopolyŠ.
1. The decisive forces in the period of history we have discussed are the developing economic forces.
These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an irresistible cumulative effect. Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware of the ultimate results of their activity. The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.
2. The various contending groups of dominant merchants, industrialists and politicians, while keenly aware of immediate interests, are for that very reason generally blind to the long-range consequences of their various actions, proposals, policies.
To the large majority of those responsible for British policy the loss of the American colonies seemed a catastrophe. In reality, as was rapidly seen, it proved the beginning of a period of creative wealth and political power for Britain which far exceeded all the undoubted achievements of the previous age. From this point of view, the problem of the freedom of Africa and the Far East from imperialism will be finally decided by the necessities of production. As the new productive power of 1833 destroyed the relations of mother country and colonies which had existed sixty years before, so the incomparably greater productive power of today will ultimately destroy any relations which stand in its way. This does not invalidate the urgency and validity of arguments for democracy, for freedom now or freedom after the war. But mutatis mutandis, the arguments have a familiar ring. It is helpful to approach them with some experience of similar arguments and the privilege (apparently denied to active contemporaries) of dispassionate investigation into what they represented.
3. The political and moral ideas of the age are to be examined in the very closest relation to the economic development.
Politics and morals in the abstract make no sense. We find the British statesmen and publicists defending slavery today, abusing slavery tomorrow, defending slavery the day after. Today they are imperialist, the next day anti-imperialist, and equally pro-imperialist a generation after. And always with the same vehemence. The defence or attack is always on the high moral or political plane. The thing defended or attacked is always something that you can touch and see, to be measured in pounds sterling or pounds avoirdupois, in dollars and cents, yards, feet and inches. This is not a crime. It is a fact. It is understandable at the time. But historians, writing a hundred years after, have no excuse for continuing to wrap the real interests in confusion. Even the great mass movements, and the anti-slavery mass movement was one of the greatest of these, show a curious affinity with the rise and development of new interests and the necessity of the destruction of the old.
4. An outworn interest, whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective, can exercise an obstructionist and disruptive effect which can only be explained by the powerful services it had previously rendered and the entrenchment previously gained.
How else explain the powerful defence put up by the West Indians when any impartial observer, if such existed, could have seen that their time was up?Š
5. The ideas built on these interests continue long after the interests have been destroyed and work their old mischief, which is all the more mischievous because the interests to which they corresponded no longer exist.
Such are the ideas of the unfitness of the white man for labor in the tropics and the inferiority of the Negro which condemned him to slavery. We have to guard not only against these old prejudices but also against the new which are being constantly created. No age is exempt. (endnotes omitted, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944, pp. 169, 210-212) *****
Eric Williams' exact conclusions concerning the nature of social change -- in this case the end of slavery and mercantilism -- are debatable, but, surely, moral appeals -- e.g. moral appeals to abolish slavery -- become most effective at the moment when objective conditions -- e.g., development of wage labor and industrial revolution -- favor (or even demand) them. The recognition of the primacy of changes in material conditions (= relations and forces of production) over changes in morals and manners is not fatalism but historical materialism. -- Yoshie
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