Quotes from Gavin Wright

It was not that "slave trade profits" flowed through some fiendish channels into the dark satanic mills. But the burgeoning Atlantic trade of the eighteenth century derived its value from the products of slave labor and would have been much diminished in the absence of slavery. As sugar became an item of common consumption in Britain, the sugar trade provided a powerful stimulus for a diverse range of occupations and ancillary activities, especially in London.

As the international economist Ronald Findlay argues, "slavery was an integral part of a complex intercontinental system of trade in goods and factors within which the Industrial Revolution, as we know it, emerged. Within this system of interdependence, it would make as much or as little sense to draw a