Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization

Abstract

The only group of clear gainers from the British trans-Atlantic slave trade, and even those gains were small, were the European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other plantation crops. They were given the chance to purchase dental decay and lung cancer at somewhat lower prices than would have been the case without the slave trade. [Thomas and Bean 1974: 914]Although the quotation above represents a radical departure from earlier economic assessments of the Atlantic slave trade, it shares with them an almost universal assumption: that the real significance of the Atlantic sugar triangle lay in its contribution to the productive capacity of Europe. Thus, concluding that only consumers “benefited” is tantamount to reducing the slave trade to economic triviality. This view of import trades has informed historical understanding not only of the factors leading to industrialization in Europe but also of those apparently retarding similar development in the Third World, including Africa and the West Indies (Bairoch 1975: 198–99).