Summary
Caribbean historian whose revisionary work, with C. L. R. James’s, replaced Ragatz’s account of the planter class, and whose Capitalism and Slavery (given in the work as 1961) Edward Said quotes on the relation of political and moral ideas to economic development and interests (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.121-122 / printed p.94-95).
Details
- With C. L. R. James, and more recently Robin Blackburn in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, Williams’s revisionary work shows slavery and empire to have fostered the rise and consolidation of capitalism well beyond the old plantation monopolies, and to have been a powerful ideological system whose effects continued for decades (PDF p.121 / printed p.94).
- Said quotes Williams: “The ideas built on these interests continue long after the interests have been destroyed” — and, the quotation continues, work their old mischief (PDF p.122 / printed p.95).
- Williams also holds that the political and moral ideas of the age are to be examined in the very closest relation to the economic development, and that an outworn interest can exercise an obstructionist effect explained only by the services it had previously rendered and the entrenchment previously gained (PDF p.122 / printed p.95).