The dazzling economic growth experienced from the middle of the 18e century is Western Europe inseparable from its colonial domination on other continents, and from the slavery of Africans in particular? Are slavery and colonialism the factors that explain the current inequalities between nations and, within the richest nations, between social classes that are increasingly “racialized” by the legacy of slavery and immigration since the former colonies?
These subjects, heavy with ideological and political stakes, deserved to be debated between the economist who knew how to put the question of inequalities at the top of the agenda of his discipline, Thomas Piketty, and the historian who launched the debate on the origins of the “great divergence” between Europe and the rest of the world in the 19e century, Kenneth Pomeranz.
For Thomas Piketty, A big difference Kenneth Pomeranz’s flagship book, published in 2000, and his own book A brief history of equality, published in 2021 – “the one that best sums up the message I want to convey”, he specifies – do not tell two different or contradictory stories, but complementary ones.
In A big difference he observes, the American historian gives “a very important role” to slavery and colonization in the emergence of European power and the beginnings of the industrial revolution: 75% of the cotton processed in Europe comes, in the first half of the 19e century, slave plantations in the southern United States.
But, adds Thomas Piketty, Kenneth Pomeranz has also shown the key role of ecological constraints. Massive deforestation from the XIVe century pushes the Europeans – and in the first place the British, who devastated their forests to build their navy – to lighten the ecological constraint by globalizing their trade to capture other resources, other lands, before monopolizing them purely and simply secondly by colonial conquest. In 1830, the United Kingdom imported the production equivalent to 1.5 to 2 times more arable land than there was on its own territory.
Material accounting
Admittedly, economists have disputed the weight of colonial trade in the British economic boom, pointing out that it represented only 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United Kingdom at that time. But Thomas Piketty opposes this strictly monetary accounting with material accounting, an approach with which he also credits the work of Pomeranz. How could British industry have taken off, asks the French economist, without the deportation of millions of slaves producing tons of cotton, without the capital, social prestige and political influence of slave traders and colonial products?
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