I am pretty sure that William Darity, among others, has convinced both
O'Brien and Engerman to take much more seriously the Eric Williams'
thesis of the importance of slavery in the emergence of industrial
capitalism (one of Darity's essays is in a book which I can't find--The
Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. (among others) Stanley Engerman, though the
Darity book that may be the most important at this point in the
emergence of the global economic crisis is the one he did with Bobbie
Horn on The Loan Pushers, an investigation of the roots of the Latin
American Debt Crisis).
By the way, Williams' thesis was anticipated by Henryk Grossmann who in
1929 had already studied the plantation system as central to early
capitalism; Grossmann argued that since accumulation was based then on
constant technique, it could only proceed through the seizure of labor
power; hence, the importance of the slave trade and the enclosures to
early capitalism (this chapter The Population Problem in Early Capitalism
was not included in the translation of Grossmann's magnum opus). Also in
his Political Economy of Underdevelopment, Amiya Bagchi has surveyed
the importance of the colonization of India to the take off of industrial
capitalism.
Rakesh
