British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the ‘Williams thesis’: that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth‐century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti‐slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable.

中文翻译：

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重新讨论奴隶制和英美资本主义 

英美两国关于奴隶制与经济增长之间关系的辩论之间几乎没有互动。本文试图通过结合这两种文献进行知识套利。这种联系开启了被忽略的“威廉姆斯论点”的第二部分：奴隶制和奴隶贸易曾经对英国工商业的发展至关重要，但到了19世纪就不再需要了。与最近关于奴隶制在美国经济发展中的中心地位的主张相反，文章认为威廉姆斯论点的第二部分对19世纪的美国同样适用。与糖不同，棉花不需要大量的固定资本投资，并且可以在没有奴隶制的情况下由自由农民定居的地方以任何规模进行有效种植。廉价棉花无疑对纺织品的增长很重要，但是廉价棉花不需要奴隶制。这种说法的最好证据是，在经过二十年的战争，废除和重建之后，棉花价格回到了战前水平。在这两个国家中，反奴隶制情绪的上升并不是由直接经济利益的前景驱动的，而是主要的经济利益集团默许废除奴隶制，因为他们不再把奴隶制视为必不可少的了。