From Plantation to Factory: Slave Narratives and the Making of Industrial Capitalism

Abstract

The transatlantic slave trade, spanning the 16th to the 19th Century, constituted a central component of early global capitalism by supplying coerced African labor to the Americas. While often treated as a pre modern institution, slavery is deeply integrated into the economic transformations that underpinned the Industrial Revolution. This study examines the role of slavery in the emergence of industrialization through close analysis of selected slave narratives, including works by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Henry Bibb, Mary Prince, and John Brown. These autobiographical accounts provide rich empirical evidence of labor practices, skill acquisition, and economic organization within plantation economies and beyond. Drawing on these narratives, the paper demonstrates how enslaved labor contributed to industrial growth in three key ways: the mass production of raw materials; the development of proto-industrial labor systems, such as task allocation and shift work; and participation in expanding sectors, including shipping and wage-based labor. Slave narratives reveal the extent to which enslaved individuals were embedded in systems resembling industrial production. Moreover, these accounts highlight how skills developed under slavery were later transferable to industrial settings, blurring distinctions between coerced and wage labor. By foregrounding narrative evidence, this study challenges conventional separations between slavery and industrial capitalism. It argues that the transformation of Africans into commodified labor was not merely a backdrop but a driving force in the rise of industrial economies. This perspective, therefore, repositions slavery as foundational rather than peripheral to modern economic development and invites further interdisciplinary research into its lasting consequences.