I am writing my history research paper about how slavery and the slave trade enhanced Britain's (Caribbean) economy around the 18th century. I want to compare and contrast such as how the economy was before slavery and after or something of that sort. I'm, however, struggling to find sources (primary or secondary sources) that specifically and explicitly talk about the slave trade's influence on the economy. I would much appreciate the help if someone can help or knows where I can find these sources.
David Eltis, a History Professor at Emory University, had published a couple of papers on this topic (as part of a much larger research program into slavery).
Eltis, D., & Engerman, S. (2000). The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain. The Journal of Economic History, 60(1), 123-144. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2566799, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Eltis/publication/23565372_The_Importance_of_Slavery_and_the_Slave_Trade_to_Industrializing_Britain/links/588e2abb92851cef1362c973/The-Importance-of-Slavery-and-the-Slave-Trade-to-Industrializing-Britain.pdf
Eltis, D. (1979) The British Contribution to the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade, Economic History Review. May79, Vol. 32 Issue 2, p211-227. 17p.
[Edit to add:] Just a more general note about trade. Historians tend to talk a lot about foreign trade in terms of economic performance, but in large part that's because customs duties historically was a significant part of how states funded themselves, so there's often surviving records of imports and exports along with records of trade treaties, parliamentary debates over trade policy, etc. Domestic sources of production are typically much less documented before the development of modern statistical collections in the 20th century. This results in a biased discussion that risks over-emphasising the contribution of said trade to historic economies. Particularly as most people's institutions about the size of economies are very misleading, we for example think of Jane Austen's Mr Darcy as being very rich with £10,000 a year, so a figure of say £1 million looks huge in comparison, but UK nominal GDP in 1801 is estimated to have been over £400m a year, so £1m is less than 1%. It's good practice to discuss economic numbers as a share of GDP, just to keep in mind this scale.
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