The slave trade that supplied labor to the New World colonies contributed in many ways to Europe's social transformations. Enslaved Africans, replaced after 1834 by indentured or otherwise coerced colonized workers, provided the cheap labor that brought erstwhile luxuries such as sugar, tea, coffee, and tobacco within reach of middle-class consumers. Slaves produced the cheap raw materials such as cotton that fueled the industrial system by keeping its products affordable and its profits high. West African slave traders accounted for a high proportion of the demand for early British industrial goods such as textiles--''shirts for Black men''--and for iron ingots, used as currency. Colonies were virtually captive markets for European and colonial products, including slaves themselves.

Profits from this ''triangular trade'' flowed mainly to Holland, France, and Britain, contributing to the rapid capital formation that made them commercial and industrial leaders. Wealth derived from slavery and colonialism financed infrastructure such as roads, canals, factories, and warehouses throughout Europe. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams showed how slave trade profits were used in Britain to capitalize James Watt's steam engine, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway, Britain's metallurgical industries, the Welsh slate industry, numerous banks, notably Barclay's, and the marine insurer Lloyd's of London. Thus industry and empire went hand in hand. Yet deep involvement in the trade in human beings shook Enlightenment thinkers' confidence in the superiority and rationality through which they distinguished their societies from those of the past or of the non-European world.

British high politics were preoccupied with slavery and emancipation for decades during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wealthy Caribbean planters, ''the West India interest,'' purchased parliamentary seats, further threatening and displacing the landed aristocracy. One of these, the owner of plantations in Guiana, was the father of William Gladstone, Liberal prime minister in the Victorian era. Gladstone's maiden speech was in defense of slavery. On the other hand, antislavery was a defining issue in reform, Chartist, and socialist politics in Britain as well as in French republican and revolutionary movements.

Africans and other colonized people were not found only in the colonies, however; many were found in European metropoles and were commonly depicted in the works of such artists as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Their widespread appearance in domestic painting of the period suggests the prevalence of black house servants and slaves in eighteenth-century western European societies, and estimates place between ten thousand and thirty thousand in London alone. In the nineteenth century an Indian ayah or nanny became an upper-class status symbol. Some slaves or former slaves, such as Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Francis Barber, became prominent in public life as spokesmen for emancipation. Like nineteenth-century elite travelers from India, such as Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Behramji Malabari, they brought empire home, embodied in their persons, while contributing dissenting voices to metropolitan conversations about empire. . .

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