1770s–1800s: (The Economic Calculus Behind Abolition — Slave Labor No Longer Viewed as Profitable, Caribbean Sugar Profits in Decline, Industrial Capital Red…

1770s–1800s: (The Economic Calculus Behind Abolition — Slave Labor No Longer Viewed as Profitable, Caribbean Sugar Profits in Decline, Industrial Capital Redirected Homeward, and Africa Reimagined as a Source of Raw Materials and a Market for Manufactured Goods): Moving and powerful though the humanitarian arguments were, shifts in economic thinking also led to a more hard-headed reconsideration of the viability of the slave trade. Slave labor was no longer viewed as profitable by many western European economists — future economic growth, it was argued, lay in industrialized systems making use of free, waged labor. Profits from slave-based sugar production in the Caribbean had declined significantly in the second half of the eighteenth century, while investment in manufacturing industry at home continued apace, particularly in Britain, at the expense of plantation slavery overseas. The abolition of the slave trade by the major European powers ushered in a new age of economic and political change — there had been an important shift in thinking about Africa, which was increasingly regarded as a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods rather than simply a source of slave labor. Industrialization in the northern hemisphere would be further fueled by the vegetable oil and rubber of the tropics, while European manufacturers — many of whose companies had originally made their money in the slave trade — searched for markets abroad to sell cheaply made commodities.