In nearly all his publications, Selwyn Carrington has followed the view put forward in Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that the British West Indian economy was in serious decline in the later eighteenth century and that the problems were so grave that the British abolished their slave trade as a result, primarily for economic reasons. Such arguments were first given prominence by Lowell J. Ragatz in The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1928). Williams, however, sharpened Ragatz's arguments and focused particularly on the economic determinism that led Britain to dismantle its nefarious commerce in enslaved Africans. Carrington has already written The British West Indies during the American Revolution (Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology/Foris Publications 1988), which deals with trading problems in a prolonged conflict that witnessed falling levels of slave imports, reductions in sugar prices, and interruptions to the supply of foodstuffs from the United States to the West Indies. These themes are retreated in The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, but the chronological span is greater and the trawl of evidence to support the argument is more thorough. Carrington argues that the British West Indian plantation system experienced declining profits, increased debts, and other economic inefficiencies that made the sugar industry in the Caribbean no longer a viable ongoing proposition in the post-1783 period. British politicians, influenced by these calamitous signs, pulled the life support away from the sugar plantations—so Carrington's argument runs—by ending the British transatlantic slave trade in 1807.

In making these arguments, Carrington confronts the consensus of modern historians that the British West Indian economy recovered after considerable difficulties experienced during the American revolutionary war; that the British Caribbean slave system was expanding, not contracting, in most years between 1783 and 1807; and that therefore it made little sense to abolish the slave trade on economic grounds. Seymour Drescher's Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) is the main proponent of this more positive line of argument. His views have been broadly accepted in B. W. Higman's summative assessment in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, (vol. 1, edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Drescher and others, in addition, have underscored the British abolitionist achievement in pressuring Parliament to act against the slave trade. Carrington, on the contrary, emphatically believes that abolitionist agitation was a convenient smokescreen for Britain to get rid of the slave trade for economic reasons.

Unfortunately, in making his claims Carrington ignores important published material that contradicts his arguments. He states that “virtually no plantations made any profits” during the 1780s but provides no statistics to support his case (p. 97). No systematic data are produced for the further statement that “the profitability of West Indian estates had all but disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century” (pp.125–26). In making these assertions, Carrington fails to cite the carefully compiled estimates of sugar plantation profitability produced by J. R. Ward (“The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650–1834,” Economic History Review 31, no. 2. (May, 1978): 197–213) and in British West Indian Slavery: The Process of Amelioration, 1750–1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1988). Ward showed—and no-one has bettered his estimates—that though profits dipped on British Caribbean estates, especially in wartime, the fact remains that on average most British West Indian territories produced plantation profits in the late eighteenth century and that, just as declining profits had previously been recuperated, there was no reason to think the same would not happen again. For Ward, and for most historians, the British West Indian economy was still a viable proposition until at least 1815.

Carrington's failure to cite Ward on crucial aspects of the British West Indian economy is symptomatic of a broader tendency to omit the work of various historians. Ward is left out from the footnotes to Carrington's chapters 8 and 9, dealing with new management techniques and planter reforms, though this is a central concern of British West Indian Slavery: The Process of Amelioration. Higman's summary of the British West Indian economy, mentioned previously, is not addressed or cited. David Ryden's work, documenting falling sugar prices in the British Caribbean after 1790, is ignored even though its evidence lends some support to Carrington's case. Drescher's articles, restating and refining his position in Econocide, are not cited. The statistics Carrington tabulates on the slave trade ignore the data presented in The British Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A table of slave prices for 1772–1808 (p. 206) is not compared with statistics on slave prices for the late 1780s that can be found in a volume that Carrington jointly edited entitled Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—A Reassessment of the Man and his Work (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000). Carrington's discussion of the rum trade between the British Caribbean and North America is rendered redundant by failure to cite John J. McCusker's comprehensive Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 1650–1775 (New York and London: Garland, 1989). I could extend this list of omissions, but the point has been made.

The fact that so many authorities are ignored on matters crucial to Carrington's arguments means that one cannot recommend The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade. But there are other reasons why it is a seriously flawed book. Though based on extensive research, the plantation records for the Windward Islands, Trinidad, and British Guiana—all expanding areas of the British slave system in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries—have not been investigated properly. Chapter 6 is based almost entirely on one set of plantation papers for Jamaica. These have been researched skillfully, but Carrington does not tell us why they should have wider application to the entire British Caribbean, or why he has not consulted equivalent papers, which do exist, for the Lesser Antilles. Sugar import figures are given in terms of different containers (e.g., pp. 18–20, citing hundredweights and hogsheads) but a common system of quantities could have been established by using Customs records in the Pubic Record Office, London rather than the sources cited. Carrington's main point, following Williams closely, is that “overproduction [of sugar] coupled with underconsumption, which both had the effect of overstocking the market, provided Britain with the rationale for destroying the slave trade” (pp. 94–95). But to investigate why Britain abolished its slave trade—and this is, after all, the second part of Carrington's title—one needs to examine the political debates in Parliament on this issue. Carrington fails to do so, but if he had done he would have noticed, as Roger Anstey long ago pointed out, that economic matters relating to slave trade abolition were not discussed prominently at Westminster in 1806 and 1807.

Colin Palmer writes an enthusiastic preface to the book stating that Carrington “clinically” dissects “the arguments and conclusions of less careful and gifted scholars” (p. xv): who these people are is not divulged. Palmer also states that The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade is “a model of exhaustive research, measured in its analysis and brilliant in its conclusions” that will be “read, reread, and debated” (pp. xvi–xvii). I can only think that this was written in a spirit of West Indian solidarity. Carrington has produced a book that is based on scholarly research but the omissions are of such significance that they cannot be ignored: they really should have been seen a mile away by the University of Florida Press's readers. Furthermore, as stated previously, though evidence is produced on aspects of economic difficulties in the British Caribbean plantation economy in the 30 years after 1775, the argument that the British eliminated their slave trade for economic reasons is not handled in a convincing manner.