... can and cannot learn from it. The economic accounts of slavery are presented as objective. 'Facts' and figures are used to analyse the profitability of slavery. Ernest Williams, for example in From Columbus to Castro: the history of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (1970) provides a lot of numerical data detailing the rise and fall of slavery. How accurate these figures are is an important question. The reader needs to consider how they were constructed and for what purpose. Aitken suggests that historians often picked up unexamined assertions and used them as facts. They based their arguments on 'stereotypes of the negro and of plantation slavery they found in earlier writings' (1971: 2). If true, this means the conclusions of these arguments are of little value. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944) Williams discusses the 'origins of Negro slavery'. He stresses the idea that black slavery was 'an economic phenomenon. Slavery ...

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