In their recent book Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, two prominent scholars of the British industrial revolution, offer a general reinterpretation of this transformative phenomenon (and its legacies) in light of the rippling economic effects set in motion by the forced transport of African labor by European traders and its employment in the Caribbean sugar plantations. In addition to summarizing the book’s main arguments, this piece expands on numerous historiographical debates with which they engage, including the global turn, the new history of capitalism, and the variety of forms of quantification adopted by economic historians.