Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Say

Jean-Baptiste Say argues that home-consumers bear the brunt of the cost of maintaining overseas colonies and that they also help support the lavish lifestyles of the planter and merchant classes (1817)

Found in: A Treatise on Political Economy

Say provides a devastating critique of the colonial system on economic, political, and moral grounds. His sympathies obviously lie with the exploited slaves as well as exploited home-consumers and taxpayers who foot the bill. Here he makes an early form of classical liberal class analysis, pitting the exploited slaves and home consumers and taxpayers against the powerful planter and merchant classes who dominate parliament and benefit from the slave trade and the profits which come from the slave system

Colonies, Slavery & Abolition

All these losses fall chiefly upon the class of home-consumers, a class of all others the most important in point of number, and deserving of attention on account of the wide diffusion of the evils of any vicious system affecting it, as well as the functions it performs in every part of the social machine, and the taxes it contributes to the public purse, wherein consists the power of the government. They may be divided into two parts; whereof the one is absorbed in the superfluous charges of raising the colonial produce, which might be got cheaper elsewhere; this is a dead loss to the consumer, without gain to any body. The other part, which is also paid by the consumer, goes to make the fortunes of West-Indian planters and merchants. The wealth thus acquired is the produce of a real tax upon the people, although, being centred in few hands, it is apt to dazzle the eyes, and be mistaken for wealth of colonial and commercial acquisition. And it is for the protection of this imaginary advantage, that almost all the wars of the eighteenth century have been undertaken, and that the European states have thought themselves obliged to keep up, at a vast expense, civil and judicial, as well as marine and military, establishments, at the opposite extremities of the globe.