The money came, in the last resort, from the planters themselves… . The money which was received from one planter was lent again, either to him or to another planter… . Thus it was the planter who was paying, so to speak, for his own enslavement. The profits of the plantations were the source which fed the indebtedness charged upon the plantations themselves. In this sense Adam Smith was wrong: the wealth of the British West Indies did not all proceed from the mother country; after some initial loans in the earliest period which merely primed the pump, the wealth of the West Indies was created out of the profits of the West Indies themselves

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 608