How did Atlantic slavery stimulate British industry? This article answers that question through a study of five firms that supplied gunpowder to the slave trade. It first demonstrates that the Atlantic slavery trade certainly expanded Britain's explosives industry during the eighteenth century. British merchant capitalists established five plants in the proximity of Bristol and Liverpool to meet African demand, provincializing the gunpowder industry for the first time. The slave trade also inflated the gunpowder industry's volume, with twelve percent of all powder going to Africa before abolition. This article next reveals that supplying the slave trade was likely a lucrative pursuit for British manufacturers, with investors in the five mills earning profits that exceeded those of slaving. The boost given to the explosives industry faded considerably as abolition neared, however, and so this article concludes that Atlantic slavery's stimulus was likely of limited importance for driving the later Industrial Revolution.

This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.