Many historians today would agree that using profits as the basis of William's thesis was erroneous and that the ultimate success of the Industrial Revolution should have been the progress of technology and its contribution to sustainable per capita growth rather than wealth accumulation. It is in this sense that the internal factors which fueled the industrial revolution, such as the development of energy based on coal and steam, developed largely autonomously from the Atlantic system and that the industrial revolution would most likely have started without the Atlantic trading system, even if slavery had been abolished. two centuries earlier than before. However, the development of these technologies was most likely the result of an influx of demand for manufactured goods and the increased availability of cheap raw materials made possible by slave labor. The need for these inventions might therefore have been unnecessary without Atlantic trade.