Capitalism and Slavery

What Hacker News says

1. nemothekidJun 2023
   >Why do you think the country is richer because of slavery?

   There are plenty of books on this subject, I think "Capitalism and Slavery" goes into this well, but it's pretty well documented. Slavery was a huge part of the southern economy, it wasn't just a few individual slaveholders getting rich; it was embedded in the very way of life in the south. It's akin to saying "America isn't rich because of Apple, there's just a few wealthy executives at Apple" - it totally ignores how embedded Apple is in our economy - from the app store, to digital payments, to the entire businesses that live on that platform. It's not controversial at all to say the country was made richer because of slavery.

   It's not to say that every plantation owner was massively wealthy, or America was a super power due to slavery, but America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.

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2. ZeroGravitasAug 2022
   Classic text from 1944 on this:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Slavery

   > The book, besides dealing with a passage of economic history, was furthermore a frontal attack on the idea that moral and humanitarian motives were key in the victory of British abolitionism. It was also a critique of the idea common in the 1930s, and in particular advocated by Reginald Coupland, that the British Empire was essentially propelled by benevolent impulses. The centenary celebration of the 1833 Act that took place in the United Kingdom in 1933, in Kingston upon Hull where William Wilberforce was born, was a public event in which Coupland made these ideas explicit, supported in The Times by G. M. Trevelyan.

   > An attempt by Williams to have his dissertation published in the United Kingdom through Fredric Warburg failed: the undermining of the humanitarian motivation for the Abolition Act 1833 was found unacceptable, culturally speaking.[7] Publication of Capitalism and Slavery happened finally in the United States, in 1944. It appeared in a British edition in 1964.

   I was thinking about this the other day when someone linked a weird defense of the roots of US capitalism in slavery, and attacking historians generally as being "too political", where they were trying to claim that yes okay the horrific slavery did actually happen, but you couldn't prove that slavery helped to establish captalism in the USA, because in theory, it wasn't necessary for capitalism and if you couldn't prove it then talking about it was just politics not history.

   Some short biographical sketches of some of these slave traders:

   https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/t...

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3. kthejoker2Jan 2022
   I like this dumb idea, how about 3 different books

   Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams - what evil really looks like

   Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail - the "theory" of a good life

   I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - the "practice" of a good life

   I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings can be optionally replaced by Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

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4. orange8Mar 2023
   > Wildly incorrect. The slave trade peaked around 11% of the UK economy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-...

   Thanks for the link, very interesting. Some quotes from it..

   "By the end of the eighteenth century, the British part of the Triangular Trade alone incorporated economic activities equivalent to around 5% of the British gross domestic product. If we add the activities in the American plantation complex, as well as the industries in Britain directly dependent upon this (either for inputs of raw materials or for markets for output), the estimated figures show that economic activities equivalent to around 11% of British GDP were directly involved in or associated with the Triangular Trade and the American plantation complex. Activities of this magnitude can hardly be dismissed as marginal to the British economy at the time."

   Note that this 11% is only at the end of the 18th century. Just a snapshot of a trade that started in the 15th century.

   "The transatlantic slave trade did have intimate connections to several European economies, but the consequences have also been fiercely debated."

   They say "fiercely debated", you say "wildly incorrect". Do you actually read the sources you link to?

   "One important reason for this focus on Britain was no doubt the publication of Eric Williams’ much-cited book Capitalism and slavery, first published in 1944."

   Someone actually wrote a whole book about it! That's how deep the subject is. I remember watching a 1 hour lecture on you tube, where this professor argued that the trans-Atlantic slave trade is actually what made Europe and economic powerhouse. Something about a combination of good timing and location. If you have any alternative theory of what powered Europe's economic growth in the 18th century, let me know. My take, it was not much different from what powered the roman empire and many other economic powerhouses going thousands of years back.

   "The assumptions underlying such counterfactual models can be quite controversial. For instance, the American plantation complex might seem unimportant as a supplier of cotton and other plantation crops, if one assumes a very high elasticity of supply of these crops in other parts of the world, and declining costs of maritime transport. In his recent book Empire of cotton, Sven Beckert has essentially argued against making such an assumption. In his view, the coercion involved in the expansion of the American plantation complex was the key ‘that opened fresh lands and mobilized new labor, becoming the essential ingredient of the emerging empire of cotton – and thus an essential ingredient in forging industrial capitalism’."

   Another book! This one is more about America though, and the influence of the cotton industry, powered by slaves. Not sure how those GDP calculations from the 1800s you quoted were arrived at, but I'm certain an "essential ingredient in forging industrial capitalism" is not 5%.

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5. ZeroGravitasAug 2022
   I would argue you'd see the exact same thing, and this is another reason it's a great parallel, see this summary from 2017:

   https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-be...

   > provide a tool for investors who have exposure to US coal power to make their portfolio compliant with the Paris Agreement in an economically rational way;

   > detail how an outdated regulatory framework is one of the only reasons why uncompetitive coal power continues to operate in the US; and

   > highlight how phasing-out coal power could save US citizens money and make the US economy more competitive

   > Given the current political backdrop, the assumptions underpinning our analysis are deeply conservative: no Clean Power Plan (CPP) or carbon prices and only well established environmental regulations, originally drafted in 1970s.

   Plus, you're talking about nuclear being replaced with fossil fuels, which is the exact opposite of what would happen if we abolished subsidising fossil fuels.

   On slavery, people still argue that slavery made the US rich, or enabled the Industrial Revolution or various other contrarian "thing you thought was bad was actually good" takes, but I believe the standard view is that, while it might have helped get things going, it was eventually, at the time of the civil war, a net negative, even not accounting for costs of the war, and that afterwards the economy grew faster without that deadweight.

   (The book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Slavery covers this.)

   I'm sure there were people arguing at the time of abolition that it was a necessary evil too though:

   > Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.

   > Defenders of slavery argued that if all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos. This would lead to uprisings, bloodshed, and anarchy. They pointed to the mob's "rule of terror" during the French Revolution and argued for the continuation of the status quo, which was providing for affluence and stability for the slaveholding class and for all free people who enjoyed the bounty of the slave society.

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6. emodendroketMar 2018
   Counterfactuals are difficult, but surely you'd agree that the Triangle Trade was important to the economies that actually ended up leading the Industrial Revolution.

   Although I have not read it, I think Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery is an influential work well known for forcefully arguing for a link between the eponymous phenomena (of course not everyone agrees with its claims).

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