The economy in the colonial Americas grew exponentially because thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of new people were arriving every year and creating value.
The shitty, exploitative things those humans also did back then were not responsible for the growth. Countries in the rest of the world were doing the same things back then but not growing as fast. Only 5% of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to North America.
For a further example, the US experienced its greatest upward climb during the industrial revolution, after slavery was abolished.
If exploitation was the only reason for the US’s success, then why would the US experience explosive growth after abolishing slavery?
> America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them.
The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.
Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.
There where a small number of people that profited greatly from slavery. However, economic growth is more than just what happens to rich people. As much hoopla as surrounded slavery in the US they always maintained a small portion of the total population and per capita generated less goods and services than the average american.
My condensed argument is that Slavery per se does not make countries rich. Rather I am only arguing that slavery, in many countries including the USA, Brazil, and others world-wide, did not contribute to the long term economic success of the nation nearly as much as many claim it does (or solely claim it does in the USA).
We don't have a counterfactual Twin Earth where those countries did not have slaves, but we know for sure slavery is not necessary for a country to be successful. And if we look at countries that had way more slaves, the advantage of simply having slave labor seems hugely insufficient for a country to be successful.
It is possible that the USA had slaves and was able to economically leverage them far greater than all the other countries that had slaves, but this seems unlikely, and such a scenario would also be the biggest gain for a counterfactual scenario that the USA would have been successful without them, too.
On the point of slavery, it's possible for a bunch of free exploited labor is a requirement to build the levels of wealth we see now. There's probably also another requirement factor on how you utilize those resources.
I'm not convinced that citing economies in decline with historic abuse of slavery is evidence that it isn't a requirement to some of the degrees of wealth we see now. If an entire economy was based around an assumption was that a bunch of free exploited labor like slavery would exist indefinitely then it disappeared over night and no transition strategy existed for that economy or that economy was further tied to slavery... then it's completely possible to see economic decline. Meanwhile, one could have seen the writing on the wall that slavery was gone and moved their resources accumulated off the back of slavery elsewhere and been more successful.
Colonialism is a lot more complicated because there are more inherent costs that could offset the benefits from an economic perspective so its pretty difficult to measure. Slavery is pretty much a guaranteed 'win' from a business perspective, after all, automation of processes with cheap reliable machines is most businesses current wet dream. I'm not saying slavery is a 'good' thing (it's absolutely not), I'm just saying a bunch of cheap ways to create services/goods you can then sell or accumulate seem like a clear way to accumulate/capture wealth. Slavery was one such mechanism abused in the past (and even today, really).
The advancements of industry were accelerated by a limitless supply of cheap slave labor. And of course, the natural resources that were plundered from the colonies.
In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. It's not even a great feat or accomplishment. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.
I'm not trying to point accusatory fingers anywhere, you're missing the claim. You made the claim that USA success was the direct result of slave labor. If this were true, you would expect other societies with boatloads of slave labor to be more successful. They weren't.
Since lots of places had lots of unpaid labor and did nothing particularly successful, there must be more to it. If there is more to it, it is (usually) evidence that the USA would have been successful without slave labor.
> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour
As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common cynical refrain that the current level of abundance would be impossible without slavery.
There are many many places where there has been slavery throughout the years, and they have not ended up richer for it. The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. Brazil, who imported double the amount of slaves as the US, is poorer. Northern Europe, not known for their abundance of slaves, is wealthier.
Similarly with colonialism - that's something that is only possible once your society is already rich and powerful enough to go around and dominate others. Colonialism was not a huge success for England when you look at how much it cost. It was great for national pride and as a symbol of their "greatness" however.
Cheap imported labor can definitely help parts of an economy - but remember that many people lose their jobs when labor like that is imported - not necessarily granting them upward mobility, and the ones from whom the labor has been imported are more likely to be better off than they were.
I actually mentioned that: “English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade”
The point was slavery was economically and politically viable in the American south far longer than Europe. It’s a reasonable argument to suggest Europe outsourced and profited from slavery, but it also wasn’t in peoples faces just as few people consider the working conditions of the 3rd world today when they buy stuff.
Anyway, the slave trade wasn’t that profitable for England. Profits where mostly split between Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark with no country having a massive advantage. Divide 12.8 million people across 400 years and then further split profits between multiple countries and it was a tiny rounding error for the European countries involved.
PS: I don’t mean this to be apologist, more pointing out the horrific amount of suffering inflicted vs the gains involved.
Industrialization is what brought prosperity to the masses.
Colonialism and slavery benefited the reigning elite, but the average person almost didn’t see any benefit.
Unfortunately that won’t stop people from lying that slavery is the foundation of wealthy western democracies.
Brazil had 10x more slaves than the USA [1]. They would have been the richest country in Latin America per capita if slavery was the foundation of rich modern democracies, but that’s far from the case
I say this as a Nigerian whose country was colonized by the British.
"When America was 90%+ white (before ~1965), it experienced a huge surge of productivity"
Yes, by enslaving blacks and exploiting non-whites, women, and children, something that any population with a workforce of slaves could easily do in a country as big as the US thus making the "huge surge of productivity" hardly impressive and definitely not something to ever be repeated again.
> Recent research argues that among former New World colonies a nation’s past dependence on slave labor was important for its subsequent economic development (Engerman and Sokoloff, 1997, 2002). It is argued that specialization in plantation agriculture, with its use of slave labor, caused economic inequality, which concentrated power in the hands of a small elite, adversely affecting the development of domestic institutions needed for sustained economic growth. I test for these relationships looking across former New World economies and across states and counties within the U.S. The data shows that slave use is negatively correlated with subsequent economic development. However, there is no evidence that this relationship is driven by large scale plantation slavery, or that the relationship works through slavery’s effect on economic inequality.
I haven't actually read much research in this area in particular. Frankly, it just seems intuitive to me based on all the literature I have read about American political, legal, and industrial development; the development of other countries, such as in SE Asia; and especially works related to the so-called "resource curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Slave trade brought in massive wealth into Europe back then. That is why people did it, really. Otherwise they would not bothered with it.
The south had slavery, because it was massively profitable. They did not done it for fun and giggles. Owners fought to keep slavery multiple times, because they wealth was in slaves and in what slaves produced. The slave owning families were the richest and most powerful.
Same with colonialism. It was not done out of boredom, it was done because resources you get from all of it.
Slavery hasn't been a factor for a century and a half. Natural resources play a meaningful role, but there's plenty of poor countries with resources. And the indigenous people before didn't have a juggernaut economy from those resources.
Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.
Indeed this is something that even George Washington famously wrote about. His conclusion was that slave labor is an economic disaster and that he would be far better off financially not being responsible for carrying all the costs of the labor. And that's before the US developed a far superior economic model to what existed in Washington's time, in regards to productivity (ie even in a backward, low productivity agrarian context, it was obvious slave labor was extremely inefficient, it did not work well at all).
This is something that has been proven repeatedly by studies that have looked into slave labor in the colonies and elsewhere. When people on the Internet say otherwise, my experience has been that they never support their claims, they're always empty statements held up as fact.
The US would have developed faster if the slaves had been free. Along with being obviously morally evil, slavery inherently must involve a great misallocation of human resources. It's an extreme example of command economics. The Soviets, Chinese and others more recently have demonstrated how poorly slave-based economics works in practice. We're not lacking for proof; there isn't a single example from modern history of it working well versus free labor.
The greatest example of this in action in recorded history, is modern China. They only developed at all after they began to shift away from a de facto slave-based labor system, to something closer to free labor. Simply put, they unleashed their human capital and it has done the rest, going to work building out modern China (in spite of the restraining, backwards, command economics system that remains, rather than because of it; something Internet pundits frequently get wrong about China).
The shitty, exploitative things those humans also did back then were not responsible for the growth. Countries in the rest of the world were doing the same things back then but not growing as fast. Only 5% of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to North America.
For a further example, the US experienced its greatest upward climb during the industrial revolution, after slavery was abolished.
If exploitation was the only reason for the US’s success, then why would the US experience explosive growth after abolishing slavery?
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