Not necessarily. Slavery might have indirectly assisted the north's industrialization in at least a couple ways. (1) Accumulation of financial capital in the hands of an investment class (2) Cheap cotton gave northern factories a competitive advantage.
A counterpoint to this is that the northern part of the US developed exactly because of the availability of cheap cotton provided by slave labor in the south which was crucial for industrialization.
> The interdependency between North and South was more than the direct connection between mass production of cheap cotton in the South, picked by enslaved people, and the success of northern textile mills. Recently, historians of American capitalism argued that slavery was even more tightly connected with the modernizing national and global economy. Above all that the U.S. domestic slave trade, worth perhaps $440m in total and moving more enslaved people (about 750,000) since 1790 than the middle passage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was crucial in the westward movement of investment together with the development of new financial products including securities, bonds, and mortgages. These historians have revealed how deeply committed many nineteenth century banks, especially in New York, were to the continued expansion of slavery.
Are you arguing that slavery did not contribute significantly to the wealth of the North, first by using slaves directly, then by integrating advantageously with the South’s economy and the slave trade?
Interesting. Would you say the South was an important market for the industrialized North?
Would you like to guess whether businessmen in the North invested in the slave trade and grew rich thanks to it?
And what do you make of the fact that the North abolished slavery only after decades of using slaves, making it plausible that they never could have succeeded as colonies without slaves in the first place?
It was a significant contributing factor. Consider, for example, the American Civil War - the outcome would have been very different if not for the fact that the North's non-slave industrial economy worked.
This is an oversimplification. The north also had an economy that made quite a bit of bank off of southern slave labor: mills in New England would not make sense if not for slave hands in the south.
This is true, but most of the economic historians I am aware of also acknowledge that America wouldn't have been in the position to leverage industrialization that it was without the economic driver of slavery. Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.
Holy crap, this is a breathtakingly dishonest answer. Regardless of the topic, you should be ashamed of yourself for being so comfortable with intellectual dishonesty.
The quote you cite explicitly talks about the _European_ industrial revolution. The _very next sentence_ says:
>. Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor
Even more to the point, a couple sentences later:
> In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
Given that we're talking precisely about "the economy of the early usa", this is the relevant perspective.
The enormous profits from the slave plantations were in part put into the industry that developed in the north, providing lots of the much-needed starting capital. The US wouldn't be where they're at today without the exploitation of slaves.
Slavery died out in the Northern states around 1800. The industrialization in the North came after that.
> not all the wealth built on slavery in the Confederacy was destroyed in the Civil War
What wasn't was a rounding error. Of course, the slave states didn't have much in the way of industry to be destroyed in the first place. The plantations were burned down by Sherman.
The slave South couldn't even make shoes. The reason Lee was at Gettysburg was he was headed for nearby Harrisburg to loot the shoe factory there. Rebel soldiers were largely barefoot.
History shows that free people outproduce slaves by a wide margin. Running an industrial slave economy has been tried a few times, with dismal results.
Yep, it's convenient today to connect the two or to pretend that America's (or Britain's) success in the early day was largely a product of slavery. But even when slavery ended there was hardly a sudden decline in prosperity, that engine kept accelerating.
> Slavery didn't make America rich. It made a few Southerners rich and a few Northerners rich, but it didnt make the country rich.
> Another way to look at it is, the Confederacy was a loose collection of agricultural states. The real money was made by the industrial northern states. In the north were mills, factories, ship building, and steel mills.
Slavery wasn’t really that profitable outside of the cotton belt, though. Yes there were still slaves in the North until the early to mid 1800s but it’s not clear that its impact on the economic prosperity of those states was ever particularly significant.
> not all the wealth built on slavery in the Confederacy was
Not to say that even the free states in the Northeast massively benefited economically from the cotton trade in the decades that preceded the war.
Blue collar workers in the North definitely benefited from slavery in the form of lower cost of living as many items were imported from the South to the North. Also cheaper imports for northern manufacturing increased the value of norther labor.
But those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers.
You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
The "mostly-slavery-free North" was where the industrialised (that is, high-value-add) cotton-processing factories and mills were located.
It may not have harboured slaves, but it was definitely profiting by them.
And early stages of industrialisation, most notably the cotton gin, extended the viability of slave-based plantation labour by several more decades, according to extensive accounts.
I don't think that there is any doubt that slavery provided a great deal of the early economic growth in the American south. (Weirdly, I was just reading an article that suggested that slavery itself did not catch on in the Virginia colony until like 60 years after it was founded because slaves cost more than indentured servants, but didn't live any longer.)
However, if you combine the fact that the southern economy was based on labor intensive agriculture (indigo, tobacco, and cotton) with the presence of cheap slave labor prevented the southern economy from industrializing, which limited its growth during and after the industrial revolution.
An amusing note from the chapter: between 1620 and 1660 (?), the Virginia government continually re-passed laws requiring everyone to plant at least two acres of corn. Apparently, most didn't want to take the minimal time away from their tobacco crops, in spite of the fact that they were frequently starving.
Slavery was my first guess, and the article seems to confirm this. The antebellum South was behind the North in technology-driven economy for this same reason.
Slavery was integral to the entire U.S. economy, but that economy was changing in the mid-19th century, and indeed it's not totally false that those economic changes were part of what led to the civil war.
// Capitalists in the North profited by investing in banks that handled the exchange of money for people, or in insurance companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved people. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hotbed of American abolitionism — New England — was also the home of America’s cotton textile industry, which grew rich on the backs of the enslaved people forced to pick cotton. The story of America’s domestic slave trade is not just a story about Richmond or New Orleans, but about America. //
"“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,” Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. “… Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and banks.”"
Mostly the North industrialized, whole the South relied on slave labor as long as they could and then sharecroppers and other forms of barely-not-slavery.
Slavery is not actually very economically efficient. This is one of the main reasons the north had a much better developed economy. The problem is it’s limited to steady state production but you miss out on the increases in efficiency that drives compound economic growth.
EX: The first cotton gin was patented in 1793 which is 68 years before the American civil war. But, with cheap labor there is little pressure to improve it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin Sadly, it ended up increasing slavery in the south by making it more profitable, where a modern farm uses far less labor the south simply doubled down on cheap labor.
PS: There is actually a fair amount of evidence that Slavery significantly reduced US economic growth over time. Paid workers keep more of their output which is a non-issue from an overall economic standpoint, but they need far less supervision which is a large boon. There also more mobile and easier to fire and higher as needs change.
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