Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains.
If you look at the history and the economic charts, the big boost was started by the industrial revolution.
Exactly. Now, lets look at some of the causes of the first Industrial Revolution
First, large tracts of lands in Britain, largely held in the commons, were stolen from the peasantry and given to private individuals and landlords, as part of the Enclosure movement. This forced the peasants to look for work in cities en masse, providing cheap labor for the capitalists.
Second, Britain's African Slave trade constituted a big part of the early accumulation of capital that made the revolution possible.
Cheap cotton from the colonization of India as well that produced by the slave labor in North America fueled the textile industry, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution. India's share of the world economy fell from 20% to less than 5%, chiefly because the capital required for industrialization was siphoned off to England
I'm not convinced by your second one. Why didn't states like Portugal industrialise equally quickly? Or within America, why didn't states with more slaves grow faster? Germany has no history of slavery, and the same is true for modern industrialisation transitions like South Korea and China.
The topic has been studied in great detail in economic history. The consensus seems to be that however horrible slavery was, it wasn't fundamental to industrialisation.
If you are making profit to support a lavish lifestyle relative to your local peers and (crucially) there is no free market value of your laborers' labor, then what incentive do you have to apply innovation?
Some (cotton gin), but certainly less than a free (in all senses of the word) labor market where a shortage of workers leads to increased wages and a push towards mechanization.
I agree. It is my understanding that the Romans were in a good position to develop a usable steam engine, but never had enough motivation to do so, because slave labor was cheaper.
Germany has no history of slavery
Also take a look at what happened in the Sud west if you think Colonial Germany didn't have slaves
A very interesting related book that I've read about that period and which I'd recommend to everyone generally interested in economic and social history is E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I'm generally leaning on the right side of politics and economics (I'm a sympathizer of both Bentham and Benjamin Constant, who are not receiving very kind words in this book), but I found it super interesting and I find it intellectual honest to try and and understand opinions (and related facts) coming from multiple sides of the story.
It's always been my understanding that _wool_ had been the early carrier of the industrial revolution? That by the time cotton entered that picture, the revolution was well underway?
Two hundred years of slavery was not a major driver of economic growth?
Edit: Serious question, rephrased: do economic historians really not consider slavery a major driver of growth? If so, that would be highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the free labor of ~10 million people over two centuries, in an economy that was almost entirely agricultural.
Rule of law (contracts, low official corruption), absence of arbitrary confiscation risks (ie the King is not going to suddenly come and grab your stuff), unfettered movement of goods/people/ideas. Generic ideas that allow you to compare across societies.
I actually studied economics, and the explanation of how growth arrived does not normally rely on slaves. It tends to focus more on the advent of early parliamentary government (Glorious Revolution), presence of coal in northern England, and advancement of science and technology.
There's no absolutes in economic history though, and you might well find an argument that the triangular trade aided the industrial revolution. That's more of a vignette that explains why England in particular might have prospered, rather than an explanation of how growth gets started in general.
Quite relevant as a set of innovations in the time when people started having to do business with strangers, particularly ones with different ecological positions. You can imagine having lived in agricultural societies there would be a big question of how exactly you're going to have a business relationship with say a factory owner or delivery company.
JSC, exchanges, (perhaps central banking as well) and various encounters with credit issues worked out a certain way in the UK, and innovations were copied across many other societies.
- Mass production: Venetian arsenal
- Central Bank: Sweden
- The word Bourse: a certain family in Belgium
- Political philosophy: lots of places
- Coal and steel production, factories: Northern France, Belgium
- Religious freedom: rather bloody wars still in living memory
While a large number of, not free but very low cost, laborers will build individual wealth for the small percentage of the population who use them, those same laborers do not participate in the economy. So you end up with very large supply and very little demand, little or no reason to innovate, and a stalled engine of growth.
Slavery, or even low wage workforce is bad even from the point of view of entirely selfish actors. It erodes the market eventually killing the entire economy.
The lesson is, if you want to get rich don't reduce the cost of your labor force, increase the value of your production.
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.
The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative.
Not really difficult to disentangle.
And theres Canada.
Whereas claiming they can't be disentangled is obviously disinterested.
Slavery was the rule, not the exception in the world at the time. The African kingdoms mostly practiced it, the Arabs were infamous for it, Mexico ended slavery in the 1830s after American industrialization was well underway, Russia didn't truly end serfdom until around 1900 as I recall, and then you have India's caste system, so only China is left without slavery in some form? But were they? And why didn't all of these countries industrialize?
However, you'll note that in the absence of southern cotton during the Civil War, these textile mills did not shut down or become unprofitable, they switched to alternate sources of cotton.
From this [0] I can only conclude that owners were paying for value and the price did go up over time, as did the price of cotton, but it looks like it was a good deal.
To be fair, there are few if any countries with the scale of stolen/free land and enslaved labor as in US history.
You'd have to look at the European 'colonies' for both. The US of course was the first colony to become independent -- meaning an end to it's profits being extracted for the home country, and instead re-invested locally.
So I'd say there are basically no other countries with close to the scale of profits built from stolen land and enslaved labor, and then not extracted for a colonial home country overseas.