In the post-WWII era, the countries that have prospered have done so because they have enjoyed stable government and long periods of peaceful relations with their neighbours. This allows for an educated populace, fruitful use of their natural resources and human ingenuity, and remunerative trade with other nations.
I do not know for other countries but in France what is told in schools and in media is that France had abolished slavery in 1794.
However it had slavery inscribed in its legal system for West Africa up until the beginning of the 20th century.
Even in metropolitan France, slavery was reinstated by Napoleon in 1802 and was not abolished for good until 1848 (in metropolitan France!).
In west Africa it was only in the beginning of the XX century that an end of slavery was declared by the colonial French administration ( 1905 in Mauritania).
In African states like Mali that are still controlled by France, at least by its military forces and its financial system (CFA/West African Franc), slavery was only legally forbidden in 2003.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Triangular_... :
> By the 18th century, the slave trade became a major economic mainstay for such cities as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, engaged in the so-called "Triangular trade".
Further details from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade :
> Bristol and Liverpool merchants became increasingly involved in the trade.[92] By the late 17th century, one out of every four ships that left Liverpool harbour was a slave trading ship.[93] Much of the wealth on which the city of Manchester, and surrounding towns, was built in the late 18th century, and for much of the 19th century, was based on the processing of slave-picked cotton and manufacture of cloth.[94] Other British cities also profited from the slave trade. Birmingham, the largest gun-producing town in Britain at the time, supplied guns to be traded for slaves.[95] 75% of all sugar produced in the plantations was sent to London, and much of it was consumed in the highly lucrative coffee houses there. ...
> By far the most financially profitable West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. ...
> It has been estimated that the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations created up to one-in-twenty of every pound circulating in the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution in the latter half of the 18th century
However, the fact that the period to which your refer is some 250 years in the past supports my wider point that it is specious to claim that the the wealth of current-day first world nations derives from the historic use of slave labour.
How many years does it take for the benefits of slavery to disappear? I think it's far longer than you do.
British slavery meant more income to the government, which lead to a better navy, which lead to the ability to defend the triangle trade. A better navy helped advance British imperialism. How might Trafalgar have turned out with a weaker British navy?
British control of sugar production was built on slavery. But even once the slaves were free in a legal sense, the black population of ex-slaves was still at the bottom of the social ladder. The white landowners kept political and economic control for generations, and the profits went to Britain.
In the US, institutionalized racism, not just in localized Jim Crow laws and sundown towns, but also in federal policies like redlining, prevented generations of blacks from getting the same economic benefits as whites. (See Richard Rothstein's “The Color of Law”; interview at http://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-... .) I know less about British history, but I do know how many thought the "Anglo-Saxon race" was above all others.
You earlier wrote: "Furthermore, the civil war that was waged to end slavery ultimately brought economic ruin to the southern States that had relied on slave labour."
I don't think you appreciate the full impact of slavery on the US or British economies. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#A... :
> slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the banking, shipping and manufacturing industries of New York City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as did similar industries in other major port cities in the North. The northern textile mills in New York and New England processed Southern cotton and manufactured clothes to outfit slaves. By 1822 half of New York City's exports were related to cotton
and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton#History
> By 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, cotton accounted for almost 60% of American exports, representing a total value of nearly $200 million a year.
Even though slavery was banned in the British Empire, Britain still profited from slave labor carried out elsewhere. The cotton mills of Lancashire produced a huge fraction of the world's processed cotton. You know where that cotton came from? The forced labor of American slaves.
Quoting now from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Cotton_Famine :
> When the slave-owning Southern States of America demanded secession from the United States of America and declared war in 1861, the cotton supply was interrupted at first by a Southern imposed boycott and then a Union blockade. The South's thinking was that it could force British support through an economic boycott. ... Of the 1,390,938,752 lb of raw cotton 1,115,890,608 lb came from America.(80 %) ... Confederate flags were flown in many cotton towns.
Britain's economy profited from American slavery even until the 1860s, and they knew it.
Yes, I do. I concede that you have demonstrated that economic benefits from slave labour continued to accrue to the UK economy until the 19th century. However, it is simply not true to flatly claim, as did the OP, that "Most rich countries are rich because they build their wealth on free labor (slavery)".
> French traders were heavily involved in the slave trade. From 1721-30, French ships took 85,000 enslaved Africans to the plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean. In the 1730s, they carried more than 100,000. Altogether, about 1,250,000 enslaved Africans were taken by French ships. Even after France abolished the trade, 500 French ships continued slave trading illegally between 1818 and 1831.
Quoting now from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-confronts... :
> In the 18th and 19th centuries, France was among the major European slave-trading nations, capturing and selling an estimated 1.4 million people before leaders outlawed slavery in 1848.
> The country’s coffers grew rich from colonial conquests in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, where slave labor generated the commodities that French merchants then sold in Europe.
> When metropolitan France finally outlawed slavery — a generation before the United States — liberation brought freedom only in theory for many blacks in French territories overseas.
> “Slavery was abolished, and the old slaves became citizens,” said the historian Frédéric Regent, a renowned expert on the French slave trade. “They even elected deputies. But the plantation economy continued with the same masters, who then became ‘employers.’ ”
> “What was different between that and slavery?” Tin asked. “Nothing.”
> This form of economic subjugation overseas persisted well into the 1960s, when France, crippled by two world wars, lost its former empire. Many argue that the injustice persists today in the form of socioeconomic disparity between young whites and blacks, increasingly confined to peripheral suburbs and low-paying jobs.
> “It’s from slavery that we have the discrimination we have today and the racism we see in France today,” said Myriam Cottias, a historian and member of the government-sponsored foundation, in a telephone interview from Martinique.
> “It’s not yet totally done in France. France has many, many institutional links to slavery.”
Yet again, even though slavery was officially abolished, the "economic benefits from slave labour continued to accrue". Even to the present.
I agree that it's an exaggeration, and even that it's wrong, but it's not absurd.
The further back in time you go, the more the framework changes. How did those nations become relatively wealthy in the first place?
How much was due to serfdom? Combined, of course, with the new political philosophy which centralized absolute power for the sovereign.
(As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_Convention_on_th... helpfully points out, the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery also prohibits serfdom.)
But by doing that, the problem is that most areas in Europe had serfs. I think in Europe only some of the Nordic countries did not. (On the original topic, Sweden's era as a great power was funded by its copper export, and not from slaves or serfs.) And many cultures had slaves or participated in the slave trade, including those that weren't great powers, so slavery, serfdom, and other forms of forced labor are not really diagnostic.
Do you have an idea of how much of the those nations' wealth derives from slavery? I don't think it's an easy thing to answer. It's clearly not "zero".
> The Dutch role in the slave trade is said to be minor, but Kwame Nimako shows that although the Dutch colonies in the Americas might have been few and small compared to the Spanish, Portuguese and British colonies, the Dutch were, because of their well-built vessels and good seamanship, very active in the actual transport of slaves both for their own colonies and for others. Between 1600-1650 the Netherlands replaced Britain as the second major transatlantic transporter ...
> The state was very much involved in the slave trade: brokerage and pilot fees were required by the state, gifts to rulers were sometimes required, permits had to be purchased and agreements with other enslaving nations were made. There was government protection of sugar refining between 1650-1680 (p.73). The slave ships required a crew twice the size of a normal commercial ship, since ‘unwilling passengers’ might revolt. The transportation of slaves was never a normal business but needed state support. ‘The treaties that shaped the formation of some of the major European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were tied to control of or negation about the Atlantic slave trade, annexation and colonisation of other people’s land and subjugation of other people’ ...
> The Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Dutch Antilles had their complement of slaves, though these were fewer in number than in the British colonies. ...
> Unlike Britain, in Holland there was no movement for the abolition of slavery. The Dutch ignored the 1794 French declaration of liberty for slaves, even though they adopted many French laws when under French control in the Napoleonic period. ...
> Nimako shows that, contrary to supposition, the Dutch still found slavery profitable at the time of abolition, since they deferred the latter until after the produce had been harvested. Further, the slave-owners wanted compensation for the loss of their slaves after abolition. The enslavers were compensated, but the former slaves received nothing, not even the much smaller amount they were supposed to receive. In fact the compensation granted to the enslavers came from the enslaved and most went not to the colonies but to slave owners living in the Netherlands
Still, I do not find it an absurd generalization.
How many rich countries do you think are rich because they built their wealth on slavery?
While it's not slavery, does that number change if it were generalized to include indentured servitude or forced labor?
For example, Belgium benefited from forced labor in the Belgium Congo. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo :
> After the First World War, ... the colonial state gave private companies, to a large extent, a free hand. This allowed, in particular, the Belgian Société Générale to build up an economic empire in the colony. Huge profits were generated[by whom?] and for a large part siphoned off to Europe in the form of dividends. ...
> The necessary work-force was recruited in the interior of the vast colony with the active support of the territorial administration. In many cases, this amounted to forced labour, as in many villages minimum quotas of "able-bodied workers" to be recruited were enforced. In this way, tens of thousands of workers were transferred from the interior to the sparsely populated copper belt in the south (Katanga) to work in the mines. In agriculture, too, the colonial state forced a drastic rationalisation of production. The state took over so-called "vacant lands" (land not directly used by local tribes) and redistributed the territory to European companies, to individual white landowners (colons), or to the missions ...
> During the First World War (1914-1918), the system of "mandatory cultivation" (cultures obligatoires) was introduced, forcing Congolese peasants to grow certain cash crops (cotton, coffee, groundnuts) destined as commodities for export.[31] Territorial administrators and state agronomists had the task of supervising and, if necessary, sanctioning those peasants who evaded the hated mandatory cultivation
I mean, it's a fair assumption: slavery was abolished in France in 1794, in the United Kingdom in 1833 and in the United States in 1865. Germany mainly traded with it's European neighbors, which didn't use slave labor in their territories.
Then how can all these different countries have similar levels of GDP per capita and similar growth paths, despite their different levels of exposure?
Furthermore, there currently poor countries which relied on slave labor for much longer. Brazil only abolished slavery in 1888. Morocco, in 1922. And if we include serfdom, Russia, in 1861.
Unless you mean metaphorical slavery.
I grant that it would take much more sophisticated analysis in order to properly exclude any confounding factors, but that's kinda the point, really. I don't think you really thought this through.
Don't stop there. Throw in Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungry, etc.
> Some are really poor because they've been exploited by the countries mentioned above (Africa and former German, British, Belgian, French colonies
Including Ethiopia, right?
> Some are poorer because they've been destroyed by war multiple times (Poland).
Poland is poorer, but not poor. It's in the top 50 of countries ranked by GDP adjusted for PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...
Switzerland, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia -- none of them had colonies.
"Hungry"
That's not even a country (though can't argue that it would be a fun name).
Kind of ironic to hear the Democrats wringing their hands now out of "compassion" for the oppressed people...