Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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Slavery overlaps with the Industrial Revolution by at least 100 years, and even longer in the colonies, such as India and Kenya. The resources needed for industrialism were dug up by slaves. It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism, when there are many cases where slavery seems to have helped industrialism. I think its best to look elsewhere for the roots of industrialism. Descartes and Newton helped form certain intellectual foundations, and the willingness of English peasants to fight and die for their religious beliefs lead to the end of the witch burning and heresy trials. That's important because a few years later Jethro Tull and Charles Townshend begin the Agricultural Revolution. Jethro Tull was 26 years old when he started working on his machines, in 1701. He was not necessarily smarter than all previous farmers, but he belonged to the first generation in history that had a guarantee that they could violate tradition and they would not be burned at the stake for it.

Location, geography, the availability of coal, lower water tables (a big deal in mining), climate, availability of harbours... the reasons behind the north industrializing before the south are far more complex than slavery.

Imho I think the use of coal for heat allowed colder climates to get going faster than those area where heat wasn't as needed. Shorter growing seasons may also have meant more available manpower. Scotland before England. New York before Mississippi. Europe before Africa.

>The resources needed for industrialism were dug up by slaves.

Not true, Britain had no slaves and it industrialized just fine. You have to feed,house and clothe slaves while "Free" people cost you nothing at all except the cost of labor. Room and board is a greater cost than just an hourly rate. Slavery inhibits industrialization, not enables it.

The term wage-slave doesn't appear to be in your lexicon. Child labor, too. Never mind slavery was officially abolished only half a century after the industrial evolution had started, which didn't even count for e.g. India. Never mind they owned India. I am sure the Irish will have a thing or two to say about the matter, anyway.

> It is tough to make the case that slavery impeded industrialism

Compare the free states of the Union vs the slave states of the Confederacy. The free states rapidly industrialized from 1800-1860, the slave states did not and pretty much did not advance economically at all.

If you read about the economics of this period you'll find that, as with most of history, the reality isn't this simple. A lot of Southern capital went into financing Northern industry, for example. It's difficult to neatly divide the nation's economy in this way as if they were two separate spheres, as much they as they may have want to think of themselves that way.

Not one southern city industrialized.

Investors tend to invest in things they know about and can keep an eye on, which tends to be local. Investment capital uniformly fleeing the slave states to the free ones suggests that investing in slave states was a bad investment.

In those days, different states were like different countries today.

> Not one southern city industrialized.

There's also the climate of the South to consider — until the invention of air-conditioning, factory work in the South would have been at a significant disadvantage. Malaria, too, was an issue within living memory.

People don't realise nowadays how very inhospitable warm climates can be.

And yet millions of people lived and worked there. Agricultural work is backbreaking.

The South didn't even have a shoe factory.

Really, how productive can a workforce be that can't read, that have to be forced to do anything, that will not contribute any improvements, that have to be guarded at all times, that will sabotage the work if they can get away with it, etc.?

How productive would you be if you were a slave?

Slavery is a terrible economic system when compared with free labor. It isn't remotely a surprise that free economies economically bury slave economies.

Right. Likewise with India and Kenya and a hundred other examples. It is the slavery in the colonies that allows the center to industrialize. The colonies send resources to the center. The center exports its goods to the colonies. The center also exports the unemployment it might otherwise face from rapidly increasing productivity. India was one of the wealthiest civilizations on Earth for thousands of years, but it is still recovering from what happened in the 1700s, when England industrialized and forced products into India at gunpoint.

Britain had no competition at the time. Slavery cannot compete with free labor.

> but it is still recovering from

I.e. slavery did not benefit the Indian economy, nor the Kenyan economy, etc. Neither industrialized.

The US economy did industrialize (except for the slave states), and did not rely on slave labor from other countries, either, and it grew to economic dominance.

I know there's a theory that the northern economy depended on the southern slave economy, but when it was cut off from the southern economy in 1860, it prospered while the slave economy crashed.

> I know there's a theory that the northern economy depended on the southern slave economy, but when it was cut off from the southern economy in 1860, it prospered while the slave economy crashed.

The Confederacy crashed economically because they tried to pull a 19th century equivalent of the Arab Oil Embargo, cutting off their main export crop in the hopes of compelling Europe to intervene. The Confederacy suffered from what we'd call in modern times the resource curse--ironically, one enabled entirely by industrialization.

"slavery did not benefit the Indian economy, nor the Kenyan economy, etc."

Right, obviously. The reason why Britain invaded is because they wanted India and Kenya to work for Britain. Slavery benefited Britain.

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