America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were the exploiters.
Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war?
If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA?
Native Americans had slaves:
> "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric sources and 20th century ethnographic works indicates that predatory warfare, or preying on other groups for plunder and captives, was engaged in by virtually all Northwest Coast societies."
> "Source after source notes, either through specific instances or in general terms, and with almost monotonous iteration, that within this large area a prime motive for raiding was to gain captives for enslavement."
(From: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3773392?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...)
Why weren't those people rich?
If you think slavery was instrumental to any rich nation getting rich, I suggest you read a lot more history, and look at who had the most slaves in history, and who has the most slaves today.
Because the North had a diversified, industrialized economy, while the South specialized in cotton production.
But the North never could have diversified in this way if it weren't for the South. First because slave-grown cotton was a major source of capital for the overall US economy - it provided over half of all US export earnings. Second, because the demand for textile factories, meat processing plants, insurance, shippers etc. in the over-specialized South is precisely what created a market for the North to diversify into.
This is on top of the fact that the North itself had slaves for a long time, from initial settlement to abolition many decades later.
> Other findings of the NHC, such as the assertion that the Cotton South was the primary force driving national expansion in the antebellum period, are neither original nor correct.
As you say:
> it provided over half of all US export earnings.
This is not true. It may(?) have been over half of US exports, by some measure, but cotton was definitely not over half of earnings. Per Olmstead 2016:
> North’s fellow new economic historians promptly assaulted his thesis. It was widely recognized that cotton was leading U.S. export in the antebellum period. But exports represented less than one-tenth of total income (Kravis 1972). Figure 2 graphs the values of cotton exports as a share the value of U.S. merchandise exports, and then both U.S. cotton and merchandise export values as shares of GDP.30 As the bottom line makes clear, cotton exports were a very small share of national product—less than 5 percent over much of the of the antebellum period (Engerman and Gallman 1983, p. 28).
Emphasis mine. It goes on:
> Perhaps more surprising, given the NHC narrative, is that in 1839 and 1849 corn, not cotton, was even the South’s leading crop in terms of value! Some familiarity with historical data might have moderated the sensational claims of the NHC literature.
If you're interested in the topic, I suggest you read it, especially the section "The Economic History Slavery Debates". You should also read the sections relating about diversification if you have a strong belief in the over-specialized south.
https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/...
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.
I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.
> Native Americans had slaves:
The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.
[0]: https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...
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.
However, if your intention is to dispute the claim that slavery was immensely beneficial to the development of the American economy, or to suggest that the morality of American slavery was somehow mitigated by other historical examples of slavery, I strongly disagree. I think in general this mentality is incredibly disrespectful. Acknowledging the role played in our success by the (unwilling) sacrifice made by millions of slaves and Native Americans is the very least that we can do.
I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it?
And since we don't have access to a world in which the US didn't have slavery, the best we can do to get information is to compare to other somewhat similar societies. Other places in the Americas with (and without) slave economies seem extremely relevant.
One comparison not mentioned so far: The cotton mills of England spun a lot of slave-grown cotton, just like the ones of New England. It was debated at the time how essential this was. And the civil war blockade provided a useful natural experiment, in which it turned out not to take very long to switch to cotton from other places, like Egypt.
The moral questions don't seem tightly coupled to the economic ones. Would anyone claim that slavery in what's now Haiti (or Brazil) was less of an evil act than slavery in the US, on the grounds that these places are poorer now? Or more evil, on the same grounds? And if not, then why is disputing the economic benefit of slavery in any way taken to be disrespectful of suffering?
The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less white Americans should feel owed to pay back. So I think there’s a significant moral cost to this argument, and yes I think it’s disrespectful. But again, it’s factually controversial as well.
I had also made a variety of significant points which GP failed to respond to, instead focusing only on a hyper-literal interpretation of one subset of my argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that England, another state with a horrific history of exploitation and colonialism, was also guilty of slavery, is hardly exculpatory for the US. Whether slavery was economically beneficial in every single historical example is a separate question from whether it was beneficial to the United States.
My argument re English cotton mills was much more focused than you credit. It was about how rapidly they switched from slave-grown cotton to non-slave cotton, once there was a blockade, not some denial that they consumed slave-grown cotton before this.
Something like that did in fact happen -- the post-civil war period coincided with the Long Depression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression), which some economic historians would date between 1873 and 1896.
However, the Long Depression was at least in part a global phenomenon, and with any economic story there are many confounding factors. (And on top of all of this, nations did not keep rigorous economic statistics at the time anyway.)
I agree that the expansion to west was facilitated by forced migration of native americans from their homelands in a process that was borderline genocidal.
The fun part is about american industrialization - quite lot of it was based on directly stealing the IP of european industrialists (i.e not respecting their patents). This is quite fun in the sense how vocal US is now in upkeeping IP laws.