An East African Kingdom Changed T Roosevelt and the Course of American Democracy
politico.com
politico.com
Before the arrival of Europeans in the region, Buganda was an expanding, "embryonic empire".[12] It built fleets of war canoes from the 1840s to take control of Lake Victoria and the surrounding regions and subjugated several weaker peoples. These subject peoples were then exploited for cheap labor.[12] The first Europeans to enter the Kingdom of Buganda were British explorers John Hanning Speke and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton while searching for the headwaters of the Nile in 1862. They found a highly organized political system which was marred, however, by the ongoing practice of mass human sacrifice estimated at 800 persons annually.
OP then changed gears to include completely different reasons for death to make it seem like that made human sacrifice no different. Textbook whataboutism.
This argument is generally used by people to defend bad institutions. I've heard Confederate apologists makes the exact same argument you have here ("Look at the Union treatment of Native Americans. All sides in the Civil War were immoral.").
There are gradations of bad behavior. Treating bad behavior as if it's all the same just encourages a race to the bottom.
Humans have a strange thirst for blood, whether its for religion or money.
So I wouldn't say it was particularly common in the 19th century.
Not sure about Buganda, but here is a quote from wikipedia:
> Subjugating weaker peoples for cheap labor, Buganda grew into a powerful "embryonic empire"
Ethiopia is an interesting example - since it wasn't colonized in the 1800's, it didn't have colonial rulers who tried to end the practice, so it was one of, if not the, last polities on the continent to end slavery. The League of Nations kept pressuring it to end the institution, and it kept dragging its feet. Slavery was only abolished after Italy invaded and took over the country (Italy used the existence of slavery in Ethiopia as one of the pretexts for the invasion).
If you read historical research on the ending of slavery in Buganda, it's similar to what I said. It was pushed by the British, often against intense local opposition.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade
In fact, almost every region in the world practiced slavery at some point or another [1]. So how come the relatively small fraction of slaves (e.g. the US is only 12% Black) had such outsized economic benefits for the US and Europe, that didn't manifest in any other instance of slavery?
And the US also waged an expensive and bloody war to end slavery. Did we take into account how the lack of such a war would have helped their economy? Or are we only tallying the economic benefits of slavery, and ignoring its costs?
Microsoft sold mobile phones, just like Apple does. How come they didn't benefit so much from it?
In short, the Arabian slave trade did benefit, but it was on the way out by the time the Europeans got interested in colonial slave labor. Don't make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world got involved in the slave trade then got out of it at the same time.
Slow indeed:
It is estimated that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, 1.4 million slaves were compelled to make the trek through the Sahara [..] 1.2 million slaves are estimated to have been sent through the Sahara in the 19th century. In the 1830s, a period when slave trade flourished, Ghadames was handling 2,500 slaves a year. Even though the slave trade was officially abolished in Tripoli in 1853, in practice it continued until the 1890s. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade
Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast). - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
Nevertheless, "slow indeed" is correct, and the Zanj rebellion didn't have much of an effect on North African slave trading.
However, the original question was why Arabian slavery was not as economically potent for Arabs as transatlantic slavery was for European colonies. The answer I'm trying to give is twofold: 1: it was, just vastly earlier than European colonialism, and 2: by the time the transatlantic slave market was established, the Zanj rebellion and other events had had a deleterious effect on slaveowning culture in Arabia. The question as phrased assumes everyone was getting rich from slavery at the same time, which is not the case.
Europe as a continent had already diverged from the rest of the world before the slave trade. The divergence of the UK from Asia began before 1500: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita....
While the desire to pin European wealth to the slave trade is understandable, it’s self-evidently incorrect. For one thing Britain wouldn’t have ended the slave trade when it did if its economy was built on it. For another, European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany, ended up becoming wealthier than countries like Spain who did. Same is true for free states versus slave states in America. As to a third thing, the end of slavery wasn’t accompanied by major economic hardship in either the US or Britain. You can look at a graph of US GDP per capita and struggle to identify when the civil war happened if you don’t have axis labels.
As your own source states, focusing on this single number is overly reductive:
> Any indirect linkage effects are not included in the quantitative estimates presented here.
> The growth of economic activities directly associated with the Triangular Trade or the American plantation complex would in turn have contributed to the development of other parts of the economy, through backward and forward linkages to a host of other value-chains. For example, a growth in demand for maritime shipping associated with the Triangular Trade most certainly had effects upon the development of the financial, insurance, and shipbuilding industries. It has also been argued that these factors helped drive the development of docks in the ports of Europe.
> In addition, it has been suggested that this would include fundamental shifts in institutions and economic structures. The growth of the Atlantic trade may thus have had other important consequences, for example, through contributing to institutional change in Britain, as Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have famously argued.
> Activities of this magnitude can hardly be dismissed as marginal to the British economy at the time.
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> European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany
What? Germany was absolutely involved in colonialism. Slavery perhaps not in an official state capacity given the lateness of its formation relative to the Trans-Atlantic trade, but people from the region certainly were.
> Same is true for free states versus slave states in America.
Again this is overly dismissive of the economic interplay between North and South. The Northern textile industry was reliant on cotton grown in the South, and the South provided an important outlet for Northern goods.
[1]
> As for the lack of a home market, southern consumers generated a significant demand for northern-made shoes, clothing, locomotives, steamboats, farm implements--to name just a few products--that encouraged such promoters as Gregg and De Bow to believe that a market for southern manufactures existed if it could only be exploited.
[1] Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 97
You have to look at the counter-factual scenario of what would have happened instead. And we kind of know what the counter-factual scenario looks like because European countries ended slavery and their economies didn’t collapse.
The “indirect effects” theory is so wrong that even Jacobin, who are actually socialists, wrote an article debunking it: https://jacobin.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capi...
You’re correct, Germany did have a colonial empire before WWI, but only for about 30 years. It was inconsequential to Germany’s economic development.
Thanks for the link, very interesting. Some quotes from it..
"By the end of the eighteenth century, the British part of the Triangular Trade alone incorporated economic activities equivalent to around 5% of the British gross domestic product. If we add the activities in the American plantation complex, as well as the industries in Britain directly dependent upon this (either for inputs of raw materials or for markets for output), the estimated figures show that economic activities equivalent to around 11% of British GDP were directly involved in or associated with the Triangular Trade and the American plantation complex. Activities of this magnitude can hardly be dismissed as marginal to the British economy at the time."
Note that this 11% is only at the end of the 18th century. Just a snapshot of a trade that started in the 15th century.
"The transatlantic slave trade did have intimate connections to several European economies, but the consequences have also been fiercely debated."
They say "fiercely debated", you say "wildly incorrect". Do you actually read the sources you link to?
"One important reason for this focus on Britain was no doubt the publication of Eric Williams’ much-cited book Capitalism and slavery, first published in 1944."
Someone actually wrote a whole book about it! That's how deep the subject is. I remember watching a 1 hour lecture on you tube, where this professor argued that the trans-Atlantic slave trade is actually what made Europe and economic powerhouse. Something about a combination of good timing and location. If you have any alternative theory of what powered Europe's economic growth in the 18th century, let me know. My take, it was not much different from what powered the roman empire and many other economic powerhouses going thousands of years back.
"The assumptions underlying such counterfactual models can be quite controversial. For instance, the American plantation complex might seem unimportant as a supplier of cotton and other plantation crops, if one assumes a very high elasticity of supply of these crops in other parts of the world, and declining costs of maritime transport. In his recent book Empire of cotton, Sven Beckert has essentially argued against making such an assumption. In his view, the coercion involved in the expansion of the American plantation complex was the key ‘that opened fresh lands and mobilized new labor, becoming the essential ingredient of the emerging empire of cotton – and thus an essential ingredient in forging industrial capitalism’."
Another book! This one is more about America though, and the influence of the cotton industry, powered by slaves. Not sure how those GDP calculations from the 1800s you quoted were arrived at, but I'm certain an "essential ingredient in forging industrial capitalism" is not 5%.
The growth in 19th century is much more explosive, and I would say that the primary reason is widespread use of coal for energy. Not being dependent on the power of muscles (and wind) was a game changer for Europe. And absence of that capability put a hard limit on Roman economic power. You just don't gain much economic efficiency from burning wood and working people and animals to death.
Economic development in countries that were able to harness steam power was enormous regardless of their slavery laws (some notable industrial hotspots like Prussia never had slavery to begin with). Countries like Portugal and Spain, with their old colonial empires, were much more stagnant.
Generally, slavery only sort-of works in agriculture and possibly mining. Anything more value-added requires voluntary, educated workforce. Nazi and Soviet slave-powered industries were extremely inefficient, sabotage was a constant problem, even though punishments were heavy.
That is because Rich nations have the luxury to turn their attention and resources to the sciences and arts, once the basic necessities of life have been taken care of. Europe hardly made any progress during its so called "dark ages".
Yes, slavery as a mass industry became economically obsolete due to advances in science. That does not mean it was not very lucrative and beneficial to the those economies on the right side of it while it lasted. A study of human history is just one of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, until the next revolution comes about.
The correlation between contemporary richness and former slavery is pretty weak. Many innovative countries like Ireland, Finland, Estonia, Taiwan or South Korea used to be actually subjugated to bigger empires. Meanwhile, no one considers Portugal, a major global power during the slavery era, rich or innovative.
Even in the US, the Deep South was technologically backward, which was one of the reasons why they actually lost the Civil War. If you have servants working on you, what is your motivation to study, tinker and innovate? Similar countries of today (such as Saudi Arabia) mostly spend their own loot of slavery on conspicuous consumption.
>> Europe hardly made any progress during its so called "dark ages".
I recommend you reading a history book or two before making such claims.
You can find one or two professors to stand behind literally any point. But that theory doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If the slave trade is “actually” what was responsible for European wealth, how did Britain end it almost overnight without any significant impact on its economy? It’s not like the slave trade was in a natural decline in 1807 when the British banned it. It had peaked just a couple of decades before.
> If you have any alternative theory of what powered Europe's economic growth in the 18th century, let me know
The rise of strong central governments that could protect trade routes, and the early part of the Industrial Revolution.
Not just one or two, the article you linked to clearly states that it is hotly debated by economic and history experts. The professor is an expert on the topic, are you? One thing all experts agree on, is that Africa was, a very exploited continent. And many believe it still is. How else would the worlds richest continent in terms of natural resources also have the worlds poorest populations? Europe benefited from the African slave trade, you say "just a tiny bit", I say significantly, but on that we both agree.
> If the slave trade is “actually” what was responsible for European wealth, how did Britain end it almost overnight without any significant impact on its economy?
They ended it at the height of the British Empire. When they had colonized huge swathes of Africa. It did not impact Britain's economy since the direct exploitation of african peopls was replaced by the direct exploitation of africas natural resources. Colonialism is just another form of slavery.
> The rise of strong central governments that could protect trade routes, and the early part of the Industrial Revolution
That's right. And one of the most lucrative trade routes in human history that they protected, controlled and profited from was the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/277585.The_Great_Lakes_o...
You also say "enslaving each other", but from what was written so far it seems to have been mostly Buganda enslaving its neighbors - they didn't take turns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_Stat...
"This nation is a copy of a Marvel concept, but predates it" is also a really awkward framing.
And calling Roosevelt's speeches "cynical" because they were critical was ridiculous, too.
Honestly, the article smacked of someone who didn't know much except pop culture, read about this somewhere else, cribbed a lot of language, and pretended to know something about history.