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Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case.

Modern capitalists prefer seasonal labor for agriculture. They don't have to feed/clothe/house people year round, and have no personal investment. Seasonal migrant agriculture labor cheap and easily exploited, with little legal protection. Slaves, like domestic a nimals (reprehensible as that simily is), must be treated well enough to keep working productively. There is no such need with migrant labor. If they are abused or killed it is easy to sweep under the rug. There'll be new migrants available next year.

NOTE: I'm not saying slavery is good, or even better than migrant labor. They are both highly unethical if you consider how corporations treat migrant labor today.

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Go read a few slave narratives — Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography for one is great, extremely readable, and pretty short.

And just notice how often the writers mention not having enough food, or basic clothing. Then get back to us on the idea that slave owners would have taken even minimal care of slaves.

You’ve written how you think it ought to have worked. But that’s not how it actually worked.

Anecdote is not data.

Many types of slaves existed and still exist in the history of humanity.

The slaves around Julias Ceasar probably had a different life than the average native Columbus slave (they where almost all quickly worked to death genocide style and he was a total sadist).

We are talking about American slavery, no?

There is a different between enough food and feeling full. Most people want to eat enough to get fat. A slave would be given cheap food, enough that they can work. Starving a slave to death isn't a good use of them. However feeding them so much they get fat isn't economic as well.

Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).

> A slave would be given cheap food, enough that they can work. Starving a slave to death isn't a good use of them

You might want to check on accounts from e.g. Haiti where slaves' lives were considered very cheap and that's precisely why they were used for the dangerous labour around sugar production.

> Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).

How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is. What other side is there to present? The economic interests of the slaveowners?

There were lots of different slaves, with lots of different treatment. You cannot count a few examples and extrapolate to all slaves.

>How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is.

He can exaggerate how bad it was for one thing. It is well known that people's memories are not exact to what happened, and it is likely he would remember dramatic incidents and not the day to day reality.

Try reading "uncle tom's Cabin" - a book that was written with the intent to start the civil war to end slavery. Despite that intent to presents a picture of slavery that was in general much nicer for the slave owners.

Don't take anything of the above as statement that slavery was good. Only that it wasn't in general as bad as what you see on TV.

Does it make logical sense to abuse and weaken your own property?

If they were too harsh with slaves they'd spend a lot more time and energy managing their behavior. Even in prison privileges are given so they can be taken away. Slave owners probably treated their slaves well enough, in aggregate, that they were capable to work productively and did not have immediate cause for revolt. The slave owners had to live in close proximity to their slaves after all.

The Hollywood portrayals of slavery as essentially unrelenting cruelty and sadism don't make sense, except for on TV. Any farmer would have known that you don't get the best work out of your horses or mules by abusing and starving them. There's a knee point of optimal treatment for all labor arrangements. The EVIL fact that slaves were property of their masters does not change this.

The industrial revolution radically increased slavery.

Read the history of the cotton gin and then how steam power made larger transportation easier and expanded populations to consume cotton and tobacco. Industrially produced guns and other tools helped "manage" slaves and later prisoners.

Post-civil war, industrial prison system instituted chain gangs to recreate "legal" slavery and forced prison labor still exists in many states.

Not really. It increased some types of slavery as before steam power those parts you name were not economical. However slaves were a major way to grow food prior to the industrial revolution. Industry created machine that needed only a few trained crew to operate. That you only needed a few meant that the slave master could do all the work without having to watch the slaves (who did tend to rebel or not work hard if you didn't watch them closely). You couldn't have a lone slave run a machine in general because the slave not being watched would find it easy to run away - possibly with the machine.

The US south ended slavery with the civil war, but most places in the world had a peaceful end. It wouldn't have been peaceful if it was economical as the rich would have fought to keep it.

Slaves worked in a lot of crafts and services, not just field agriculture.

It's weird that you think that they had it better than migrant laborers.

Slaves had it way worse than migrant workers. But slaves costed owners more than migrant workers cost employers.

Seems like a citation would be useful there.

No citation but in times of inflation the reasoning makes sense to me: a slave would not earn a wage, but the owner would have to provide a roof/bed/food + pay for whatever transportation was needed to/from work + pay for healthcare in case the return on investment would be worth it (probably would?).

An (immigrant) worker gets none of that and might barely be able to get by even without counting the healthcare (in the US).

Sounds to me like a slave might indeed be cheaper in some/many situations than a minimum wage worker. I'm not convinced either way.

A migrant is more expensive when you have work to do. However a migrant is free when you have no work - they go elsewhere. A slave you need to feed year round, even when it is raining and thus you cannot work.

A slave also needs more management. Migrants and free workers will get themselves to the job and in general work. A slave has no motivation to work harder so you need some form of "slave driver" to keep them working. If you try to move your slaves around like migrants move, then you need a manager to go with the slaves to keep them working - migrants manage themselves.

A slave is cheaper if you have a lot of repetitive, low-skill, year round work that must be done by hand. However most of that type of labor is easy for the industrial revolution to automate.

You added a note to try to cover yourself but no, slavery is not comparable, not the same as migratory workers. Migratory workers have it very hard & it's to the shame of America how we treat those vulnerable people at our borders. For migratory workers, generally no one kidnaps their children, rapes them as part of their job, forces them to carry their children to term, murders them, sold them off. It's basically one step away from the classic "black people had it better as slaves" comment.

> It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case.

…except slavery still exists all over the place in industrialized countries? There’s nothing incompatible between industrialization and slavery, as myriad historic and contemporary examples have shown.

https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-...

1) in the USA slavery would have eventually ended due to the economics. Steam engines are cheap compared to human manual labor.

2) Migrant labor is the replacement for slave labor in the USA. These are workers who do not legally exist and thus are subject to the worst of exploitations by employers and criminal concerns.

3) Human beings of all races have a pretty bad record of how they may treat other races/tribes/outgroups. Genghis Kahn killed and raped so many people that he altered the genetic profile of humans. African tribes routinely enslaved each other. Arabs took white slaves. People can be dicks. The list goes on and on: cruelty is a part of the universal human condition.

As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race, even if that wasn't the complete reason for the Civil war.

Steam engines were widespread for half a century before the abolition of slavery. Your argument here is just not coherent.

Not in a form that could replace slaves. The first traction engines were not until around the civil war time, and those were not practical for many tasks that slaves did. Steam trains did exist, but the idea of running a train engine off of tracks didn't really come around until the 1850s - just before the war - and those were very limited machines that couldn't work most soils.

Even at that, the steam engine was in the process of replacing slaves for many tasks. There were just a lot of tasks left that the steam engine wasn't yet practical to replace slaves - but that would have happened anyway.

> As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race

"free slaves of another race"? Some of those going to war were people of that race. On both sides.

This is also a bit ahistorical as Lincoln was willing to allow slavery in order to keep the union. It was really the south who chose to go to war in order to guarantee slavery would stay; the north chose to go to war in order to keep the union. The slavery issue was used by the north, initially, to keep the anti-slavery UK from siding with the south.

Eh, the US went to a civil war because half of the country (the south) started attacking national (i.e. union) armories/forts.

Of course there was some lead up to that but the actual flashpoint is that the south started it and they didn't do so to free northern slaves. Northern congressmen were not pushing for any bills that removed slavery from the south and etc; there wasn't an imminent (i.e. during Lincoln's presidency) existential threat that the North would end slavery in the South except the one the South manufactured.

But I thought it was the war of Northern aggression? :P

Yeah, that's even better than what I stated.

> free slaves of another race

And I forgot to mention that some of those slaves were blonde-haired and blue-eyed with skin lighter than most Caucasians. Maternal inheritance of slavery rule. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/white-slave-children-photog...

The industrial revolution predated the abolition of slavery in the US by decades. Indeed, one of the (not very high minded!) gripes of the northern states was that their industrial economies had to compete on an uneven playing field, against states with free labor.

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