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Comment by skippyboxedhero | Hacker News Reader

Slave societies are generally poor. Africa's economy was largely slave-based until relatively recently (and still is the only place where you have active slave markets, the reason why slaves came from Africa was because it was the only place where there was a local slave industry, largely due to the trade into the Middle East), Brazil's slave trade was 10x larger than the US (the US never actually had a large first-generation slave population because mortality was so low and fertility so high), Caribbean the same, the Middle East the same, India the same.

There is a lot of research on this subject but it is worth remembering that slaves were capital that had a price too. So it wasn't "free labour" in any sense.

Most plantation owners didn't end up rich either, there were economies of scale and the price of cotton collapsed over the 19th century.

Over the long-term though, slave labour has typically inhibited economic development.

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In part because when labor is free you have less incentive to innovate;

American slavery in the U.S. South was threatened more by the invention of the cotton gin and the global floor for cotton prices dropping. This was diversified away somewhat with Tobacco, but still a major factor in the economics of slavery.

The sad part is that the US South was fearful of this economic reality - up to runaway slaves and illegal slave trade decimating the profit margins - which meant the powder keg for revolt was ready. But as we can see from the Southern "Tax" men stealing from the citizenry, the French less incentivised because of global cotton prices; the future in American slavery was futile.

I think you have the economic history of the cotton gin backwards there. The slave economy was much more tobacco-centric before the cotton gin, because even with slaves, cotton was too labor-intensive to be worth large scale agriculture before the cotton gin. The cotton gin is a good example of Jevons paradox, where making something more efficient (in this case, making cotton harvesting more labor-efficient) ends up increasing demand (in this case, of cotton-harvesting labor).

Whilst I agree with your point that slavery inhibits economic development, your points on the slave trade within Africa come off as revisionist. The transatlantic slave trade took off after the New Laws were passed and African slaves were adjusted to the climates plantations were in. I have never seen anything to suggest Africa was the only place with a local slave trade at the time, and it is definitely not the only place with active slave markets.

Just last week, a woman was arrested in Germany for practicing slavery whilst living back in Syria. It shouldn’t be hard to find news about people being sold on WhatsApp in the Middle East. BBC did a special on it. This isn’t even going into the obvious slavery, and the market for it, that persists even further East.

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