Tag: Slavery

Do We Really Care Whether the Profits from American Slavery Were Reinvested to Spur Faster American Economic Growth or Not?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Brian Fennesey: “Gavin Wright keeping the slave-capitalism debate lively: Slavery was profitable to slaveholders but it kept the region underdeveloped and claims about its centrality to US economic growth are exaggerated! #DukeMonumentsSymposium…

…James DeWolf Perry: A tough argument to make. Slavery brought enormous wealth to the South. And slavery’s centrality to the U.S. economy is hard to deny: its products were a substantial fraction of U.S. economic output, and were vital to northern industrialization.

Slavery brought enormous wealth to white slaveholders. But they did not invest it in their country—they spent it. Thus slaveholder profits were not essential to boosting U.S. economic growth.

Slavery also brought substantial comfort to purchasers of cotton textiles and other slave-grown products. But here, again, most of this wealth went to boost the standard of living of those who directly benefitted, not to fuel faster economic growth.

The place where American slavery mattered for economic growth in Britain, New England, and the rest of the North Atlantic is indeed in the spur it provided to boosting investment in cotton textile technologies, and in the subsequent spillovers of the technologies developed from that experience elsewhere: practice making machine tools to make textile machinery meant that down the road the machine shops could make better machines, etc. But cotton textiles were only 1 of the Big Four sectors of the Industrial Revolution. The others were:

  • wool textiles,
  • locomotives and other uses of steampower, and
  • rails and other uses of iron were the others.

Plus there were important innovative sectors outside the Big Four as well.

Figure that 1/5 of the upward leap of the Industrial Revolution came from slavery. Hobsbawm said: “He who says industrialization says ‘cotton'”, but that it is only 1/5 of the word cloud—he who says “industrialization” says many other things too.

Perhaps the brutalization of American slaves turned a 50-year process into a 40-year process.

That said, cutting 10 years off of the time for industrialization ain’t chickenfeed.

And that said, that slavery was not “essential” to the Industrial Revolution makes the murder, torture, and torment of persons enslaved on the plantations look not better but worse. You can plead “but this horrible process created a brighter future for everyone” as a partial mitigation before the Bar of History. To plead “but it did not make that much difference in the long run—we lived high and the hog and did not pass any of the benefits down the generations” makes the slaveholder (and slave labor consumer) generations look worse, not better at all.

It mattered a lot for persons enslaved. It matters a lot for their descendants. It matters a lot because of their additional descendants who never got the chance to exist but would have otherwise. It does not matter less in any sense because people alive today are not principal profiteers from the peculiar institution of plantation slavery.

Must-Read: Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen: The Political Legacy of American Slavery

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Fruit of a badly-poisoned tree…

Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen: The Political Legacy of American Slavery: “We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South…

…in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. We show that these results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of contemporary racial threat. To explain the results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of political attitudes. Following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly freed African American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations.

Must-read: Chris Blattman: “Black Lives Matter, Economic History Edition”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Chris Blattman: Black Lives Matter, Economic History Edition: “‘I use the individual-level records from my own family…

…in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952-1965.

That is from Trevon Logan’s Presidential address to the National Economics Association.

Partly he calculates the productivity of his sharecropping ancestors relative to slave holding estates a century before (a persistent question in American economic history). But mainly he makes an argument for doing more qualitative interviews, which seems like an obvious point, except that systematic qualitative work is the exception in economic history (as it is in development economics):

That richer, fuller picture reveals that the work behind the estimates came to define the way that the Logan children viewed racial relations, human capital, savings, investment, and nearly every aspect of their lives. We learn not only about the picking process itself, but that chopping cotton may have been the most physically taxing aspect of the work. Similarly, the sale of cotton seed during the picking season was an important source of revenue for the family, and yet this economic relationship with the landowner was outside of the formal sharecropping contract. We also learn that it is impossible to divorce the work from its social environment{ an era in which Jim Crow, segregation, and other elements of overt racial oppression were a fact of life. Although none of the children has picked cotton in more than forty years, this experience continues to govern their daily lives and the way they interact with the world around them. Rather than being an item of the past, the work recorded in the cotton picking books continues to be a salient factor in their current economic decision-making.