> the big boost was started by the industrial revolution

Exactly. Now, lets look at some of the causes of the first Industrial Revolution

First, large tracts of lands in Britain, largely held in the commons, were stolen from the peasantry and given to private individuals and landlords, as part of the Enclosure movement. This forced the peasants to look for work in cities en masse, providing cheap labor for the capitalists.

Second, Britain's African Slave trade constituted a big part of the early accumulation of capital that made the revolution possible.

Cheap cotton from the colonization of India as well that produced by the slave labor in North America fueled the textile industry, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution. India's share of the world economy fell from 20% to less than 5%, chiefly because the capital required for industrialization was siphoned off to England

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Your first point is interesting. People gloss over how disruptive the industrial Revolution was, and the downward pressure it put on the wages of farm workers.

I'm not convinced by your second one. Why didn't states like Portugal industrialise equally quickly? Or within America, why didn't states with more slaves grow faster? Germany has no history of slavery, and the same is true for modern industrialisation transitions like South Korea and China.

The topic has been studied in great detail in economic history. The consensus seems to be that however horrible slavery was, it wasn't fundamental to industrialisation.

Admittedly without support, I'd assume that slavery held back southern productivity.

If you are making profit to support a lavish lifestyle relative to your local peers and (crucially) there is no free market value of your laborers' labor, then what incentive do you have to apply innovation?

Some (cotton gin), but certainly less than a free (in all senses of the word) labor market where a shortage of workers leads to increased wages and a push towards mechanization.

> Admittedly without support, I'd assume that slavery held back southern productivity. If you are making profit to support a lavish lifestyle relative to your local peers and (crucially) there is no free market value of your laborers' labor, then what incentive do you have to apply innovation?

I agree. It is my understanding that the Romans were in a good position to develop a usable steam engine, but never had enough motivation to do so, because slave labor was cheaper.

  Germany has no history of slavery

We'll just conveniently ignore the war years, gotcha.

That is stupid sophistry. In looking at an economy, comparing economic models, forced labor during 4-5 war years (especially a war which turned out to be a big loss and destruction of the country) is different than institutionalized serfdom/slavery over generations.

That's because when l the other empires where getting going Germany was a set of small disunited sates.

Also take a look at what happened in the Sud west if you think Colonial Germany didn't have slaves

> First, large tracts of lands in Britain, largely held in the commons, were stolen from the peasantry and given to private individuals and landlords, as part of the Enclosure movement. This forced the peasants to look for work in cities en masse, providing cheap labor for the capitalists.

A very interesting related book that I've read about that period and which I'd recommend to everyone generally interested in economic and social history is E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Work...). I'm generally leaning on the right side of politics and economics (I'm a sympathizer of both Bentham and Benjamin Constant, who are not receiving very kind words in this book), but I found it super interesting and I find it intellectual honest to try and and understand opinions (and related facts) coming from multiple sides of the story.

> Cheap cotton […] fueled the textile industry, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution.

It's always been my understanding that _wool_ had been the early carrier of the industrial revolution? That by the time cotton entered that picture, the revolution was well underway?

One might consider that if Enclosure did not increase total food production productivity per person, then the peasants would have had to just keep working the land like they did before. I'm not saying the peasants had better lives as industrial workers than as feudal farmer workers (they probably did not), but maybe in the long run more people will have better lives. Same problem today with automation.

I am not very receptive to those kinds of argument, arguing for widescale criminal/immoral acts today to justify a better future. Sounds very "Final Solution"-esque to me. And everytime this argument is used to justify an action in the present, it is much weaker as it presents merely a "possible" better future. However, you are applying an after the fact justification. There are many actions that justified themselves on the basis of a better future, but failed to deliver.

> for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth.

Two hundred years of slavery was not a major driver of economic growth?

Edit: Serious question, rephrased: do economic historians really not consider slavery a major driver of growth? If so, that would be highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the free labor of ~10 million people over two centuries, in an economy that was almost entirely agricultural.

Normally the story is that you need certain institutions to make it work.

Rule of law (contracts, low official corruption), absence of arbitrary confiscation risks (ie the King is not going to suddenly come and grab your stuff), unfettered movement of goods/people/ideas. Generic ideas that allow you to compare across societies.

I actually studied economics, and the explanation of how growth arrived does not normally rely on slaves. It tends to focus more on the advent of early parliamentary government (Glorious Revolution), presence of coal in northern England, and advancement of science and technology.

There's no absolutes in economic history though, and you might well find an argument that the triangular trade aided the industrial revolution. That's more of a vignette that explains why England in particular might have prospered, rather than an explanation of how growth gets started in general.

I've got a degree in economics as well. There are a few more big ones, including the advent of the joint stock company (or more generally, the ability to effectively pool capital) and the common law, specifically the ability to enforce business contracts. Those two are fundamental.

This is a good point, under the rubric "institutions girdling trust".

Quite relevant as a set of innovations in the time when people started having to do business with strangers, particularly ones with different ecological positions. You can imagine having lived in agricultural societies there would be a big question of how exactly you're going to have a business relationship with say a factory owner or delivery company.

JSC, exchanges, (perhaps central banking as well) and various encounters with credit issues worked out a certain way in the UK, and innovations were copied across many other societies.

Didn't the UK mainly copy them from the Netherlands?

Another thread is that a lot of ingredients originated in different places in Europe, thanks to political fragmentation.

- Mass production: Venetian arsenal

- Central Bank: Sweden

- The word Bourse: a certain family in Belgium

- Political philosophy: lots of places

- Coal and steel production, factories: Northern France, Belgium

- Religious freedom: rather bloody wars still in living memory

An economy is about the volume of cashflow (value flow), not magnitude of wealth. If you have all the money in the world, you will find there is nothing you can buy.

While a large number of, not free but very low cost, laborers will build individual wealth for the small percentage of the population who use them, those same laborers do not participate in the economy. So you end up with very large supply and very little demand, little or no reason to innovate, and a stalled engine of growth.

Slavery, or even low wage workforce is bad even from the point of view of entirely selfish actors. It erodes the market eventually killing the entire economy.

The lesson is, if you want to get rich don't reduce the cost of your labor force, increase the value of your production.

This basically sums up the debate to me. Great summary.

Not an economist, but...

I don't think that there is any doubt that slavery provided a great deal of the early economic growth in the American south. (Weirdly, I was just reading an article that suggested that slavery itself did not catch on in the Virginia colony until like 60 years after it was founded because slaves cost more than indentured servants, but didn't live any longer.)

However, if you combine the fact that the southern economy was based on labor intensive agriculture (indigo, tobacco, and cotton) with the presence of cheap slave labor prevented the southern economy from industrializing, which limited its growth during and after the industrial revolution.

An amusing note from the chapter: between 1620 and 1660 (?), the Virginia government continually re-passed laws requiring everyone to plant at least two acres of corn. Apparently, most didn't want to take the minimal time away from their tobacco crops, in spite of the fact that they were frequently starving.

It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.

This is true, but most of the economic historians I am aware of also acknowledge that America wouldn't have been in the position to leverage industrialization that it was without the economic driver of slavery. Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.

The slave holding states are now the poorest and were under-industrialized even during the Civil war.

The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative.

Not really difficult to disentangle.

And theres Canada.

>Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.

Whereas claiming they can't be disentangled is obviously disinterested.

Slavery was the rule, not the exception in the world at the time. The African kingdoms mostly practiced it, the Arabs were infamous for it, Mexico ended slavery in the 1830s after American industrialization was well underway, Russia didn't truly end serfdom until around 1900 as I recall, and then you have India's caste system, so only China is left without slavery in some form? But were they? And why didn't all of these countries industrialize?

Possibly because they didn't have the large amount of valuable raw materials to process, the way England did from its slaveholding colonies?

If you think slavery was the main, or even a large driver of industrial growth, you need to explain the extreme lack of industry in places where slavery was common versus places where there was no slavery. E.g., New England versus the Carolinas, etc.

Northern manufacturing bought cotton from slave plantations, yes. As did British mills.

However, you'll note that in the absence of southern cotton during the Civil War, these textile mills did not shut down or become unprofitable, they switched to alternate sources of cotton.

Slaves were expensive, not free (not to say they werent a contributing factor)

Expensive compared to what? Since this idea is a little counter-intuitive, can you suggest a search or link?

From this [0] I can only conclude that owners were paying for value and the price did go up over time, as did the price of cotton, but it looks like it was a good deal.

[0] https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php

Im not saying it wasnt a good investment for them (im sure it was), but it costs a lot of money not only to buy slaves, but to feed and take care of them.

> Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains.

To be fair, there are few if any countries with the scale of stolen/free land and enslaved labor as in US history.

You'd have to look at the European 'colonies' for both. The US of course was the first colony to become independent -- meaning an end to it's profits being extracted for the home country, and instead re-invested locally.

So I'd say there are basically no other countries with close to the scale of profits built from stolen land and enslaved labor, and then not extracted for a colonial home country overseas.

And while the industrial revolution wasn't a distinct U.S. advantage, the post-WW2 period gave the U.S. a near monopoly on industrial production. Most factories across Europe and Asia were destroyed in the war.