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.