The Language of the Roman Empire

Re:The Language of the Roman Empire by lkrubner on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @03:31PM (#17085668)

Right. Likewise with India and Kenya and a hundred other examples. It is the slavery in the colonies that allows the center to industrialize. The colonies send resources to the center. The center exports its goods to the colonies. The center also exports the unemployment it might otherwise face from rapidly increasing productivity. India was one of the wealthiest civilizations on Earth for thousands of years, but it is still recovering from what happened in the 1700s, when England industrialized and forced products into India at gunpoint.

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Re:The Language of the Roman Empire by WalterBright on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @04:04PM (#17085959)

Britain had no competition at the time. Slavery cannot compete with free labor.

> but it is still recovering from

I.e. slavery did not benefit the Indian economy, nor the Kenyan economy, etc. Neither industrialized.

The US economy did industrialize (except for the slave states), and did not rely on slave labor from other countries, either, and it grew to economic dominance.

I know there's a theory that the northern economy depended on the southern slave economy, but when it was cut off from the southern economy in 1860, it prospered while the slave economy crashed.

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Re:The Language of the Roman Empire by jcranmer on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @05:53PM (#17086802)

> I know there's a theory that the northern economy depended on the southern slave economy, but when it was cut off from the southern economy in 1860, it prospered while the slave economy crashed.

The Confederacy crashed economically because they tried to pull a 19th century equivalent of the Arab Oil Embargo, cutting off their main export crop in the hopes of compelling Europe to intervene. The Confederacy suffered from what we'd call in modern times the resource curse--ironically, one enabled entirely by industrialization.

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Re:The Language of the Roman Empire by lkrubner on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @05:26PM (#17086644)

"slavery did not benefit the Indian economy, nor the Kenyan economy, etc."

Right, obviously. The reason why Britain invaded is because they wanted India and Kenya to work for Britain. Slavery benefited Britain.

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