As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common cynical refrain that the current level of abundance would be impossible without slavery.
There are many many places where there has been slavery throughout the years, and they have not ended up richer for it. The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. Brazil, who imported double the amount of slaves as the US, is poorer. Northern Europe, not known for their abundance of slaves, is wealthier.
Similarly with colonialism - that's something that is only possible once your society is already rich and powerful enough to go around and dominate others. Colonialism was not a huge success for England when you look at how much it cost. It was great for national pride and as a symbol of their "greatness" however.
Cheap imported labor can definitely help parts of an economy - but remember that many people lose their jobs when labor like that is imported - not necessarily granting them upward mobility, and the ones from whom the labor has been imported are more likely to be better off than they were.
Northern Europe didn't import a lot of slaves but they sure as hell benefitted financially from the slave trade.
> Colonialism was not a huge success for England when you look at how much it cost. It was great for national pride and as a symbol of their "greatness" however.
The motivations for colonizing were primarily economic. Do you think the belgian congo was created to satisfy king leopold's fondness for cutting off hands too? The idea that colonialism is some kind of beneficent force that exists to civilize savages is painfully condescending
Since the north is more rich than the south, that's supposed to be an example of how they weren't enriched from slavery? They both benefited tremendously from slavery, ending when they fought a devastating war over it. A slavery based economy does not transition well into a world where slavery is illegal. Not to mention that a lot of the poor people in the south are literally the slaves and their descendants.
I disagree. The European colonial period started in the 15th Century[1]. It established the wealth and power of those nations for almost half a millennium following. The main enabler was not power and wealth, but technology (sailing ships)
> Colonialism was not a huge success for England when you look at how much it cost. It was great for national pride and as a symbol of their "greatness" however.
Again, I'm not sure is correct. By 1914, European colonial powers controlled 84% of the globe[1]. Effectively the only competition was other colonial powers and colonialism demonstrated itself as effective to achieve economic power through (ruthless) acquisition and exploitation of global resources.
As we should understand rather well, sometimes technology is power.
Does this analysis account for the fate of the former slaves and their descendants? I think part of the "wealth" of a society built on these things is leaving those effects as an externality. That doesn't really work when the people who were oppressed are freed and live among you.
European nations who strip mined the rest of the world never really had to account for this head-on, since the most visible exploitation was safely far away.
I'm not convinced that citing economies in decline with historic abuse of slavery is evidence that it isn't a requirement to some of the degrees of wealth we see now. If an entire economy was based around an assumption was that a bunch of free exploited labor like slavery would exist indefinitely then it disappeared over night and no transition strategy existed for that economy or that economy was further tied to slavery... then it's completely possible to see economic decline. Meanwhile, one could have seen the writing on the wall that slavery was gone and moved their resources accumulated off the back of slavery elsewhere and been more successful.
Colonialism is a lot more complicated because there are more inherent costs that could offset the benefits from an economic perspective so its pretty difficult to measure. Slavery is pretty much a guaranteed 'win' from a business perspective, after all, automation of processes with cheap reliable machines is most businesses current wet dream. I'm not saying slavery is a 'good' thing (it's absolutely not), I'm just saying a bunch of cheap ways to create services/goods you can then sell or accumulate seem like a clear way to accumulate/capture wealth. Slavery was one such mechanism abused in the past (and even today, really).
> The interdependency between North and South was more than the direct connection between mass production of cheap cotton in the South, picked by enslaved people, and the success of northern textile mills. Recently, historians of American capitalism argued that slavery was even more tightly connected with the modernizing national and global economy. Above all that the U.S. domestic slave trade, worth perhaps $440m in total and moving more enslaved people (about 750,000) since 1790 than the middle passage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was crucial in the westward movement of investment together with the development of new financial products including securities, bonds, and mortgages. These historians have revealed how deeply committed many nineteenth century banks, especially in New York, were to the continued expansion of slavery.
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slav...
The south had slavery, because it was massively profitable. They did not done it for fun and giggles. Owners fought to keep slavery multiple times, because they wealth was in slaves and in what slaves produced. The slave owning families were the richest and most powerful.
Same with colonialism. It was not done out of boredom, it was done because resources you get from all of it.
Both of these persist for many generations post slavery. We are still dealing with them in the form of everything from police violence to far right and far left performative extremist ideologies re-enacting the drama.
I disagree with the people who say slavery is responsible for our wealth. We would be much, much wealthier and far less dysfunctional as a culture had it never existed.
One of the more intriguing ideas I’ve run across is that total slavery abolition is a major contributing factor to the industrial revolution by pricing all labor and incentivizing automation.
I wonder if Egypt and Rome would have industrialized and the solar system would look like the world of The Expanse now had slavery been abolished in the ancient world.
Slavery dwindled away in England around the same time and was abolished in 1833 right before the industrial revolution really went white hot.
I should have mentioned the connection was a hypothesis. It's also possible that causation goes the other way and industrialization led to abolition by reducing demand for slaves. It's easier to make moral progress when it doesn't cost very much, which is why in our current society you see a whole lot of very inexpensive "corporate woke" virtue signaling but massive pushback if someone mentions the word "union" or "increasing the minimum wage."
Which of these was responsible for China's rise from poverty?
It's certainly true that there are other important factors and I don't think the parent poster's list is exhaustive, but these are crucial factors in China's current rise.
Slavery: we know there are factories inside their "reeducation camps"
Colonialism: Internally, Han Chinese are encouraged to migrate & take over areas of the country where other ethnics groups have traditionally been the majority. Abroad, China is involved in the modern form of colonialism by having direct influence in other countries via economic control.
Cheap imported labour: Definitely cheap labour and I'd say it's a large enough country to consider internal migration as regionally imported labour, with millions migrating from the countryside to factory cities.
It’s known that the use of slavery or slave labor stunts growth rather than enhances it because rather than innovating you use “subsidized”manual labor while others are innovating and progressing and using less expensive labor (mechanization, automation).
China’s policies are probably the largest force for human happiness in the last two decades simply because of the sheer scale of people uplifted from poverty through industrialization.
The fact that they’re a totalitarian dictatorship means that they stand opposed to us but they are not incompetent.
China’s regime is ridiculously popular for a reason: It’s the economy, stupid.
And China setup those "camps" and had a local GDP stagnation. Before the camps there was double digit growth every year and then terror attack came and everything went downhill.
- Chinese sweatshops
- Chinese "investments" in africa
- Chinese anexation of surrounding territories
In addition, these people made a calculus where staying in their ancestral homes meant certain poverty and moving to the city meant immediate increase in income as well as better prospects for the future. The drawback is/was poor working conditions, but I’m not sure they are worse than those back in their an ancestral homelands.
You're undermining your own argument. Those things, collectively, were the norm for most of human history, not that "short window of time", so something else must have happened that made people optimistic about hard work yielding the fruits of a better life (however you want to define that).
If you think American slavery was unique, you need to get your money back for you education. The Romans had a special tool to knock out the teeth of slaves so they could be better abused sexually. The N. African kingdoms castrated their slaves so that they would be more docile. There are a plethora of horror stories from history, because that was the norm. Just like it is in the norm in nature for the strong to take from the weak.
What we have today is a brief moment of respite, but it sure looks like a hell of a lot of people want to regress to the mean.
This is tautological. Why? Because I'm 99% certain that the only definition you have of "the strong" and "the weak" is based on who takes from whom.
Ecologies don't tend to work the way human societies do, and should probably not be used as analogies or metaphors for them.
What humans have today is an aberration from history and nature and should be protected at all costs. And those that would destroy it can't fathom the kind of hell life was for 99.9% of humanity just a bare fraction of our history ago.
> Nature is completely filled with hierarchies, where those that are stronger and more fit take resources from those are who are weaker and less fit.
The sort of understanding of "evolution" and "fitness" might do well in the circles you move in. It doesn't have much to do with reality. The "heirarchies" you insist fill nature are as much a projection of 19th century naturalists' understanding of their own societies as they are a description of actual power dynamics among other creatures.
There are huge numbers of examples of both intra-species and inter-species dynamics that do not play out in the simplistic way you're describing. Sure, there are also examples that do, but it's inaccurate to suggest them as the dominant form.
Co-evolution, overlapping resource extraction, and of course the tension between the health of a group and the health of the individuals within it are just three basic ways that complicate your strong-takes/weak-taken description.
Why would that possibly complicate anything? You think a cheetah making the gazelle faster over time is some sort of gotcha that changes the fact that cheetahs eat gazelles?
I can throw out some terms and claim they'll contradict you too. Dominance hierarchy, infanticide, territoriality, and reproductive fitness are just 4 basic ways that uncomplicate my strong-takes/weak-taken description.
If you want to contradict me, given that I'm acknowledging the presence of strong-takes-weak, but noting that it's not the whole picture, you'd need to show that actually, it is the whole picture.
You can't do that (because it's not true).
Slavery was frequent but led to minor growth in gdp (as evidenced by Columbus living at only twice the average standard of living of Jesus-times in 0 AD). Cheap labor perhaps even stalled industrialization, which lead to living standards doubling every 5-10 years during the fastest periods. Slavery was a better wealth generator for the slaveholders than nothing, but the idea that it’s some great wealth generator compared so what came after is ridiculous. Maybe 1% of the wealth of the US came from slavery, steam power is a much much larger chunk, and computing thereafter.
They own you. By design.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
Or is it possible that "success follows hard work" is more of a universal human belief that has existed outside of the narrow window of domestic politics that you became aware of in the last 5 years?
I sometimes wonder about some of the components we use which are sourced from China. Do they have efficient foundries or am I invisibly benefiting from cheap slave labor? There's such a disconnect between clicking "buy" and it arriving.
I can't help but feel like it's what we're doing today, but using processors instead of slaves, which is why tech pays so well.
If you had another person on the island, you could share and exchange, and if you both of you worked, you'd both be better off.
By induction, adding more people can result in more people being better off, especially when you add specialization, etc.
Where that breaks down is when others start using force to take your/others stuff. Then you don't see the product of your labors, since someone else is stealing it.
Exploiting colonies fits that, so does the modern warfare/welfare state, the late Roman empire, and communism/socialism. _Anywhere_ that force is used to "reallocate" the products of someone's labour, the people start to get the feeling that working more won't get them ahead, because someone else will take what they produce.
Not the same thing, also you forgot to mention capitalism. You know, the current system under which the exploitation is happening.
I think it comes down to this: Upward mobility is a little misleading term, because you can increase it not only by exploiting more slaves (as you seem to think), but also by reducing class inequality itself. As inequality gets smaller, the distance to travel (in terms of social mobility) decreases, and more people can cross classes.
And I would argue, what the West managed to do in the period of circa 1930-1970, was indeed a massive reduction in social inequality. This happened not by chance, but was a result of many years of struggle for social democracy, starting from the French revolution (rejection of nobility as a concept), and continuing in pursuing socialist ideas in the late 19th century, and rise of the unions in the workplace.
Slavery, colonialism, and cheap imported labor are ways that lower mercantile classes can see significant wealth (generated from slavery, the colonies, or cheap labor) injected into their class at very little expense. However, they are not the only ways. Expansion into new territory, gold rushes, new technology, and governmental policy are among a very long list of other things that can have this same effect.
The most important one for a society, however, is the fact that sufficiently progressive taxation and societal reinvestment can do this as well.
This is one of the primary reasons why democratic capitalistic states tend to have better overall growth than more strongly state capital societies. And more controversially (and far too complex to talk about here) why socialist countries were often able to industrialize in under a generation.
When hard work can't guarantee a better life, it is a sign that a democratic society has hit a degree of wealth inequality great enough to translate into a failure of democratic society to represent and act on behalf of the interests of the majority of its population.
The fact that this is the historical norm is a reflection of the history of authoritarianism (monarchism) in human history, not some unwritten rule of physics.
Can we get an example of this?
For their own people for some definition of own. The problem now though is that the basic way you live (in capitalism) is by exchanging something you have for something else. The average person doesn't have much of value to offer, less and less so each day due to technology. How can they have better lives if they don't have anything left to trade?
I think it was actually true in the USA around the time of the oil age. I think this because back then, it seems, you'd poke a hole in the ground and oil would spill out. Oil so good that it has all been extracted already; and such an oil is as close as we've gotten to free energy.
And paying someone a high salary to do a job they can leave at any time, isn't causing them to sacrifice their life, it's called free trade is generally considered 'winning'.
True, but smallpox blankets did happen. Not often. Perhaps only once, but it was documented at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt