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Slavery didn't really end, the same people worked on the same plantations... honestly, you wonder why they even starting a civil war over it.

The article was about Britain. As a matter of historical fact there's a link between the slave trade and industrial development in Britain. Maybe you're trying to defend capitalism or whatever with your hypothetical counterfactuals but that's what actually happened.

Industrialization happened primarily in the free states, not the slave states.

This didn't happen in a vacuum, wall street was full of slave-labor company shares. The speculators and financiers were closer to the financial center.

There was a lot more to free states than wall street. The industrialization happened all over those states, but not the slave ones.

Then how did countries with de minimis involvement in the slave trade like Germany, Italy or Austria-Hungary do so much better economically than Brazil? Four to six times as many slaves went to Brazil as to all of the modern USA. The Trans Saharan slave trade where Arabs enslaved Sub Saharan Africans started earlier, lasted longer and enslaved more people than the Trans Atlantic trade too. If slavery was the reason for the Industrial Revolution why aren’t we discussing this in Arabic?

> If slavery was the reason for the Industrial Revolution

That's not what the article is saying.