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to Great Debates
Was
slavery the engine of economic growth?
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Few works of history have
exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944
called Capitalism and Slavery. Its author, Eric Wiliams,
later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that
black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe's rise
to global economic dominance. He maintained that Europeans'
conquest and settlement of the New World depended on the enslavement
of millions of black slaves, who helped amass the capital
that financed the industrial revolution. Europe's economic
progress, he insisted, came at the expense of black slaves
whose labor built the foundations of modern capitalism. |
In addition, Williams
contended that it was economic self-interest and not moral convictions
that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. It was only after
slavery came to be regarded as an impediment to industrial progress
that abolitionists in Europe and the United States succeeded in
suppressing the slave trade and abolishing slavery.
Did slavery create the capital
that financed the industrial revolution? The answer is "no";
slavery did not create a major share of the capital that financed
the European industrial revolution. The combined profits of the
slave trade and West Indian plantations did not add up to five
percent of Britain's national income at the time of the industrial
revolution.
Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable
to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable
that European colonists could have settled and developed North
and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover,
slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the
basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.
In the pre-Civil War United States,
a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role
in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided
over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew
60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent
of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery
paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured
good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition,
precisely because the South specialized in cotton production,
the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services
for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing
industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
Was the abolitionist crusade against
slavery the product of a belief that slavery was an impediment
to economic development? Not in any simple sense. Williams was
wrong to think that by the mid-nineteenth century slavery was
a declining institution. Slavery was an economically efficient
system of production, adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture
to mining, construction, and factory work. Furthermore, slavery
was capable of producing enormous amounts of wealth. On the eve
of the Civil War, the slave South had achieved a level of per
capita wealth not matched by Spain or Italy until the eve of World
War II or by Mexico or India until 1960. As late as the 1850s,
the slave system in the United States was expanding and slave
owners were confident about the future.
And yet, there can be no doubt
that opponents of slavery had come to view the South's "peculiar
institution," as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite
clear evidence that slavery was profitable, abolitionists--and
many people who were not abolitionists--felt strongly that slavery
degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization, thwarted
industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery
with economic backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic
and social stagnation. When the North waged war on slavery, it
was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it was because
Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with
progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation,
moral improvement, free labor, and commercial and economic growth.
Questions to
think about:
1. Was slavery
indispensable to the growth of the western economies?
2. Which
was more important in bringing about the abolition of slavery:
economic interest or moral conviction?
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