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While I think it's important to remember these atrocities, I think that for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers

While I think it's important to remember these atrocities, I think that for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth. Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains. If you look at the history and the economic charts, the big boost was started by the industrial revolution.

wz1000 10y ago
> the big boost was started by the industrial revolution Exactly. Now, lets look at some of the causes of the first Industrial Revolution 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. Second, Britain's African Slave trade constituted a big part of the early accumulation of capital that made the revolution possible. Cheap cotton from the colonization of India as well that produced by the slave labor in North America fueled the textile industry, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution. India's share of the world economy fell from 20% to less than 5%, chiefly because the capital required for industrialization was siphoned off to England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
- oli5679 10y ago
  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.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    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.
    - adwn 10y ago
      > 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.
  - riffic 10y ago
    Germany has no history of slavery We'll just conveniently ignore the war years, gotcha.
    - ralfd 10y ago
      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.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    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
- hemflit 10y ago
  > 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?
- paganel 10y ago
  > 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_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.
- nickjarboe 10y ago
  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.
  - wz1000 10y ago
    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.
all_usernames 10y ago
> for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth. Two hundred years of slavery was not a major driver of economic growth? Edit: Serious question, rephrased: do economic historians really not consider slavery a major driver of growth? If so, that would be highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the free labor of ~10 million people over two centuries, in an economy that was almost entirely agricultural.
- thedevil 10y ago
  It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.
  - eropple 10y ago
    This is true, but most of the economic historians I am aware of also acknowledge that America wouldn't have been in the position to leverage industrialization that it was without the economic driver of slavery. Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.
    - Shubley 10y ago
      The slave holding states are now the poorest and were under-industrialized even during the Civil war. The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative. Not really difficult to disentangle. And theres Canada.
    - scythe 10y ago
      >Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive. Whereas claiming they can't be disentangled is obviously disinterested. Slavery was the rule, not the exception in the world at the time. The African kingdoms mostly practiced it, the Arabs were infamous for it, Mexico ended slavery in the 1830s after American industrialization was well underway, Russia didn't truly end serfdom until around 1900 as I recall, and then you have India's caste system, so only China is left without slavery in some form? But were they? And why didn't all of these countries industrialize?
louprado 10y ago
And while the industrial revolution wasn't a distinct U.S. advantage, the post-WW2 period gave the U.S. a near monopoly on industrial production. Most factories across Europe and Asia were destroyed in the war.
jrochkind1 10y ago
> Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains. To be fair, there are few if any countries with the scale of stolen/free land and enslaved labor as in US history. You'd have to look at the European 'colonies' for both. The US of course was the first colony to become independent -- meaning an end to it's profits being extracted for the home country, and instead re-invested locally. So I'd say there are basically no other countries with close to the scale of profits built from stolen land and enslaved labor, and then not extracted for a colonial home country overseas.

wz1000 10y ago

> the big boost was started by the industrial revolution Exactly. Now, lets look at some of the causes of the first Industrial Revolution 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. Second, Britain's African Slave trade constituted a big part of the early accumulation of capital that made the revolution possible. Cheap cotton from the colonization of India as well that produced by the slave labor in North America fueled the textile industry, which was at the heart of the industrial revolution. India's share of the world economy fell from 20% to less than 5%, chiefly because the capital required for industrialization was siphoned off to England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

oli5679 10y ago
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.
- ethbro 10y ago
  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.
  - adwn 10y ago
    > 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.
- riffic 10y ago
  Germany has no history of slavery We'll just conveniently ignore the war years, gotcha.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    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.
- walshemj 10y ago
  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
hemflit 10y ago
> 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?
paganel 10y ago
> 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_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.
nickjarboe 10y ago
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.
- wz1000 10y ago
  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.

all_usernames 10y ago

> for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth. Two hundred years of slavery was not a major driver of economic growth? Edit: Serious question, rephrased: do economic historians really not consider slavery a major driver of growth? If so, that would be highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the free labor of ~10 million people over two centuries, in an economy that was almost entirely agricultural.

thedevil 10y ago
It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.
- eropple 10y ago
  This is true, but most of the economic historians I am aware of also acknowledge that America wouldn't have been in the position to leverage industrialization that it was without the economic driver of slavery. Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.
  - Shubley 10y ago
    The slave holding states are now the poorest and were under-industrialized even during the Civil war. The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative. Not really difficult to disentangle. And theres Canada.
  - scythe 10y ago
    >Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive. Whereas claiming they can't be disentangled is obviously disinterested. Slavery was the rule, not the exception in the world at the time. The African kingdoms mostly practiced it, the Arabs were infamous for it, Mexico ended slavery in the 1830s after American industrialization was well underway, Russia didn't truly end serfdom until around 1900 as I recall, and then you have India's caste system, so only China is left without slavery in some form? But were they? And why didn't all of these countries industrialize?

louprado 10y ago

And while the industrial revolution wasn't a distinct U.S. advantage, the post-WW2 period gave the U.S. a near monopoly on industrial production. Most factories across Europe and Asia were destroyed in the war.

jrochkind1 10y ago

> Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains. To be fair, there are few if any countries with the scale of stolen/free land and enslaved labor as in US history. You'd have to look at the European 'colonies' for both. The US of course was the first colony to become independent -- meaning an end to it's profits being extracted for the home country, and instead re-invested locally. So I'd say there are basically no other countries with close to the scale of profits built from stolen land and enslaved labor, and then not extracted for a colonial home country overseas.