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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 popula

• 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?
    • mcguire 10y ago
      Possibly because they didn't have the large amount of valuable raw materials to process, the way England did from its slaveholding colonies?