4 ms·

> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common

> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour 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.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago
Because a country or region has slavery, doesn't mean the those who benefit from said slavery reside in that country or region.
api 5y ago
Slavery engenders a culture of self-righteous laziness and entitlement in the slave owners and cynicism and internalized oppression (a “chip on their shoulder”) in the slaves. 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.
- hdhjebebeb 5y ago
  Pretty sure slavery is the definition of external oppression
- pram 5y ago
  The industrial revolution started a century before 'end' of slavery. I mean, cotton was pretty much the basis of most early industry. Where do you think it came from.
  - api 5y ago
    The industrial revolution mostly happened in England. American industrialization came later and was mostly imported at first via the same kind of industrial espionage plus protectionism that China is using today. (The USA was the China of the 19th century.) 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."
    - pram 5y ago
      England imported the cotton that was harvested by slaves in the new world. The fact that the manufacturing of finished goods was based on wage labor doesn’t change that the required raw inputs depended on exploitation elsewhere. Unless you think there were lots of wage based cotton plantations in England.
hdhjebebeb 5y ago
> Northern Europe, not known for their abundance of slaves, is wealthier. 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
- apexalpha 5y ago
  Countries like Netherlands, France, England definitely profited form the slave trade. But there are many European nations, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, that didn't.
  - gorbachev 5y ago
    Scandinavian countries, however, had an underclass, who worked in near-slave-like environments for the benefit of land owners.
    - apexalpha 5y ago
      Yes, as did every other (European) nation at the time. The benefits of the slave trade in the Netherlands did not go to the bottom part of society...
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    So you think that the abundant, cheap, raw material that made it into European factories that spurred the Industrial age materialized out of nowhere?
- shard972 5y ago
  @dang rule violation
mikepurvis 5y ago
> The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. 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.
lifeformed 5y ago
> The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. 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.
- JackFr 5y ago
  Every consumer of cotton in the first half of the 19th century was a beneficiary of slavery. That's why serious abolitionists eschewed cotton. An unflinching economic analysis shows that the value of the labor stolen was distributed (not necessarily evenly) between plantation owners, textile manufacturers and consumers.
awll 5y ago
A counterpoint to this is that the northern part of the US developed exactly because of the availability of cheap cotton provided by slave labor in the south which was crucial for industrialization. > 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-slavery https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slav...
Frost1x 5y ago
On the point of slavery, it's possible for a bunch of free exploited labor is a requirement to build the levels of wealth we see now. There's probably also another requirement factor on how you utilize those resources. 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).
taffronaut 5y ago
> 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. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > The main enabler was not power and wealth, but technology (sailing ships) As we should understand rather well, sometimes technology is power.
watwut 5y ago
Slave trade brought in massive wealth into Europe back then. That is why people did it, really. Otherwise they would not bothered with it. 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.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago

Because a country or region has slavery, doesn't mean the those who benefit from said slavery reside in that country or region.

api 5y ago

Slavery engenders a culture of self-righteous laziness and entitlement in the slave owners and cynicism and internalized oppression (a “chip on their shoulder”) in the slaves. 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.

hdhjebebeb 5y ago
Pretty sure slavery is the definition of external oppression
pram 5y ago
The industrial revolution started a century before 'end' of slavery. I mean, cotton was pretty much the basis of most early industry. Where do you think it came from.
- api 5y ago
  The industrial revolution mostly happened in England. American industrialization came later and was mostly imported at first via the same kind of industrial espionage plus protectionism that China is using today. (The USA was the China of the 19th century.) 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."
  - pram 5y ago
    England imported the cotton that was harvested by slaves in the new world. The fact that the manufacturing of finished goods was based on wage labor doesn’t change that the required raw inputs depended on exploitation elsewhere. Unless you think there were lots of wage based cotton plantations in England.

hdhjebebeb 5y ago

> Northern Europe, not known for their abundance of slaves, is wealthier. 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

apexalpha 5y ago
Countries like Netherlands, France, England definitely profited form the slave trade. But there are many European nations, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, that didn't.
- gorbachev 5y ago
  Scandinavian countries, however, had an underclass, who worked in near-slave-like environments for the benefit of land owners.
  - apexalpha 5y ago
    Yes, as did every other (European) nation at the time. The benefits of the slave trade in the Netherlands did not go to the bottom part of society...
- Daishiman 5y ago
  So you think that the abundant, cheap, raw material that made it into European factories that spurred the Industrial age materialized out of nowhere?
shard972 5y ago
@dang rule violation

mikepurvis 5y ago

> The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. 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.

lifeformed 5y ago

> The American South, where slavery was more prevalent, is poorer than the North. 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.

JackFr 5y ago
Every consumer of cotton in the first half of the 19th century was a beneficiary of slavery. That's why serious abolitionists eschewed cotton. An unflinching economic analysis shows that the value of the labor stolen was distributed (not necessarily evenly) between plantation owners, textile manufacturers and consumers.

awll 5y ago

A counterpoint to this is that the northern part of the US developed exactly because of the availability of cheap cotton provided by slave labor in the south which was crucial for industrialization. > 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-slavery https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slav...

Frost1x 5y ago

On the point of slavery, it's possible for a bunch of free exploited labor is a requirement to build the levels of wealth we see now. There's probably also another requirement factor on how you utilize those resources. 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).

taffronaut 5y ago

> 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. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> The main enabler was not power and wealth, but technology (sailing ships) As we should understand rather well, sometimes technology is power.

watwut 5y ago

Slave trade brought in massive wealth into Europe back then. That is why people did it, really. Otherwise they would not bothered with it. 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.