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It was the profits from the slave trade that financed the initial capital investments in mining, factory, railroads, etc.
by viburnum 4y ago
It was the profits from the slave trade that financed the initial capital investments in mining, factory, railroads, etc.
- WalterBright 4y agoIndustrialization happened primarily in the free states, not the slave states.
- yieldcrv 4y agoThis 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.
- WalterBright 4y agoThere was a lot more to free states than wall street. The industrialization happened all over those states, but not the slave ones.
- rayiner 4y agoBut those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers. You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(GDP)_per_capita https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
- whatshisface 4y agoSlavery didn't really end, the same people worked on the same plantations... honestly, you wonder why they even started a civil war over it.
- viburnum 4y agoThe 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.
- barry-cotter 4y agoThen 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?
- biorach 4y ago> If slavery was the reason for the Industrial Revolution That's not what the article is saying.