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Europe as a continent benefited the most from the slave trade. So much that the wealth they made powered their economies for the next 200 years. The trans-Atlan

Europe as a continent benefited the most from the slave trade. So much that the wealth they made powered their economies for the next 200 years. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw over 12 million africans work for free as slaves, was run and controlled by the Spanish, French and British. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade

nhchris 4y ago
The Arab slave trade took even more slaves than that - mostly Black, but some 2 million Europeans too. How come they didn't benefit so much from it? In fact, almost every region in the world practiced slavery at some point or another [1]. So how come the relatively small fraction of slaves (e.g. the US is only 12% Black) had such outsized economic benefits for the US and Europe, that didn't manifest in any other instance of slavery? And the US also waged an expensive and bloody war to end slavery. Did we take into account how the lack of such a war would have helped their economy? Or are we only tallying the economic benefits of slavery, and ignoring its costs? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History
- orange8 4y ago
  > The Arab slave trade took even more slaves than that ... How come they didn't benefit so much from it? Microsoft sold mobile phones, just like Apple does. How come they didn't benefit so much from it?
- stonogo 4y ago
  The Arab slave trade took more slaves than that over the course of twelve centuries. The transatlantic slave trade only existed for a few hundred years. The event that led to the slow demise of Arabian slavery, the Zanj rebellion, occurred a thousand years before transatlantic slavery even existed. In short, the Arabian slave trade did benefit, but it was on the way out by the time the Europeans got interested in colonial slave labor. Don't make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world got involved in the slave trade then got out of it at the same time.
  - nhchris 4y ago
    > The event that led to the slow demise of Arabian slavery, the Zanj rebellion, occurred a thousand years before transatlantic slavery even existed. Slow indeed: It is estimated that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, 1.4 million slaves were compelled to make the trek through the Sahara [..] 1.2 million slaves are estimated to have been sent through the Sahara in the 19th century. In the 1830s, a period when slave trade flourished, Ghadames was handling 2,500 slaves a year. Even though the slave trade was officially abolished in Tripoli in 1853, in practice it continued until the 1890s. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast). - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
    - stonogo 4y ago
      Being precise about these things gets difficult; arguably some Arab states are still practicing slavery, but with a veneer of indentured servitude. However, I'd like to point out that the Barbary pirates were not Arabs, and the Trans-Saharan slave trade article you reference covers a similarly vast time scale; if we look at the era during which transatlantic slavery markets operated the scale was at least one, possibly two orders of magnitude larger than Arabian imports of slave labor. Nevertheless, "slow indeed" is correct, and the Zanj rebellion didn't have much of an effect on North African slave trading. However, the original question was why Arabian slavery was not as economically potent for Arabs as transatlantic slavery was for European colonies. The answer I'm trying to give is twofold: 1: it was, just vastly earlier than European colonialism, and 2: by the time the transatlantic slave market was established, the Zanj rebellion and other events had had a deleterious effect on slaveowning culture in Arabia. The question as phrased assumes everyone was getting rich from slavery at the same time, which is not the case.
rayiner 4y ago
Wildly incorrect. The slave trade peaked around 11% of the UK economy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/on-the-economic-importance-of-the-slave-plantation-complex-to-the-british-economy-during-the-eighteenth-century-a-valueadded-approach/DBB1225FF928C09689B3EEFCA8F66C55 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-hi.... In the US slavery never accounted for much more than 5% of GDP. Europe as a continent had already diverged from the rest of the world before the slave trade. The divergence of the UK from Asia began before 1500: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita_1500-1950.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita.... While the desire to pin European wealth to the slave trade is understandable, it’s self-evidently incorrect. For one thing Britain wouldn’t have ended the slave trade when it did if its economy was built on it. For another, European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany, ended up becoming wealthier than countries like Spain who did. Same is true for free states versus slave states in America. As to a third thing, the end of slavery wasn’t accompanied by major economic hardship in either the US or Britain. You can look at a graph of US GDP per capita and struggle to identify when the civil war happened if you don’t have axis labels.
- novaomnidev 4y ago
  That gdp graph doesn’t show what you seem to think it does. For one, you can’t separate the UK from Europe, since the UK being situated in Europe traded the refined goods from produced by the raw materials found in their colonies and produced by their slaves with the rest of Europe. So we should expect it’s trading partners GDP also rise along with it. Even if they didn’t directly participate in the slave trade at the time (Germany). OPs comment is not “self evidently incorrect” in the least bit.
- l3mure 4y ago
  > The slave trade peaked around 11% of the UK economy As your own source states, focusing on this single number is overly reductive: > Any indirect linkage effects are not included in the quantitative estimates presented here. > The growth of economic activities directly associated with the Triangular Trade or the American plantation complex would in turn have contributed to the development of other parts of the economy, through backward and forward linkages to a host of other value-chains. For example, a growth in demand for maritime shipping associated with the Triangular Trade most certainly had effects upon the development of the financial, insurance, and shipbuilding industries. It has also been argued that these factors helped drive the development of docks in the ports of Europe. > In addition, it has been suggested that this would include fundamental shifts in institutions and economic structures. The growth of the Atlantic trade may thus have had other important consequences, for example, through contributing to institutional change in Britain, as Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have famously argued. > Activities of this magnitude can hardly be dismissed as marginal to the British economy at the time. -------- > European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany What? Germany was absolutely involved in colonialism. Slavery perhaps not in an official state capacity given the lateness of its formation relative to the Trans-Atlantic trade, but people from the region certainly were. > Same is true for free states versus slave states in America. Again this is overly dismissive of the economic interplay between North and South. The Northern textile industry was reliant on cotton grown in the South, and the South provided an important outlet for Northern goods. [1] > As for the lack of a home market, southern consumers generated a significant demand for northern-made shoes, clothing, locomotives, steamboats, farm implements--to name just a few products--that encouraged such promoters as Gregg and De Bow to believe that a market for southern manufactures existed if it could only be exploited. [1] Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 97

nhchris 4y ago

The Arab slave trade took even more slaves than that - mostly Black, but some 2 million Europeans too. How come they didn't benefit so much from it? In fact, almost every region in the world practiced slavery at some point or another [1]. So how come the relatively small fraction of slaves (e.g. the US is only 12% Black) had such outsized economic benefits for the US and Europe, that didn't manifest in any other instance of slavery? And the US also waged an expensive and bloody war to end slavery. Did we take into account how the lack of such a war would have helped their economy? Or are we only tallying the economic benefits of slavery, and ignoring its costs? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#History

orange8 4y ago
> The Arab slave trade took even more slaves than that ... How come they didn't benefit so much from it? Microsoft sold mobile phones, just like Apple does. How come they didn't benefit so much from it?
stonogo 4y ago
The Arab slave trade took more slaves than that over the course of twelve centuries. The transatlantic slave trade only existed for a few hundred years. The event that led to the slow demise of Arabian slavery, the Zanj rebellion, occurred a thousand years before transatlantic slavery even existed. In short, the Arabian slave trade did benefit, but it was on the way out by the time the Europeans got interested in colonial slave labor. Don't make the mistake of thinking everyone in the world got involved in the slave trade then got out of it at the same time.
- nhchris 4y ago
  > The event that led to the slow demise of Arabian slavery, the Zanj rebellion, occurred a thousand years before transatlantic slavery even existed. Slow indeed: It is estimated that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, 1.4 million slaves were compelled to make the trek through the Sahara [..] 1.2 million slaves are estimated to have been sent through the Sahara in the 19th century. In the 1830s, a period when slave trade flourished, Ghadames was handling 2,500 slaves a year. Even though the slave trade was officially abolished in Tripoli in 1853, in practice it continued until the 1890s. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast). - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
  - stonogo 4y ago
    Being precise about these things gets difficult; arguably some Arab states are still practicing slavery, but with a veneer of indentured servitude. However, I'd like to point out that the Barbary pirates were not Arabs, and the Trans-Saharan slave trade article you reference covers a similarly vast time scale; if we look at the era during which transatlantic slavery markets operated the scale was at least one, possibly two orders of magnitude larger than Arabian imports of slave labor. Nevertheless, "slow indeed" is correct, and the Zanj rebellion didn't have much of an effect on North African slave trading. However, the original question was why Arabian slavery was not as economically potent for Arabs as transatlantic slavery was for European colonies. The answer I'm trying to give is twofold: 1: it was, just vastly earlier than European colonialism, and 2: by the time the transatlantic slave market was established, the Zanj rebellion and other events had had a deleterious effect on slaveowning culture in Arabia. The question as phrased assumes everyone was getting rich from slavery at the same time, which is not the case.

rayiner 4y ago

Wildly incorrect. The slave trade peaked around 11% of the UK economy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/on-the-economic-importance-of-the-slave-plantation-complex-to-the-british-economy-during-the-eighteenth-century-a-valueadded-approach/DBB1225FF928C09689B3EEFCA8F66C55 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-hi.... In the US slavery never accounted for much more than 5% of GDP. Europe as a continent had already diverged from the rest of the world before the slave trade. The divergence of the UK from Asia began before 1500: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita_1500-1950.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita.... While the desire to pin European wealth to the slave trade is understandable, it’s self-evidently incorrect. For one thing Britain wouldn’t have ended the slave trade when it did if its economy was built on it. For another, European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany, ended up becoming wealthier than countries like Spain who did. Same is true for free states versus slave states in America. As to a third thing, the end of slavery wasn’t accompanied by major economic hardship in either the US or Britain. You can look at a graph of US GDP per capita and struggle to identify when the civil war happened if you don’t have axis labels.

novaomnidev 4y ago
That gdp graph doesn’t show what you seem to think it does. For one, you can’t separate the UK from Europe, since the UK being situated in Europe traded the refined goods from produced by the raw materials found in their colonies and produced by their slaves with the rest of Europe. So we should expect it’s trading partners GDP also rise along with it. Even if they didn’t directly participate in the slave trade at the time (Germany). OPs comment is not “self evidently incorrect” in the least bit.
l3mure 4y ago
> The slave trade peaked around 11% of the UK economy As your own source states, focusing on this single number is overly reductive: > Any indirect linkage effects are not included in the quantitative estimates presented here. > The growth of economic activities directly associated with the Triangular Trade or the American plantation complex would in turn have contributed to the development of other parts of the economy, through backward and forward linkages to a host of other value-chains. For example, a growth in demand for maritime shipping associated with the Triangular Trade most certainly had effects upon the development of the financial, insurance, and shipbuilding industries. It has also been argued that these factors helped drive the development of docks in the ports of Europe. > In addition, it has been suggested that this would include fundamental shifts in institutions and economic structures. The growth of the Atlantic trade may thus have had other important consequences, for example, through contributing to institutional change in Britain, as Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have famously argued. > Activities of this magnitude can hardly be dismissed as marginal to the British economy at the time. -------- > European powers that never engaged in the slave trade or colonialism, namely Germany What? Germany was absolutely involved in colonialism. Slavery perhaps not in an official state capacity given the lateness of its formation relative to the Trans-Atlantic trade, but people from the region certainly were. > Same is true for free states versus slave states in America. Again this is overly dismissive of the economic interplay between North and South. The Northern textile industry was reliant on cotton grown in the South, and the South provided an important outlet for Northern goods. [1] > As for the lack of a home market, southern consumers generated a significant demand for northern-made shoes, clothing, locomotives, steamboats, farm implements--to name just a few products--that encouraged such promoters as Gregg and De Bow to believe that a market for southern manufactures existed if it could only be exploited. [1] Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 97