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> 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 ef

by 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

rayiner 4y ago
The error in the “indirect effect” line of reasoning is that it assumes that nobody would’ve grown cotton in the American south if slavery hadn’t existed. Of course they would have, it would just have been share croppers doing it instead. The north still would’ve gotten southern cotton, but maybe the supply would be somewhat lower and the products more expensive. British ships would still have been sailing around bringing that cotton to mills in Britain. You have to look at the counter-factual scenario of what would have happened instead. And we kind of know what the counter-factual scenario looks like because European countries ended slavery and their economies didn’t collapse. The “indirect effects” theory is so wrong that even Jacobin, who are actually socialists, wrote an article debunking it: https://jacobin.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capitalism https://jacobin.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capi... You’re correct, Germany did have a colonial empire before WWI, but only for about 30 years. It was inconsequential to Germany’s economic development.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  The EIC was a major rival for talent to the British government. That alone should have given a fillip via competition.

by l3mure 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

The error in the “indirect effect” line of reasoning is that it assumes that nobody would’ve grown cotton in the American south if slavery hadn’t existed. Of course they would have, it would just have been share croppers doing it instead. The north still would’ve gotten southern cotton, but maybe the supply would be somewhat lower and the products more expensive. British ships would still have been sailing around bringing that cotton to mills in Britain. You have to look at the counter-factual scenario of what would have happened instead. And we kind of know what the counter-factual scenario looks like because European countries ended slavery and their economies didn’t collapse. The “indirect effects” theory is so wrong that even Jacobin, who are actually socialists, wrote an article debunking it: https://jacobin.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capitalism https://jacobin.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capi... You’re correct, Germany did have a colonial empire before WWI, but only for about 30 years. It was inconsequential to Germany’s economic development.

selimthegrim 4y ago
The EIC was a major rival for talent to the British government. That alone should have given a fillip via competition.