5 ms·

Slavery was my first guess, and the article seems to confirm this. The antebellum South was behind the North in technology-driven economy for this same reason.

jmclnx 2y ago
I agree with you, plus if you notice, after slavery in the UK pretty much ended before their Industrial Revolution started. In the US North, around the time of independence is when slavery there was banned. In both places the "IR" started not long afterwards, with the UK starting first. Probably because labor was not cheap anymore, people had to find a new way of production.
- cm2187 2y ago
  Slavery has been banned in the UK since at least the Middle Ages.
  - defrost 2y ago
    With the loophole | caveat that in 1832 there were 46,000 documented British slave owners, most living within the UK, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”. The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn. The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-histor...
    - speedbird 2y ago
      Yes, but no slaves allowed in the UK is the key point.
      - defrost 2y ago
        Just slave owners, including the Church of England, and effective slaves via parishes and otherwise geographically and class bound people with near zero options outside the local manor.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    Yes, they offshored it to Ireland.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation. The only parts of agriculture still done by hand are the parts nobody has invented a machine that can do better. Nobody is out there planting seeds by hand or watering the fields with a garden hose anymore. Whereas the modern replacement (immigrant labor) is still used, but only for the things machines can't do (yet).
- xeromal 2y ago
  I think the person you're replying to implied what you are saying. Technology was a substitute for slavery so it's meant to replicate it at first but unlike human machines, industrial machines can constantly improve
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation. Only after it was invented and successfully deployed. To get to that point, someone needed a reason to go to the expense and trouble of inventing that stuff. The slavery-dependent economies weren't going to do it: why would they need to?
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Rather famously, the cotton gin really jumpstarted slavery in the US south when it had been in a slow decline. I don't think that slavery is as much a barrier to automation as people think it is. We're biased by the main exposure to slavery being the US experience, where there's a noticeable difference between (free) mercantile north and (slave) agrarian south. Agriculture isn't particularly amenable to automation--not in the early 19th century at any rate--and it's not like the postbellum south suddenly found a renaissance in manufacturing.
    - Log_out_ 2y ago
      There is a ton of stagnant societies out there were slavery is still around. Once the "make somebody else make it go away" bizarr results appear. Dhubais medieval cannalisation comes to mind..

jmclnx 2y ago

I agree with you, plus if you notice, after slavery in the UK pretty much ended before their Industrial Revolution started. In the US North, around the time of independence is when slavery there was banned. In both places the "IR" started not long afterwards, with the UK starting first. Probably because labor was not cheap anymore, people had to find a new way of production.

cm2187 2y ago
Slavery has been banned in the UK since at least the Middle Ages.
- defrost 2y ago
  With the loophole | caveat that in 1832 there were 46,000 documented British slave owners, most living within the UK, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their “property”. The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn. The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-histor...
  - speedbird 2y ago
    Yes, but no slaves allowed in the UK is the key point.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Just slave owners, including the Church of England, and effective slaves via parishes and otherwise geographically and class bound people with near zero options outside the local manor.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  Yes, they offshored it to Ireland.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation. The only parts of agriculture still done by hand are the parts nobody has invented a machine that can do better. Nobody is out there planting seeds by hand or watering the fields with a garden hose anymore. Whereas the modern replacement (immigrant labor) is still used, but only for the things machines can't do (yet).

xeromal 2y ago
I think the person you're replying to implied what you are saying. Technology was a substitute for slavery so it's meant to replicate it at first but unlike human machines, industrial machines can constantly improve
shiroiushi 2y ago
>But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation. Only after it was invented and successfully deployed. To get to that point, someone needed a reason to go to the expense and trouble of inventing that stuff. The slavery-dependent economies weren't going to do it: why would they need to?
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Rather famously, the cotton gin really jumpstarted slavery in the US south when it had been in a slow decline. I don't think that slavery is as much a barrier to automation as people think it is. We're biased by the main exposure to slavery being the US experience, where there's a noticeable difference between (free) mercantile north and (slave) agrarian south. Agriculture isn't particularly amenable to automation--not in the early 19th century at any rate--and it's not like the postbellum south suddenly found a renaissance in manufacturing.
  - Log_out_ 2y ago
    There is a ton of stagnant societies out there were slavery is still around. Once the "make somebody else make it go away" bizarr results appear. Dhubais medieval cannalisation comes to mind..