3 ms·

It was stamped because of the industrial revolution, slaves can't buy goods, not moralism

• lurk2 2y ago
  > slaves can't buy goods This is true of some forms of chattel slavery, but not of slavery in general. Most forms of slavery throughout history allow slaves some degree of personal property. This was often legally considered to be the property of the slave’s owner, but it was effectively controlled by the slave himself. There isn’t anything inherent to industrialization which favors the use of free labor. One common argument is that mechanization required the use of more highly skilled laborers, which afforded greater leverage to laborers. This argument falls flat because we can see examples of even relatively sophisticated labor being performed by slaves. Consider the articles posted here recently about slavery in call centers in Myanmar and Thailand, where kidnapped victims are forced to perform scams. There are also the more widely known examples of sweatshops in Bangladesh. Another argument that is often made is that factories have high amortization costs that require the factory to produce (and more importantly, sell) a high enough number of units in order to cover these costs. What I have not seen here is a compelling case as to why the propertied class of a slave-holding society would care about building factories for consumer goods if the unit economics were not already favorable.
• milesrout 2y ago
  It is amazing the mad things people will believe in order to maintain the belief that the British Empire never did anything good for a good reason. You can go back and read the newspaper articles, speeches in parliament, pamphlets, etc. The historical record is unambiguous. Slavery was abhorrent. That was it.