The Economics Of Slavery

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From the NYT Review of Books http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/b...l?emc=edit_bk_20141003&nl=books&nlid=61820453

'The Half Has Never Been Told,' by Edward E. Baptist

For residents of the world’s pre-eminent capitalist nation, American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States. This situation was exacerbated in the 1970s, when economic history began to migrate from history to economics departments, where it too often became an exercise in scouring the past for numerical data to plug into computerized models of the economy. Recently, however, the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.

Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary). Recently, historians like Sven Beckert, Robin Blackburn and Walter Johnson have emphasized that cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.

Edward E. Baptist situates “The Half Has Never Been Told” squarely within this context. Baptist, who teaches at Cornell University, is the author of a well-regarded study of slavery in Florida. Now he expands his purview to the entire cotton kingdom, the heartland of 19th-century American slavery. (Unfortunately, slavery in the Upper South, where cotton was not an economic staple, is barely discussed, even though as late as 1860 more slaves lived in Virginia than any other state.) In keeping with the approach of the new historians of capitalism, the book covers a great deal of ground — not only economic enterprise but religion, ideas of masculinity and gender, and national and Southern politics. Baptist’s work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development.

Where Baptist breaks new ground is in his emphasis on the centrality of the interstate trade in slaves to the regional and national economies and his treatment of the role of extreme violence in the workings of the slave system. After the legal importation of slaves from outside the country ended in 1808, the spread of slavery into the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico would not have been possible without the enormous uprooting of people from Maryland and Virginia. Almost one million slaves, Baptist estimates, were transported to the cotton fields from the Upper South in the decades before the Civil War.

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph. For African-Americans, its results were devastating. Since buyers preferred young workers “with no attachments,” the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children was intrinsic to its operation, not, as many historians have claimed, a regrettable side effect. Baptist shows how slaves struggled to recreate a sense of community in the face of this disaster.

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits. They not only emphasized the labor abilities of those for sale (reinforced by humiliating public inspections of their bodies), but appealed to buyers’ salacious fantasies. In the 1830s, the term “fancy girl” began to appear in slave-trade notices to describe young women who fetched high prices because of their physical attractiveness. “Slavery’s frontier,” Baptist writes, “was a white man’s sexual playground.”

The cotton kingdom that arose in the Deep South was incredibly brutal. Violence against Native Americans who originally owned the land, competing imperial powers like Spain and Britain and slave rebels solidified American control of the Gulf states. Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation.

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.” When Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans in his Second Inaugural Address of the 250 years of “blood drawn with the lash” that preceded the Civil War, he was making a similar point: Violence did not begin in the United States with the firing on Fort Sumter.

Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose. He relates how in the 1830s Southern banks developed new financial instruments, bonds with slaves as collateral, that enabled planters to borrow enormous amounts of money to acquire new land, and how lawmakers backed these bonds with the state’s credit. A speculative bubble ensued, and when it collapsed, taxpayers were left to foot the bill. But rather than bailing out Northern and European bondholders, several states simply defaulted on their debts. Many planters fled with their slaves to Texas, until 1845 an independent republic, to avoid creditors. “Honor,” a key element in Southern notions of masculinity, went only so far.

By the 1850s, prosperity returned to the cotton economy, and planters had no difficulty obtaining loans in financial markets. As the railroad opened new areas to cultivation and cotton output soared, slave owners saw themselves as a modern, successful part of the world capitalist economy. They claimed the right to bring their slaves into all the nation’s territories, and indeed into free states. These demands aroused intense opposition in the North, leading to Lincoln’s election, secession and civil war.

Baptist clearly hopes his findings will reach a readership beyond academe — a worthy ambition. He pursues this goal, however, in ways that sometimes undermine the book’s coherence. The chapter titles, which refer to parts of the body, often have little connection to the content that follows. Presumably to avoid sounding academic, he sprinkles the text with anachronistic colloquialisms (“the president was all in” is how he describes Franklin Pierce’s embrace of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854) and with telegraphic sentences more appropriate for Twitter. Occasionally, he deploys four-letter words that cannot be reproduced in these pages. This is unnecessary — his story does not require additional shock value.

It is hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded in our nation’s history. But many Americans still see it as essentially a footnote, an exception to a dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent. If the various elements of “The Half Has Never Been Told” are not entirely pulled together, its underlying argument is persuasive: Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.

So, in short, the Industrial Revolution was financed by the cheapest labour possible: slavery. There you go.
 
It [The civil war] also shows that even the biggest industries can be taken down if public support is high enough or induced against it. "Cotton is king" didn't stop the South from losing the war.

Forcibly changing an economic system (even if only slightly in the case of the post-reconstruction South) is never easy or cheap. One of the biggest problems with industry today is that capital is too fluid between nations and companies have little incentive to not pick up and leave their homes if they find somewhere cheaper. Trade barriers are economically illogical (plus the WTO is a thing), maybe its time nations begin forming exit barriers - where companies are additionally taxed if they shift labor from their home nation to another [thereby avoiding some of the biggest free trade issues the WTO would bring up]
 
The only thing I wish that excerpt acknowledged is that the US was not a closed market. Southern cotton had a big impact, but what about Egyptian and Indian cotton? How much of the English industrial revolution or German industrial revolution depended on slavery? I realize this is about the American economy, but international trade can't be ignored.

That being said, that's a fascinating look at the complex economy of slavery. I tend to agree with its premise that slavery was strong and still entwined in the US economy at the time of the Civil War. I suspect that's part of the reason sharecropping and peonage laws (as well as broad use of convict labor) was so widely tolerated after the war.
 
So, in short, the Industrial Revolution was financed by the cheapest labour possible: slavery. There you go.
And yet again, we find that Marx woz rite. :mischief:

The only thing I wish that excerpt acknowledged is that the US was not a closed market. Southern cotton had a big impact, but what about Egyptian and Indian cotton? How much of the English industrial revolution or German industrial revolution depended on slavery? I realize this is about the American economy, but international trade can't be ignored.
Britain relied largely on American cotton until the mid-19th century. The shift towards Egyptian and Indian cotton really comes with the American Civil War, when the whole mess of protections and boycotts and blockades forced manufacturers to look elsewhere. (There was a brief but unpleasant depression in Northern England as a result.) Also, it's worth remembering that until the 19th century, Caribbean slavery was much more economically significant than North American slavery, so whatever the impact of slave-cotton, the economies of Western Europe were still substantially built on slave-sugar, slave-coffee and slave-tobacco.
 
And yet again, we find that Marx woz rite. :mischief:

Marx wrote about slavery financing the Industrial Revolution?

Britain relied largely on American cotton until the mid-19th century. The shift towards Egyptian and Indian cotton really comes with the American Civil War, when the whole mess of protections and boycotts and blockades forced manufacturers to look elsewhere. (There was a brief but unpleasant depression in Northern England as a result.) Also, it's worth remembering that until the 19th century, Caribbean slavery was much more economically significant than North American slavery, so whatever the impact of slave-cotton, the economies of Western Europe were still substantially built on slave-sugar, slave-coffee and slave-tobacco.

This was basically in the book review. Except for the Caribbean, as that was outside the scope of the subject. Also, I don't think the latter did much in financing industry, which is the basic hypothesis of the author.
 
Britain relied largely on American cotton until the mid-19th century. The shift towards Egyptian and Indian cotton really comes with the American Civil War, when the whole mess of protections and boycotts and blockades forced manufacturers to look elsewhere. (There was a brief but unpleasant depression in Northern England as a result.) Also, it's worth remembering that until the 19th century, Caribbean slavery was much more economically significant than North American slavery, so whatever the impact of slave-cotton, the economies of Western Europe were still substantially built on slave-sugar, slave-coffee and slave-tobacco.

Were those three really more significant than cotton? Seems odd that luxury goods were more important than something which was essential for practically everybody.
 
Marx wrote about slavery financing the Industrial Revolution?
Little bit. Didn't develop it very far, wasn't really his area of expertise, but he argued that chattel slavery was part and parcel of Western capitalist development rather than the aberration typically presented by liberal accounts.

This was basically in the book review. Except for the Caribbean, as that was outside the scope of the subject.
Merely an observation. As Louis says, American slavery has to be placed in the context of international trade, which means placing it in the context of international slavery, or we risk giving ourselves the impression that American capitalist development was somehow aberrant in its dependence on unfree labour.

Were those three really more significant than cotton? Seems odd that luxury goods were more important than something which was essential for practically everybody.
In context, yes, I'd say they were. The trade in coffee, tobacco and sugar created the modern consumer economy which made the industrial revolution possible. You probably wouldn't see the transatlantic trade in cotton without an existing trade in coffee, sugar and tobacco. That's why they settled the American South in the first place, to produce tobacco and other cash-crops, and why they began importing African slaves.

Also, it's not as if coffee, tobacco and sugar were exclusive luxuries, or at least not in England. Most people would probably have consumed more in the way of even non-necessary consumables like coffee than they did on textiles until the late 19th century at the earliest.
 
Little bit. Didn't develop it very far, wasn't really his area of expertise, but he argued that chattel slavery was part and parcel of Western capitalist development rather than the aberration typically presented by liberal accounts.

Merely an observation. As Louis says, American slavery has to be placed in the context of international trade, which means placing it in the context of international slavery, or we risk giving ourselves the impression that American capitalist development was somehow aberrant in its dependence on unfree labour.

That's basically what the author argues. Of the book, I mean. That slavery was economical - because it was so brutal. There is some similarity to the conditions of the English working class as described by Engels.

In context, yes, I'd say they were. The trade in coffee, tobacco and sugar created the modern consumer economy which made the industrial revolution possible. You probably wouldn't see the transatlantic trade in cotton without an existing trade in coffee, sugar and tobacco. That's why they settled the American South in the first place, to produce tobacco and other cash-crops, and why they began importing African slaves.

Also, it's not as if coffee, tobacco and sugar were exclusive luxuries, or at least not in England. Most people would probably have consumed more in the way of even non-necessary consumables like coffee than they did on textiles until the late 19th century at the earliest.

I doubt it. Early industrialization very much hinged on advancements in textile industry. I assume because everybody wore textile. By contrast the trade in luxuries was profitable, precisely because they were luxuries and therefore highly profitable. Mass consumption followed industrialization rather than preceded it. Also, there's no incentive to industrialize in what is essentially a trade business. Textile is all about production.
 
Coffee, tobacco and sugar weren't "luxuries", though, at least not in the same sense as exotic silks and spices. They were cash-crops, produced in an industrial fashion for export, and consumed to some degree by a majority of the population in England and France, and large minorities elsewhere in Europe. They were part of an economy of popular consumption, and were vital in creating and sustaining that economy.

Further, I'd dispute the claim that the growth of the textile industry was a result of technological advancements: it was already expanding under the putting-out system, by which merchants would organise a number of artisan weavers into a sort of diffuse factory, and the putting-out system remained part of English textile manufacturing into the early nineteenth century. (Typically, mill-owners would invest in the capacity to fill consistent demand, and rely on the putting-out system during boom times. It's only when it became cheaper to build machines than to hire artisans that the textile industry became fully mechanised.) In fact, if you set yourself in the late eighteenth century, you'd find that the production of American "luxuries", and most especially of sugar, was more "industrial" than textile production, employing larger units of production, a more sophisticated division of labour and higher investments of capital.
 
Coffee, tobacco and sugar weren't "luxuries", though, at least not in the same sense as exotic silks and spices. They were cash-crops, produced in an industrial fashion for export, and consumed to some degree by a majority of the population in England and France, and large minorities elsewhere in Europe. They were part of an economy of popular consumption, and were vital in creating and sustaining that economy.

Either they were luxuries or they were not. In any case these trade crops did not contribute in any way to industrialization.

Further, I'd dispute the claim that the growth of the textile industry was a result of technological advancements: it was already expanding under the putting-out system, by which merchants would organise a number of artisan weavers into a sort of diffuse factory, and the putting-out system remained part of English textile manufacturing into the early nineteenth century. (Typically, mill-owners would invest in the capacity to fill consistent demand, and rely on the putting-out system during boom times. It's only when it became cheaper to build machines than to hire artisans that the textile industry became fully mechanised.) In fact, if you set yourself in the late eighteenth century, you'd find that the production of American "luxuries", and most especially of sugar, was more "industrial" than textile production, employing larger units of production, a more sophisticated division of labour and higher investments of capital.

I did not "claim" the growth of the textile industry was a result of technological advancements. What I said was that the Industrial Revolution started with the textile industry. And I'm familiar with the putting out system. Finally, the Industrial Revolution did not start in the 18th century US, so again the sugar (or coffee or tea) trade is not really relevant in that regard either.
 
I think you're missing the point of what I'm saying, but it's at a bit of a tangent to the OP, so we'd best let it lie.
 
Well, let's say you are suggesting these cash crops were produced in a more industrial fashion in the US than cotton. In a pre-industry setting. That seems a bit of a far stretch. The plantation economy wasn't limited to cotton, although the author limits himself to that particular product.
 
No. What? I'm suggesting that 18th century Jamaican sugar was produced in a more industrial fashion than 18th century English textiles. :confused:

All I'm saying is, the intertwining of capitalism and chattel slavery go back to the 17th century Caribbean, and are not peculiar to the United States.
 
18th century sugar was produced more industrial than 18th century textile. Based on what? What industry was being used in sugar? What inventions were introduced in the sugar trade that led to other industrial developments?

Capitalism isn't identical to industrialization, by the way. It's quite a bit older, by at least a few centuries. In fact, it is not a bold statement to say that Capitalism is a necessary precondition for industrialization. Mao's Giant Leap Forward couldn't have possibly succeeded, because no capital was being poured into creating industry. For the same reason Soviet industrialization succeeded, as huge capital was being invested into it.
 
18th century sugar was produced more industrial than 18th century textile. Based on what? What industry was being used in sugar? What inventions were introduced in the sugar trade that led to other industrial developments?

Capitalism isn't identical to industrialization, by the way. It's quite a bit older, by at least a few centuries. In fact, it is not a bold statement to say that Capitalism is a necessary precondition for industrialization. Mao's Giant Leap Forward couldn't have possibly succeeded, because no capital was being poured into creating industry. For the same reason Soviet industrialization succeeded, as huge capital was being invested into it.

I think traitorfish overall means the amount of labor and capital spent on the production of sugar in the 18th century vs. English textiles. The distillation of sugar into other products was a complex and incredibly labor intensive process throughout the 18th century Caribbean. Wool and linen textiles in the 18th century may have had like 40 odd steps and taken some time and required semi-specialization, but it was far less intensive and produced at lower marginal yield per worker rates. Loom regions often were made up of smaller producers than sugar in the era
 
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