Only in the past decade or two have historians freed themselves of the 'victor's narrative' of the Civil War era, and those myths are still wandering around loose in the general population. Olmstead's “Journey through the Slave States”, for example, was about as reliable as a convinced Marxist traveling through the US in the 1950's would have been. He went knowing the truth, and observed precisely what he expected to see — quite honestly, but very unscientifically.

You still get howlers today like the belief that slavery “locked up” capital; which is obviously impossible, if you think about it. Slaves were a very liquid asset. Every time someone bought one, someone else (almost invariably another Southerner) got the price, and the new owner now had an excellent security against which he could borrow. He'd also bought an appreciating asset — since slaves had a high reproduction rate, if you had enough women of childbearing age, you got the capital gains of natural increase. And, of course, you could always rent a slave out if you didn't want to use his labor yourself; that was a commonplace practice, with active markets everywhere in the slave states, and increasing numbers of specialist brokers to handle it.

In economic terms, slavery is a capitalized rent. And a slave economy is much more like a capitalist one than either is like, say, a manorial-feudal-seigneurial local-subsistence type. In a capitalist or slave economy, the factors of production move according to market pricing signals. Who makes the decisions about that are different, but it's quite distinct from the customary-household system.

The Southern slave system was profitable, flexible, and efficient. It was extremely evil, too, of course, but there's no necessary connection between that and inefficiency. Slavery is not wrong because it limits development or because slaves were badly treated; in most respects, they weren't in the antebellum US, by the material standards of the day. The one in which they were badly treated — denial of personal ownership and autonomy — is the one that counts.

It's also often been said that slaves couldn't be used as factory workers. This is untrue.

They could be and were so used, and functioned about as well as most workers of the time — which, incidentally, isn't saying all that much.

Industrial work patterns of continuous effort and clock-bound regularity were intensely unpopular with almost all the ex-peasants who staffed factories in the 19th century, and chronic absenteeism, outright sabotage and so forth were problems everywhere, which explains the ferocious factory discipline and widespread use of extra-economic incentives like payment in truck. Or, in some countries, jailing and beating and shooting.

An industrialist in northern France remarked in the 1840's, sort of offhand, that every factory owner lived in fear of an uprising 'like that of the slaves of Santo Domingo'.

Read up on Hall's modernization of the Harper's Ferry arsenal, for an American example. He nearly got killed a couple of times simply because the (free, white) workers were outraged at his attempts to have management actually control the production process and to make everyone work as directed for the full day. In some respects, slaves were actually _superior_ from an employer/owner's point of view.

The state with the largest number of steam engines in 1861 was Louisiana, and almost all of them were operated and maintained by slave mechanics. Slave workers at, for example, the Tredegar Works, were about as productive as free employees and their maintenance costs were lower — about half the wages a skilled worker could command, with additional advantages in lower turnover and absenteeism.

The reason the South didn't have more factories was fairly straightforward economics; comparative advantage, to be precise, and substitutability factors in labor supply. Plantation agriculture paid better, for a number of reasons:

1: Slavery meant that Southern agriculture didn't have the diseconomies of scale that Northern farming did. You could expand the size of a farming enterprise well beyond what was possible in the North, where farm labor was relatively scarce, costly, and most of all unreliable and difficult to discipline. In agriculture, you can only use non-family labor that you're absolutely sure you can get when you need it — if the labor you expected isn't there for the harvest, you can lose an entire year's profits or more.

There were many attempts to set up large-scale, employer-manager type farming operations in the antebellum North; none succeeded for long. Family farmers out-competed them; they still do, for the most part. So if you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the North beyond the “prosperous working farmer” stage, you had to leave the family farm and go into something else, industry or trade or the professions or politics.

In the South, you could just keep adding acre to acre and slave to slave, and make _very good_ returns.

Even in the least profitable agricultural areas of the South, slaves returned about 5% on capital; in the boom zones of the Southwest and Texas, it was more like 15-25%, allowing for ups and downs and price fluctuations. This was extremely good money at the time — railway securities usually paid around 5%, if you avoided extremely speculative lines.

2: Southern agriculture was more efficient than Northern; or to be more precise, its plantation sector was more efficient.

Slaves worked slightly shorter hours than Northern free farmers, but they worked harder and their per-hour productivity was greater, because the gang system (together with a generally skillful standard of management) allowed workers to be driven in a steady lockstep fashion more like an assembly line than the rather pre-modern Northern rural labor habits.

Add in that the longer growing season meant that labor could be applied to farming much more continuously than in much of the north; there was less seasonal downtime.

Technical standards of agriculture in the South's plantation sector were also rather high, much higher than they were after 1865; cotton production per work-hour almost tripled between 1820 and 1860, for example.

And labor force participation rates were extremely high — or to put it another way, slave women in the South did almost all the same sort of agricultural labor as men, and spent much less time on household tasks, in contrast to what even very poor free women did. 100 families of slaves would give a lot more output to their employer than 100 families of white workers; the difference was that the slaves could be compelled to concentrate on commercial production at the expense of non-monetized things like domestic felicity and family pride.

When you factor in the much lower “wages” slaves got — maintaining an adult slave cost about $150 a year, even in an urban area, only a little more than half of what even the lowest-paid free laborer got — and the reason planters tended to keep most of their assets in slaves and land is obvious: it paid.

Why undertake a risky and unfamiliar form of investment, when the one you knew about was doing so well?

Planters often invested in railroads and other transportation improvements because they needed the cheapest possible route to market, and they weren't at all hostile to manufacturing — such industrial investment as there was in the South tended to come disproportionately from planters, who were after all the ones with the money, the education and the connections. They just had better ways to get rich, from their perspective.

3: Slave labor could do nearly all the same types of manual labor as free, and about as well, but the reverse was not true. There was a substitutability problem.

You couldn't get freemen to work in gangs under supervision on plantations — not at any wage that left the planter any profit.

Note that after emancipation, despite being dead broke, the ex-slaves fanatically resisted all attempts to make them work in the old style. They wanted to be family farmers, growing their own food and choosing how to allocate their own labor and how and to what degree to participate in the market.

They mostly had to settle for sharecropping since the planters retained possession of the land, but they insisted on taking their women out of as much field labor as they could, even at the cost of a steep drop in living standards, and they scattered their cabins rather than grouping them near the “big house”.

As the song said, “want to get away from the white-man Boss”. They thought of freedom in concrete terms: not having someone standing over you every hour of the day telling you what to do.

In the antebellum era, then, slaves _could_ be used in, say, factories or urban domestic service or as general laborers. There was an active market in rented slaves, and a profitable one, especially as wages in general were higher in the South than in the North, often as much as a quarter higher.

But you could also use free labor, particularly immigrant Irishmen and Germans, for those tasks. The South as a whole attracted few immigrants but its cities all had large foreign communities.

You _couldn't_ use free labor for plantation gang work, and since that paid so handsomely, farming “bid away” labor from urban uses; and larger plantations were starting to show a tendency to “bid away” labor from smaller holdings.

Despite this, all Southerners with enough money continued to buy slaves when they could — about one-third of all white Southerners in the area of the CSA were in slaveholding families — and prices continued to increase, indicating market confidence in future profitability. Only when the South was visibly losing the war did prices start to drop.

Note that a very large majority of factory and mine workers in the North were immigrants. Few native-born American adult white men worked as unskilled factory labor before 1860, or in fact at any time during the 19th century, unless absolutely desperate.

The South, after 1807, couldn't import labor; hence the relentless rise in slave prices, which tended to concentrate ownership and to concentrate slave labor in the _most_ profitable sectors.

If there had been an abundant supply of fresh slaves from Africa at $200 a head, the Southern population would have grown more rapidly and there would probably have been more diversification.

As it was, when the war came along and incentives changed, much was accomplished.

The South was a rural and agricultural country in 1860, but not a backward or poor one; it had more railroad mileage than any European country, and about as much manufacturing per capita as France, and incidentally a higher per-capita income than France even counting the slaves. Even a deeply agricultural and newly-settled state like Mississippi had several machine-shops which could manufacture complete steam engines.

The Confederate government managed to manufacture most of the arms it needed — 50 ironclads, for instance, the world's largest and most modern powder mill, and about half as many 12-pounder Napoleons as the North. When Lee's army surrendered, every man had 75 rounds and a modern rifle-musket, and there was as much artillery as there were men to work it. Food was short, shoes were short, they were running out of fit adult males to be soldiers, but weapons were sufficient if not superabundant.

The main weaknesses of the Confederate war economy were in things like transportation, finance, and in basic materials production, for reasons I could go into but about which whole books have been written. There's a limit to what you can do in a few years, while also mobilizing over half you total adult males for actual fighting. The learning curve is just too steep.

Japan managed it quicker, but then Japan had a social system that was similar to the Western one in some respects. It was a nation, for starters, in the Western sense; it had a similar decayed-feudal/ancien regime system, and so forth.

Even so, there were a lot of lurches and angst. And even now, Japanese scientists are much more productive in American labs than they are at home, where fundamental research is involved, for complex cultural reasons.

China had to abandon the whole Confucian scholar-gentry system, one which had defined the Han identity for millenia, and the process was long and bloody. They've done better in the past generation, but China's prospects are not good. Apart from the looming demographic catastrophe, their growth is quantitative, with low Total Factor Productivity increases. That sort of thing can go on for some time and lead to impressive GDP figures — the USSR outgrew the US for over 40 years — but then it hits a wall as the ability to shift factors _en masse_ runs out, which is just starting to happen there. Shifting to qualitative growth is much harder.

The Industrial and Scientific revolutions happened only once, in one subset of the Western countries; this requires a whole constellation of lucky coincidences, cultural, economic, religious, philosophical, political, and just plain coin-falling-heads-ten-times-in-a-row. They were then widely copied, because it became apparent that failure to do so meant poverty and weakness, but it wasn't an easy path for most peoples and it has proved impossible for some; they're not willing to pay the price, which is wholesale Westernization.

The process goes a long way back in the history of Western civilization; it would be more accurate to say that both science and machine industry were the products of a certain habit of mind and way of looking at the world, one which was becoming increasingly widespread throughout the medieval period. But the process was fragile and any number of things happening otherwise could have bumped it off-track; a different outcome to the theological controversies of the 13th century, for example.

It was a low-probability historical accident, which is where I think “Years of Rice and Salt” falls down. It might have happened elsewhere sometime, but not anytime soon, and I think not within the lifetime of any of the other civilizations then current.

You shouldn't make this argument for fear of lack of evidence, the best reason for not making this statement is lack of logic or reason.

How would minimizing Europe's role in the undevelopment of Africa help maintain a fragile capitalist order? I can't figure this out? How would this work. Please explain this to me?

You don't need to include footnotes [unless you want to] or any other “proof” to make an argument to me. Just lay out exactly how minimizing the Europeans role in Africa's development helps maintain a fragile capitalist order?

Now regarding Arab Slavery compared to American slavery. I will take your word for it that the Arabs used their capital in a different manner than the West. The purpose of bringing it up was just to point out that many people choose to focus on the Wests “crimes” while usually ignoring the “crimes” of others.

The reason for this is to maintain the “whites as oppressors” narrative. The purpose of the narrative was laid out above in the part about the Marxist use of 5GW.

As far as the word “Marxist”, I only use it because the “white as oppressor” narrative is the product of the Marxist intellectual lineage. See the film I posted to learn more about this.

The important thing is that you explain how minimizing the Europeans role in the underdevelopment of Africa helps to maintain a fragile capitalist order.

Thank you for the comment, and apologies for the bad service [1].

You're correct on fertility. However, China and Japan had even lower fertility rates than Europe in the early modern Era (I discuss this in passing in my review of Greg Clark's “A Farewell to Alms” [2]). Also in the period Tokyo was the largest city in the world.

Actually, your comment goes a long way to foreshadowing Clark's discussion of why England, China, and Japan, but not India, were on the road to industrialization. Clark mentions the presense of worker's family on factory workflows as just one example of lower productivity of Indian workers than European workers.

The desire to accumulate property increased over time in England, as people's time horizons expanded and the interest rate required for capital fell.

Excellent thoughts!

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/01/20/major-apologies-to-s-m-stirling.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/01/17/why-the-industrial-revolution-why-not-an-industrial-counter.html

In most parts of the world everyone marries, and usually (especially for women) soon after puberty; that seems to have been the pattern from time out of mind.

In Europe north and west of a line between St. Petersburg and Trieste, people married late — about the same ages we do now, in the mid-20's for both sexes — and a high percentage, sometimes as many as one quarter, never married or had children at all.

There was what amounted to a taboo against more than one married couple under the same roof, and you had to accumulate enough resources for your own 'hearth' before you could marry and become a full adult — a 'servant' (someone working in someone else's household) wasn't really grown-up regardless of age, and would be addressed as “boy” or “girl” even if in their 20's or 30's. Conversely, a 'family' in general usage included everyone living under one roof and under the authority of the head of the family, whether related or not.

This was also the pattern from “time out of mind”, or at least as far back into the medieval period as we have any demographic information. Marriage happened at least a decade after puberty and extra-marital childbearing was very rare, while never-married women were quite common and apparently usually died _virgo intacta_, at least in the technical sense.

This had three main consequences.

First, it provided a self-regulating population-control mechanism because marriage (and birth) rates tracked the economy, with a lag. When times were hard by customary standards, people married later and more never married; for example, the population of England stopped growing in the 1640's and didn't start up again until the 1720's, for exactly that reason — as many as a quarter of the women in late Stuart England never had children, and the average age of marriage was as high as 26.

Hence despite a 'natural' pattern of conceptions (every 2 years or so from marriage to menopause or other physical reason for infertility) crude birth rates were quite modest, about 23 per 1000 annually.

They were never all that much higher than that; really large families were fairly rare and usually a sign of unusual wealth. Typical TFR's were about 4 children per woman, or a bit less.

This mechanism kept the population from pressing too hard on the subsistence capacity of the territory; given the high infant mortality rates, crude birth rates needed to be well above 25 per 1000 to produce consistent population growth. Even in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when English nuptuality rates and fertility hit levels never seen before or since, they were lower than say, Uganda is today. Typically there were century-long swings between (modest) population growth and stasis or decline.

(By contrast, in the American colonies, where land was abundant, food cheap and wages high and it was easy to start a household, the birth rate in the 1600's and 1700's was near the biological maximum — higher than Niger or Afghanistan today.)

Second, the fact that there was no “extended family”, except to a limited extent among the very rich, and that most people spent a decade or more working away from their families of birth, meant that people were geographically and occupationally mobile.

Few Englishmen (or women) died in the parish where they were born; less than a third, in most years. A tenth of every generation after the 1500's moved to London alone. They were individualist profit-maximizers ready to shift place or job long before the Industrial Revolution. People didn't support their aged parents, either; the parish did it. Ordinarily a man died about the time his first son married; and anyway, they couldn't afford it.

Hence the Industrial Revolution in England didn't have to pry people out of time-encrusted customary communities of peasants 'rooted in the soil', because if any such had ever existed they'd been dissolved a long, long time before.

Third, there was a very strong incentive to accumulate property and/or skills, at least to a modest level — enough to rent a cottage or practice a craft. Unless you did, you couldn't become an adult, couldn't get married, couldn't have children, couldn't become a full member of society even at a fairly humble level.

This interpretation is a bit off. See for example David Hancock's London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 or Paul Langford's A Polite and Commercial People
England 1727-1783.

ElamBend, thank you for your response; it is informative. You are right; you had a great professor.

Dan tdxap writes,
This increase in growht of course helped the people affected by it, but as hte major revolution was net long term economic growth in absolute living standards greater than 0% per annum, the benefits of these additional markets (and additional suppliers) were ones of degrees.

I am sorry Dan. I had trouble understanding this. Also, thanks for the book link.

Servo, I do not know how you can claim that the Arab slave trade is a “commonly overlooked fact.” At least a dozen books are published each year on this subject.

Servo writes,
If mass slavery = wealth, then the middle east should be 10 times as wealthy as the Western Hemisphere, due to 10 times the amount of African slaves being brought to the Middle East.

This is a fallacious assertion. Mass slavery does not equal wealth. Slave labor produces wealth. The majority of African slaves kidnapped by Arab traders and sold to Middle Eastern royalty and merchants did not, like their Atlantic counterparts, work in intense, manual, agricultural labor. Instead, the majority of Middle Eastern slaves, were essentially, consumer products of conspicuous consumption. They worked in harems, served in royal palaces, as soldiers, guards, and of course, eunuchs. For a brief, descriptive overview, see Humphrey Fischer's Slavery in the History of Black Muslim Africa.

Seerov digresses,
But then again, the people who propagate these “ideas” [that the Atlantic slave trade generated wealth?] are the same people who subscribe to Marxist theories which figure racism as being the tool of the rich to maintain their class interests.

This is a shoddy and misleading argument. How can you make such a blanket, universalist assertion without evidence? How can you malign a historical discipline (Atlantic Studies) as a tool of Marxist (however you define “Marxist”; I'm inclined to believe that your use of the said term is no more than a rhetorical strategy) propaganda?

I could respond to the rest of Seerov's comment in detail. On the other hand, I could respond with gross generalizations and blanket condemnations. For example, I could write that Seerov’s attempt to conveniently minimize the role Europeans played in underdeveloping Africa, is a 5GW (dis)information tactic deployed by neoliberals who wish to maintain a fragile planetary capitalist order that was built upon historical patterns of exploitation. But, of course, I would not dare to say any of these assertions without evidence.

Dan, thanks for posting a great post that generated much enlightening and informative discussion. I look forward to reading your future posts.

“”But once the revolution began, colonialism (both the products produced and trade markets it opened) contributed to the revolution's success.”"

This can be read as making two statements at once:

1. colonialism increased the rate of growth from some positive number to another positive number.
2. colonialism was necessary for maintaining an economic growth rate above 0%.

#1 is beyond the scope of my interest, at least as far as this thread goes.
I disagree with #2. I don't see why colonailism is necessary for avoiding falling back into a Malthusian economy.

So the question now is, why do the Marxist propagate such ideas? The answer is happens to be one the main questions that this blog deals with and that happens to be 5GW. The Marxist left [whose American roots can be found in the 5GW strategy center known as the Frankfort School] construct the myth of “white oppression” or “white theft” to accomplish two tactical goals.

First, raise an army of the “oppressed” in disgruntled ethnic minorities and second, to effectively psychologically castrate Westerners and their perceptions of their historical institutions. This castration can been seen in people of European origin who in a turrets-like manner, qualify their displeasure in the behavior of ethnic minorities with the words “I'm not a racist but”. This turrets-like statement-”I'm not a racist but”-must be said before stating any displeasure regarding the behavior of ethnic minorities in the United States.

This turrets-like tic is a perfect indicator of the effectiveness of the Marxist use of 5GW. In fact, the West is the first civilization in history to literally assist in its own displacement. After the armies of the oppressed are in their staging area, the transition will be made to 4GW or even 2GW, and the West will be just another anthropological oddity.

See Bill Lind Video for more details:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8630135369495797236&q=political+correctness+bill+lind&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

“But once the revolution began, colonialism (both the products produced and trade markets it opened) contributed to the revolution's success.”

Clearly free markets, free trade, free sees, etc, helped world economic growth The majority of this growth was taken by poorer countries (first the US and western Europe, then India, China, and Latin America).

This increase in growht of course helped the people affected by it, but as hte major revolution was net long term economic growth in absolute living standards greater than 0% per annum, the benefits of these additional markets (and additional suppliers) were ones of degrees.

“I have another question: what role did religion play in establishing the preconditions for the industrial revolution or in the revolution's development?”

Clark doesn't address religion much [1], but I imagine the answer would be “substantially” if you view Europe's higher birthrates among the rich , compared to China or Japan, as a function of Christian pro-birth theology.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691121354