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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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slavery is not economical in the face of industrialization, and the British were the most industrialized leading to them being the most anti-slavery

I’ve seen this explanation before but thinking about it now it no longer makes sense to me.

Wasn’t it mostly just the island of Britain itself which lead the word in industrialisation while they still controlled lots of poorly developed colonies? Why would Britain, where slavery had already been dead for hundreds of years, developing industrially change the profitability of using slaves in areas of the empire with little to no industry?

Slavery never caught on in the British isles because they had population in excess; the same time that the US was still using slave labor had the British loosing children in mining accidents.

And despite eliminating the slave trade in the early 1800s, they didn't manumit slaves in the Caribbean holdings till around the 1840s.

If you want to be very, very cynical, the British anti-slave movement was a mix of virtue signaling and economic tactics to try and neuter an up and coming economic super-power.

Please excuse the lack of sources. It's early morning for me and I'm being lazy.

Slavery never caught on in the British isles because they had population in excess;

I learned something new looking this up, that Scotland still had slaves in the coal mines until 1799, but my understanding is that England (and by extension Ireland and Wales) didn’t use slaves domestically simply because it hadn’t been accepted under common law since the 12th century.

It didn't stop them in the Caribbean, though.

Also, minor correction on my part. The British manumitted their slaves in 1838 - it was the French that kept them until 1848 before it was abolished. My apologies - it's been a while since I've cracked open those books.

That said, I'm perhaps being very cynical. But if I'm sure the British had required the manpower, they would have worked some legal and/or financial shenanigan out.

This is all pure supposition on my part, however, so feel free to ignore it.

I don't know anything about the economics of slavery, so I'm just trying to understand. But why does having population in excess make slavery less enticing? I understand you can get lots of cheap labor if you have excess population. But at the same time, slavery is free labor, and wouldn't having excess population mean you have more people to enslave?

Slaves are not 'free'. Intial purchase, maintenance, oversight - all costs. Then there's the social aspects - slaves in the South were, ironically enough, treated very well compared to thier brethern that went elsewhere. It's why you get twisted situations such as the Irish Canal in New Orleans, Louisiana, that was so named due to all the Irish immigrants that died during it's construction in 1830s.

Why didn't they use slave labor? Because immigrant labor was much, much cheaper.

It's cost of labor vs wages, something I've been wanting to talk about recently. Slaves have huge fixed and variable costs, especially if you have to do it individually and can't take advantage of coordinated/socialized investments like the county militia Catch'uh Freeman team

You need some pretty weird conditions for slavery or serfdom to coexist with widespread wage labor iirc. Lots of war captives in Rome, ways to stop serfs bailing to go work for cash in Russia, etc. (i still don't know how that second one worked tbh, anyone have a clue?)

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