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Notes -
This has become a bit of a cliche but I think it's quite a lot more complicated than this. It's probably not wholly untrue, but, for instance, the issue of how efficient American plantation slavery was in the context of an industrialising economy has never really been settled. Time on the Cross has come in for a lot of criticism since its publication, but I think most people do now accept that American slavery was not simply going to be annihilated by the modernisation of the American economy; it really was quite 'efficient'.
Necro!
Anyhoo, I liked this particular bit.
Of course it's a lot more complicated, this was some Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy style analysis. I do think it's a useful frame.
Slavery counterfactuals aside, technology provided an option to slave labor. It didn't need to annihilate it. It just had to be a viable alternative, and I imagine that point in time was different for different technologies and different jobs. John Henry is a folk tale about this process, and he, of course, is a freed slave. Freed to have a labor competition with a steel-driving machine.
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