Saturday, July 9, 2016

Blake Smith — Slavery as free trade

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.
For a generation, the relationship between slavery and capitalism has preoccupied historians. The publication of several major pieces of scholarship on the matter has won attention from the media. Scholars demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution, centred on the mass production of cotton textiles in the factories of England and New England, depended on raw cotton grown by slaves on plantations in the American South.
Capitalists often touted the superiority of the industrial economies and their supposedly ‘free labour’. ‘Free labour’ means the system in which workers are not enslaved but free to contract with any manufacturer they chose, free to sell their labour. It means that there is a labour market, not a slave market.
But because ‘free labour’ was working with and dependent on raw materials produced by slaves, the simple distinction between an industrial economy of free labour on the one hand and a slave-based plantation system on the other falls apart. So too does the boundary between the southern ‘slave states’ and northern ‘free states’ in America.
While the South grew rich from plantation agriculture that depended on slave labour, New England also grew rich off the slave trade, investing in the shipping and maritime insurance that made the transport of slaves from Africa to the United States possible and profitable. The sale of enslaved Africans brought together agriculture and industry, north and south, forming a global commercial network from which the modern world emerged.
It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), aimed to convince the French monarchy to deregulate key businesses such as the sale of grain and trade with Asia. Only a few specialists read them today. Yet these pamphlets, letters and manuscripts clearly proclaim a powerful message: the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise.…
Powerful article.
AEON
Slavery as free trade
Blake Smith | PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University in Illinois and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris

9 comments:

Matt Franko said...

The slaves still had a cost i.e. Food clothing shelter etc some of which was probably paid in metals beyond original purchase price of the slave...


The guy says "capitalism depended on the profits of the slave trade..." This is a false statement there was no dependent relationship there....

Peter Pan said...

Certain commodities, like cotton, were dependent on slave labour.

Tom Hickey said...

Most people don't realize just how significant cotton was and still is as an economic good. It was a driver in that time period, and slave labor made affordable clothing available to those who previously could not dream of affording it.

Capitalism was largely about extending the lifestyle of the wealthy to a growing middle class. This required exploitation of the lower classes and especially the lowest class, which was the slave class.

This is what Marx and Engels and other social activists were writing about then, not to mention literary figures like Charles Dickens, who described the condition of the lower class and Jane Austin who described the foibles of the gentry.

Matt Franko said...

Well then why do we have cotton today with no slaves?

Nothing "depends on the profits..." we have tons of non-profit activity... sometimes firms have bad quarters/years and they go on...

Tom Hickey said...

Well then why do we have cotton today with no slaves?

Technological innovation.

Someday there will be material abundance and no workers.

Tom Hickey said...

Actually, the cotton gin enable quicker process of the cotton fiber mechanically,putting more slaves in the field and increasing the number of slaves overall. The cotton picker was not introduced until 1944.

Slavery was not necessary since it could have been done by share-cropping, which is what subsequently happened in the South.

The reason for slavery is obvious. Free labor excepting subsistence. But some economists argue that slavery was a historical artifact rather than an economic necessity. But labor would have had to imported some way, and at the time, that kind of labor was most readily and profitably available through African slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_picker

Peter Pan said...

And there is another invention, common in agriculture, known as a subsidy.

Matt Franko said...

Tom, Human trafficking is still a big problem today here in the US...

Tom Hickey said...

http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/

Right. Modern slavery is still an issue worldwide in all countries.

http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/