Thread 18072611

Was slavery really that bad economically? I mean, they aren't exactly taxed, but don't they make it up by producing shit? Or are they less effective for production? They aren't even paid wages, so it's literally a free income stream.
Also, slaves have to be fed, which leads to more consumption. Slavery is morally horrid, yes, but, it sounds like a good investment on the micro level, and it doesn't really sound bad on the macro level - what exactly is wrong with slavery?

> be slaveowner
> muh free labor
> pay for their food, housing, healthcare, and security 24/7
> slaves have zero incentive to work hard or innovate
> constantly sabotage equipment and fake illness
> have to pay overseers to whip them, which is another cost
> entire economy becomes a monoculture shithole with no industry or skilled workers
> get economically mogged by industrialized nations that use machines and pay wages
> muh free income stream led to the most backward, impoverished region of the US for a century after the war

Slavery is a welfare program for lazy "elites" that kills national competitiveness.

>>18072621
>work hard or innovate
i mean, would they really? how many former slave cultures are running their own business now? they could be whipped too honestly
>constantly sabotage equipment and fake illness
i didn't think of that, but wouldn't it be possible to just beat them? was it not normalized? or was it hard to enforce it because it'd become an entire legal case?
slave families do seem nasty though, and did slaves actually have their own housing? how were they usually treated by most people who'd come near them?

>>18072611 (OP)
If you ignore the ethics of keeping a massive population in violently enforced bondage servitude? There are two schools of thought on why slavery is bad. The first is that you invariably get slave rebellions. The more slaves, the more rebellions and the bigger and more dangerous they become. This is less an issue if slavery is a punitive thing for criminals or people who sell themselves into slavery to cover debts, and even less an issue if the status of enslaved person is seen as a temporary one and not a permanent multigenerational condition. Even that though isn’t really proof against internal discontent. A subset of that is where the slaves are sourced. You used a pic related of the Barbary coast. They ended up invaded and smacked to shit by the countries they were raiding for slaves. Slave raids, ransom taking, and piracy were why the United States attacked them in its first overseas wars in the 1800s. Secondly there’s the middle class issue. Slavery destroys the value of human labor for free people. As it develops it destroys the value of skilled labor as well since you can just reach a slave carpentry or blacksmithing. So all you’re left with is a plantation owning class, the small number of free men that they need to run things, and a mass of people who can’t compete against unpaid labor. This is bad.

OP, the gist of it is that slavery held back later 'modernization' efforts that is deliberate attempts to catch up to the parts of the world that first industrialized. Even the American South remained backwards compared to the rest of the US until the baby boom, needles to say it performed far above average among formerly slave countries. There's been many attempts to rationalize why but there's no unified grand theory as of yet. The simplest shortest explanation probably is that the more deeply rooted the "traditional" ways of whatever place the harder to uproot or pave over them for modernization efforts to take place, Meiji Japan being the classic example of a country with favorable conditions that tried and succeeded. Ottomans the Qing etc the examples to the opposite both of which did have slavery but not as proeminently as american plantation colonies and the reasons they remained backwards had to do with the whole political system not just with slavery.

>>18072642
i mean, historically, were there really many slave rebellions though? slavery hadn't been about until christians had to comment on it's nature in the 200s. i didn't know about the barbary coast being agro'd so often though. but wouldn't the people be incentivized to create businesses to compete against the unpaid labor? it could bridge the gap between the classes. temporary slavery being a good thing is something i've just heard of, wouldn't they be more stressed in their outlook?
your arguments are really convincing though

>>18072611 (OP)
>>18072650
Forgot to mention but prior to industrialization slavery used to be the most economically efficient.

>>18072652
sparta, rome had plenty of it, same for Caribbean colonies

>>18072650
I guess slavery practically did hold back the economy then, fucking up Southern culture.
Did the Qing have slavery upto it's collapse? That's really interesting desu, I guess slavery being looked upon terribly has to do with it too
>>18072657
Oh, are machines the main consideration for this? Would it be possible to teach slaves how to use machines xd but yeah, I think I get why now

>>18072662
the main issues with free workers - slavery is that in pre industrial/pre global trade societies you have problem with extracting labour from free folks as they usually have everything they want and fuck working hard
on the other hand you can extract all labour from enslaved people
the industrial revolution usually come with mass of former peasants/serfs getting kicked out from their plots so landowners can farm cash crops or graze livestock which create massive class of extremely poor people hungry for work that are cheap to use and abuse

>>18072652
Well again, this depends on the moral framework you’re using. Is it like chattel slavery where the enslaved person is a slave, will be a slave, will die a slave, and leave their children as slaves? Or is it a situation where Jim can’t pay his mortgage, so he sells himself to bill as a plumber for the next ten years including contractual obligations for no more than 40 hour work weeks and medical care/food? The latter is closer to what happened in classical antiquity. Note it is also similar to indentured servitude than what most people view as slavery. This difference is the basis for rebellion risk combined with populations of slaves. There were a lot of them. They tended to take one of two forms. A full blown Haiti style burn everything to the ground and kill the slavers ones and the runaways hiding in inaccessible areas or joining up with bandits or hostile natives ones. Both are bad, with the latter being more common and the former being more destructive. The Seminole tribe in Florida took in a lot of former slaves and they fought for years against the US. There were also a lot of rather violent ones in south and Central America. One of the biggest fears of the American plantation class in the south was Haiti 2.0 happening there if it helps. The actual slave owners themselves said it was a problem. Now, on labor issues? How? Anyone who can afford slaves can use them to work in anything he can train them in. So sure, there will be specialist roles for small numbers of people doing things that a slave wouldn’t be allowed to do. It’s just any time you have some guy starting a business? Some guy with a slave to spare could pay a lot less to train that slave in the trade used and just undercut the freeman. The American south had an issue here as well with a population of extremely poor whites who basically had to survive with subsistence farming on marginal land that plantation owners didn’t think was worth working.

>>18072676
I feel bad for the peasants being kicked out :( were there usually charts mapping who owned what pieces of land back then?
>>18072703
>The latter is closer to what happened in classical antiquity.
I had no idea, really?
>A full blown Haiti style burn everything to the ground and kill the slavers ones and the runaways hiding in inaccessible areas or joining up with bandits or hostile natives ones. Both are bad, with the latter being more common and the former being more destructive. The Seminole tribe in Florida took in a lot of former slaves and they fought for years against the US. There were also a lot of rather violent ones in south and Central America. One of the biggest fears of the American plantation class in the south was Haiti 2.0 happening there if it helps.
Was the Haiti revolution looked upon as good by it's contemporaries? Were they able to be good afterwards
why didn't it happen to the dominican republic
>It’s just any time you have some guy starting a business? Some guy with a slave to spare could pay a lot less to train that slave in the trade used and just undercut the freeman. The American south had an issue here as well with a population of extremely poor whites who basically had to survive with subsistence farming on marginal land that plantation owners didn’t think was worth working.
I see, damn, I guess that explains much of it. Thanks everybody for explaining it!
Slavery really did create an inescapable culture and took root that badly

>>18072621
FPBP

>>18072611 (OP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwi_Migdal
Slavery is inherently Jewish. The first Jew to hold office was a Confederate. Judaism literally supports slavery towards any "Canaanite"

>>18072611 (OP)
There was someone who won a Nobel prize for studying this. Slavery is morally repugnant, but economically speaking, it was still efficient when it was abolished.

Slavery abolition came due to religious and moral reasons. In my country they teach an enormously stupid theory that abolition happened because the "central powers" wanted to create a demand market for consumption products. I think it is basically very easy for anyone to guess why this theory is idiotic

>>18072728
>classical antiquity
Yup. Slavery COULD be a long term or generational thing but it was fuzzier. As in you could have a life long slave in a royal court who had more power and freedom than freemen. You had slaves that were more like contracted temp workers. Then you had slaves that were more or less being executed for perceived crimes against a state and were being worked to death as the form of execution. Here, I know, Wikipedia, but it’s a pretty ok general sampling of examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
>Haiti
Well they did fight in what became the Dominican Republic, and they sort of won there for a while before they had to give it back to Spain and stay on their side. Also it did not go well for Haiti. At all. France basically blockaded them and extorted a huge war debt. After all France at the time had one of the strongest navies in the world. They finished paying that debt off finally in, no shit, the 1940s.

>>18072728
>I had no idea, really?
not really
there were few classes of slaves
one of them worked to death in mines or doing other heavy labour
other was doing lighter work or more specialized in cities
some were essentially part of household that worked for a owner keeping part of what they earn

>>18072777
Yeah, the anon before was particularly clueless. Solon abolisted debt slavery in Athens in the 6th century BC and Rome banned it with the Lex Poetelia Papiria in the 4th century BC. These were full blown chattel slave societies afterwards. Even the later Roman practice of masters promising some slaves manumission after a long enough service or allowing them to save money were neither codified in law or legally enforceable and relied on the whims and goodwill of the owner (no doubt incentives designed to prevent them from running away).

>>18073506
Wrong

>>18074922
I'm clueless about 19th century America or whether your schizoposting phone calculation is true in that time and place, but in antiquity slave-holding was a profitable enterprise, and an unskilled labourer (whether slave or free) could feed multiple people with his wage. Seriously, that Abe takes up much more space than he needs to.

The fact people only think of American racial slavery when the topic of slavery is brought up is actually quite impressive. I mean the upperclass have totally made us forget that the supermajority of us all are the descendants of slaves and serfs. White people just seem to forget this so become useful idiots for the elites (descendants of nobles and royals).

>>18075212
I've noticed this too. There also seems to be some kind of "American exceptionalism" involved, as both bleeding-heart libs who lick the feet of Black Hebrew Israelites throughout February and hyper-racists dreaming of bringing back the good old days of ethnostates and buck-breaking both seem to be under the false impression that US slavery was the worst kind of slavery to ever exist, or among the worst. From the little I've read of various US states' slave laws, arbitrarily killing your own slave was mostly outlawed, and every slave society that allows legally killing slaves (far too many to list) is worse than America in my book.

Take the case of the murder of Pedanius and the execution of his four hundred slaves as a result. Roman law held every slave owned by a master accountable if the latter was killed by one of his slaves, the original legal reasoning being something like "the other slaves were probably aware of a conspiracy, or should've guarded their master better if they weren't". An angry mob tried to save the lives of those slaves who were thought to be completely innocent of guilt, and it would be a huge financial loss to the new paterfamilias if all the household slaves he inherited were executed, but in the end the Senate decided it was far more important to uphold ancient tradition and protect the integrity of law and the state, than to save possibly hundreds of innocent lives.

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