You realize that the European powers of 17th and 18th centuries "exploited" the Americas to include the U.S and yet here stands the U.S head and shoulders above these "exploiters".
Good going USA. It's too bad Africa as a whole didn't manage the same. But you know, the people in the now USA who did the overthrowing were themselves Europeans. After all, the native Americans are not running things today are they?
It's harder to exploit people who have the institutional/cultural knowledge to fight back.
And still, lots of natives in colonies managed to overthrow their exploiters, usually with higher technology or more ressources than their original hunter-gatherer culture had.
Native Americans were outmatched by the population pressure from Europe. They didn't get the time to develop agriculture and everything to the point that they could compete in population density. And on top of that, a lot of violence, accidental harm and wrongful deeds have been done to them.
America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were the exploiters.
No it wasn't. It doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war?
If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA?
Native Americans had slaves:
> "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric sources and 20th century ethnographic works indicates that predatory warfare, or preying on other groups for plunder and captives, was engaged in by virtually all Northwest Coast societies."
> "Source after source notes, either through specific instances or in general terms, and with almost monotonous iteration, that within this large area a prime motive for raiding was to gain captives for enslavement."
If you think slavery was instrumental to any rich nation getting rich, I suggest you read a lot more history, and look at who had the most slaves in history, and who has the most slaves today.
> Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war?
Because the North had a diversified, industrialized economy, while the South specialized in cotton production.
But the North never could have diversified in this way if it weren't for the South. First because slave-grown cotton was a major source of capital for the overall US economy - it provided over half of all US export earnings. Second, because the demand for textile factories, meat processing plants, insurance, shippers etc. in the over-specialized South is precisely what created a market for the North to diversify into.
This is on top of the fact that the North itself had slaves for a long time, from initial settlement to abolition many decades later.
I think you're going off of old/bad data. Olmstead's paper in 2016 writes:
> Other findings of the NHC, such as the assertion that the Cotton South was the primary force driving national expansion in the antebellum period, are neither original nor correct.
As you say:
> it provided over half of all US export earnings.
This is not true. It may(?) have been over half of US exports, by some measure, but cotton was definitely not over half of earnings. Per Olmstead 2016:
> North’s fellow new economic historians promptly assaulted his thesis. It was widely recognized that cotton was leading U.S. export in the antebellum period. But exports represented less than one-tenth of total income (Kravis 1972). Figure 2 graphs the values of cotton exports as a share the value of U.S. merchandise exports, and then both U.S. cotton and merchandise export values as shares of GDP.30 As the bottom line makes clear, cotton exports were a very small share of national product—less than 5 percent over much of the of the antebellum period (Engerman and Gallman 1983, p. 28).
Emphasis mine. It goes on:
> Perhaps more surprising, given the NHC narrative, is that in 1839 and 1849 corn, not cotton, was even the South’s leading crop in terms of value! Some familiarity with historical data might have moderated the sensational claims of the NHC literature.
If you're interested in the topic, I suggest you read it, especially the section "The Economic History Slavery Debates". You should also read the sections relating about diversification if you have a strong belief in the over-specialized south.
Are you arguing that slavery did not contribute significantly to the wealth of the North, first by using slaves directly, then by integrating advantageously with the South’s economy and the slave trade?
My condensed argument is that Slavery per se does not make countries rich. Rather I am only arguing that slavery, in many countries including the USA, Brazil, and others world-wide, did not contribute to the long term economic success of the nation nearly as much as many claim it does (or solely claim it does in the USA).
We don't have a counterfactual Twin Earth where those countries did not have slaves, but we know for sure slavery is not necessary for a country to be successful. And if we look at countries that had way more slaves, the advantage of simply having slave labor seems hugely insufficient for a country to be successful.
It is possible that the USA had slaves and was able to economically leverage them far greater than all the other countries that had slaves, but this seems unlikely, and such a scenario would also be the biggest gain for a counterfactual scenario that the USA would have been successful without them, too.
> If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.
> Native Americans had slaves:
The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.
I'm not trying to point accusatory fingers anywhere, you're missing the claim. You made the claim that USA success was the direct result of slave labor. If this were true, you would expect other societies with boatloads of slave labor to be more successful. They weren't.
Since lots of places had lots of unpaid labor and did nothing particularly successful, there must be more to it. If there is more to it, it is (usually) evidence that the USA would have been successful without slave labor.
Perhaps my choice of the term "direct" is overly specific, but I feel like this is a very nit-picky quibble. The underlying point I was trying to make doesn't change, which is that the United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion. As I said, I am not making the claim, and never intended to, that slavery was the only cause of American prosperity. If this is the primary dispute you have with what I said, I readily accept the correction and we can move on.
However, if your intention is to dispute the claim that slavery was immensely beneficial to the development of the American economy, or to suggest that the morality of American slavery was somehow mitigated by other historical examples of slavery, I strongly disagree. I think in general this mentality is incredibly disrespectful. Acknowledging the role played in our success by the (unwilling) sacrifice made by millions of slaves and Native Americans is the very least that we can do.
> United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion.
I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it?
And since we don't have access to a world in which the US didn't have slavery, the best we can do to get information is to compare to other somewhat similar societies. Other places in the Americas with (and without) slave economies seem extremely relevant.
One comparison not mentioned so far: The cotton mills of England spun a lot of slave-grown cotton, just like the ones of New England. It was debated at the time how essential this was. And the civil war blockade provided a useful natural experiment, in which it turned out not to take very long to switch to cotton from other places, like Egypt.
The moral questions don't seem tightly coupled to the economic ones. Would anyone claim that slavery in what's now Haiti (or Brazil) was less of an evil act than slavery in the US, on the grounds that these places are poorer now? Or more evil, on the same grounds? And if not, then why is disputing the economic benefit of slavery in any way taken to be disrespectful of suffering?
First of all, I have heard and read from numerous sources that I trust that slavery played a huge role in the early American economy. But that on its own would be a simple factual dispute.
The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less white Americans should feel owed to pay back. So I think there’s a significant moral cost to this argument, and yes I think it’s disrespectful. But again, it’s factually controversial as well.
I had also made a variety of significant points which GP failed to respond to, instead focusing only on a hyper-literal interpretation of one subset of my argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that England, another state with a horrific history of exploitation and colonialism, was also guilty of slavery, is hardly exculpatory for the US. Whether slavery was economically beneficial in every single historical example is a separate question from whether it was beneficial to the United States.
That the slave economy was huge in early America is beyond doubt. But the more interesting debate is to what degree this influenced later American wealth. This question doesn't answer itself, we need evidence. And the presence of lots of other slave sugar plantation economies nearby is a treasure-trove. Many were also rich in the 18th C, like Barbados & Saint-Dominque... richer than the weird experiment in theocracy going on around Boston. Their 18th C riches didn't translate to 20th C riches. The "huge role in the early American economy" at early dates actually tells us very little about the effect on the trajectory in later centuries.
My argument re English cotton mills was much more focused than you credit. It was about how rapidly they switched from slave-grown cotton to non-slave cotton, once there was a blockade, not some denial that they consumed slave-grown cotton before this.
I don't think slavery is instrumental in the economic success of the USA - it probably hindered development, while no doubt enriching some individuals. If true, then when slavery was ended we would presumably have seen a stagnation in the economic fortunes of the USA, which I don't think has happened.
> If true, then when slavery was ended we would presumably have seen a stagnation in the economic fortunes of the USA, which I don't think has happened.
Something like that did in fact happen -- the post-civil war period coincided with the Long Depression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression), which some economic historians would date between 1873 and 1896.
However, the Long Depression was at least in part a global phenomenon, and with any economic story there are many confounding factors. (And on top of all of this, nations did not keep rigorous economic statistics at the time anyway.)
Actually America industrialized quite early. The north was business and industry savvy, while the south focused on slavery. Slavery was not important for national economy - otherwise there would have been no civil war in 1860:s. Instead north was doing just fine economically without slavery, while south wanted to hold to most of it's capital (slaves).
I agree that the expansion to west was facilitated by forced migration of native americans from their homelands in a process that was borderline genocidal.
The fun part is about american industrialization - quite lot of it was based on directly stealing the IP of european industrialists (i.e not respecting their patents). This is quite fun in the sense how vocal US is now in upkeeping IP laws.
if we're talking geopolitically yes of course, if we're talking culturally yes of course. The other leaders at some point like Portugal, Netherlands, UK, Spain, all had their time in the sun. Now it is the U.S's, I'm not making the claim this will remain in perpetuity.
Currently your international relations with most countries are in shambles. You've got a nearly 20 year war going with Afganistan over a terrorist attack that wasn't sponsored by the country, and it doesn't look like the Taliban is going to actually disapear. Your other misadventure into Iraq completely destabilized the area, and resulted in creation of ISIS.
Speaking as an American who has lived in other countries, the idea of "American Exceptionalism" is rampant in the USA and you will not undo it with any appeal or facts. It's built into the identity of so many people here. Seeing that as a group Americans are a majority on most English speaking websites, criticism, however correct, is always met with egoistic backlash. I hope you haven't taken it personally, nor believe that it's ALL of us. Nationalism is a disease, but one not likely to be cured.
> Currently your international relations with most countries are in shambles.
That's an empty, meaningless claim. Even if it were true (it's not), it simply does not matter very much. When Obama was in office, it was celebrations, so to speak. When Trump is gone in N years, normalcy will return, even if it requires some relationship repair. A few years does not matter in any grand scheme when it comes to relationships between the US and eg France or Britain. One President is not going to wreck relationships that are hundreds of years old. Trump is not worse than what Bush put us through with Iraq 15 years ago when it comes to international relations, not even remotely close.
> You've got a nearly 20 year war going with Afganistan over a terrorist attack that wasn't sponsored by the country, and it doesn't look like the Taliban is going to actually disapear.
That's a bogus premise. The US didn't go into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban. The US achieved its primary objective in Afghanistan a very long time ago - neutralizing Al Qaeda as a globally threatening, effective, large terrorist organization. Removing the Taliban and establishing a stable democratic Afghanistan, is the stretch goal that was always going to be very difficult to accomplish. It's questionable that such a thing could be accomplished short of fully occupying every inch of the country and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into it annually. Is the US going to fail to achieve an impossible goal of nation building a democratic Afghanistan in under 20 years? Yeah.
> Your other misadventure into Iraq completely destabilized the area, and resulted in creation of ISIS.
That one is partially correct. It's the dictatorships of the Middle East (nearly all nations in the Middle East are without functioning democracy and most are very illiberal; the US has introduced two of the few examples of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan), their systems of government, and Islamic extremism, that perpetually destabilizes the region. Some of that mess is entirely localized, some of it has been introduced by foreign powers over centuries. You already know that of course, the Taliban (the theocratic group you mentioned the US is failing to remove) are a prime example of it. There is no such thing as a stable dictatorship or stable theocracy (they require constant threats or applications of violence to hold their positions). Nearly all dictatorships in modern history have resulted in disaster and chaos in their wake. Whenever Saddam's regime fell (however long that would have taken without the US involvement), it was always going to result in the sort of chaos that we've seen in Iraq, as the country is a forced-together bifurcated society of conflicting factions. The US should have never gone into Iraq, however it's also false to pretend that Iraq was stable or functioning well before that (What does a wildly violent, murderous stable dictatorship mean exactly? That's a contradiction in terms. Stable in what regard, the lack of all basic human rights and democratic institutions? Stable in the application of consistent terror to oppress the people?).
That's because the U.S. was never decolonized. It just became an independent colonial state, where European settlers and their descendants continued to steal land, kill natives, and import slaves for another hundred years.
That's how the U.S. came to stand "head and shoulders" above European nations: unlimited land and free labor, which yielded almost unlimited wealth, which was all acquired by Europeans.
Today slavery is abolished, and Native American nations are recognized as sovereign entities; but descendants of slaves and Native Americans continue to live in a country where colonial descendants of European settlers hold all the wealth and power, and the history of expropriation and massacre of their ancestors has been whitewashed as quaint folklore.
So if you look at it from the perspective of the colonized people and their descendants, North America has had it even worse than almost anyone.
What. A simple counter point that breaks down everything you said would be the measurement of butter production in the northern states pre bellum (civil war) versus that of the southern states.
So no, nothing to do with "unlimited land and free labor".
You're going to have to elaborate, I didn't understand your point at all.
I look forward to watching you attempt to demonstrate that appropriation of native land, and free labor from slavery, aren't the pillars on which most wealth in the US was built. I'm sure it will be entertaining.
Sure, butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows. So there is your counter point to the argument that with "free labor" things got massively built. Quite the opposite. Its hard to get high productivity from slave labor (go figure).
Anyhow, one has to observe to be first aware of such things like the butter production in the south as compared to the north to realize that the basic argument of "free labor and unlimited lands" doesn't hold up very well.
I'd also like to point that during the peak of the British Empire in the late 19th century up to the early 20th century, the British had by that point outlawed slavery.
Lastly, it is amazing to me that you keep bringing up certain groups of peoples. My sister recently took a genetics test and confirming what I already knew I'm roughly 25% "native" like you keep referencing to. Is this my mic drop moment?
Indeed this is something that even George Washington famously wrote about. His conclusion was that slave labor is an economic disaster and that he would be far better off financially not being responsible for carrying all the costs of the labor. And that's before the US developed a far superior economic model to what existed in Washington's time, in regards to productivity (ie even in a backward, low productivity agrarian context, it was obvious slave labor was extremely inefficient, it did not work well at all).
This is something that has been proven repeatedly by studies that have looked into slave labor in the colonies and elsewhere. When people on the Internet say otherwise, my experience has been that they never support their claims, they're always empty statements held up as fact.
The US would have developed faster if the slaves had been free. Along with being obviously morally evil, slavery inherently must involve a great misallocation of human resources. It's an extreme example of command economics. The Soviets, Chinese and others more recently have demonstrated how poorly slave-based economics works in practice. We're not lacking for proof; there isn't a single example from modern history of it working well versus free labor.
The greatest example of this in action in recorded history, is modern China. They only developed at all after they began to shift away from a de facto slave-based labor system, to something closer to free labor. Simply put, they unleashed their human capital and it has done the rest, going to work building out modern China (in spite of the restraining, backwards, command economics system that remains, rather than because of it; something Internet pundits frequently get wrong about China).
First, I'll note that you haven't addressed the "unlimited land" part at all. Shall I conclude that you agree with me, at least, that appropriation of native land was one of the pillars of US wealth creation?
> butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows.
So from this one example, you're extrapolating that slavery did not play a major role in the creation of overall US wealth? That is a... bold claim, to put it lightly. It is not supported by contemporary historians, and your other comments don't exactly inspire confidence as to your mastery if History, so forgive me for being skeptical.
How about you start by telling me, of the 13 original colonies, how many had slaves? And, perhaps, how much wealth had been accumulated in the original colonies before they abolished slavery?
From there, perhaps move on to researching how slavery enriched the North, even after abolition.
> I'd also like to point that during the peak of the British Empire in the late 19th century up to the early 20th century, the British had by that point outlawed slavery.
I fail to see how that is relevant to the US.
Before you take your British Empire comparison too far, you might want to research the origin of the empire's wealth during the 19th and 20th century...
> I'm roughly 25% "native" like you keep referencing to.
Oh you're Native American, that's great! What tribe?
Not only does your genetics test not matter, by claiming native heritage in this way you are participating in something which actual Native Americans find problematic.
Native American Cultures are extremely dynamic. It's hard to define objectively who is native American and who is not. As in similar matters, it may be the best thing to let people call themselves what they want.
You can define Native American ancestry in some way or other, but that would say nothing about an individuals connection to that culture which may be high or may be zero.
> Native American Cultures are extremely dynamic. It's hard to define objectively who is native American and who is not.
Sure. To quote the interview linked in my previous comment:
"We have debates amongst ourselves about whether being Native American is about being a citizen of your tribe – a political designation – or about culture and traditional practice. I tend to come down on the side of political citizenship. It’s true that it’s about much more than blood – culture matters. But our political autonomy matters too, and that helps produce a space in which our cultural traditions can thrive."
So it's true that there isn't one unique, immutable rule for determining Native identity.
But there is also a very real pattern of white people claiming Native identity in a way that 1) all tribes disagree with, and 2) erases the voice of actual Native Americans, and sometimes even actively hurts them.
> it may be the best thing to let people call themselves what they want.
They can call themselves whatever they want. But if they're going to use some bullshit blood test as a "get out of jail free card" to make a white supremacist argument, furthering a well-documented pattern of disrespectful behavior to Native Americans, then I'm going to call them out on it.
Just imagine someone saying "Hey, I'm sick of you always bringing up specific people when you mention the Holocaust. A got a blood test and I'm 25% Jewish. Is this my mic drop moment?" . In this context would you also say "Meh, let people call themselves what they want". Context matters.
If he can't use his 25% native part as an argument for wealth partially accruing to original inhabitants of the continent, you can't use his other 75% as an argument for wealth accruing to European settlers (assuming his other 75% is European).
The shortest and simplest argument is that the South barely had the funds to prosecute the war while the North not only could fully fund their war efforts, they had access to extensive lines of credit from other nations. The South had to rely upon the largesse of European countries using it as a pawn.
The North lost roughly one soldier for every African slave brought to the South and the least we could do is not imply they were some impoverished slavers who couldn't plant a crop, open a factory, or build rail lines without some help from the South.
> The shortest and simplest argument is that the South barely had the funds to prosecute the war while the North not only could fully fund their war efforts, they had access to extensive lines of credit from other nations. The South had to rely upon the largesse of European countries using it as a pawn.
Interesting argument. And what was the wealth of the North built on?
Well we know it wasn't slavery. In the South the rich invested in slaves, and the rich controlled most of the economy. In the North the economy was dominated by agriculture, and was well along into the industrial revolution.
To put the economies in the starkest of differences, 90% of all the capital in the United States, prior to the Civil War, was located in the North. The North employed 1000% more factory workers, in factories that were magnitudes more profitable. Steel production, railroads, engines, chemicals, all this was produced in the North in almost their entirety.
The South produced only three things of note: cotton, slavery, and traitors.
Interesting. Would you say the South was an important market for the industrialized North?
Would you like to guess whether businessmen in the North invested in the slave trade and grew rich thanks to it?
And what do you make of the fact that the North abolished slavery only after decades of using slaves, making it plausible that they never could have succeeded as colonies without slaves in the first place?
You can't say the northern states were not benefiting from exploitative conditions or even slavery in the south. And all of white America continued to profit from denying non-whites equal rights in one way or another.
The Confederates had probably hoped the North would not want to go to war over the Union thing.
And also: Even though slavery is not an effective means of production (though it probably was, at some points for some people), it's still wrong.
