In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).
>The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
If the South was so enriched by slavery, why did they have such a lack of guns and industry with which to build them? And why could they only buy less than a tenth of the guns that the North bought?
The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize.
If slavery really were better for the economy, then the South could have won the war even despite their lack of numbers - if the South had armed every single soldier with a breach-loading rifle (they mostly just had smoothbores, mostly muzzle-loading) then the North simply wouldn't have been able to push the offensive and would probably have been losing ground. The South's strategic goals were easier than the North's - the North needed to annex the south (or re-annex, semantics) whereas the South only needed a stalemate. The South mobilized first, so if anything they should have had more guns than the North.
You're quite correct that slavery is wildly profitable for the slave-owner, so they had more than enough capital to industrialize, so why didn't they?
>In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
The ethnicity is important here: if a serf runs away, there's no obvious inherent indicator they're a serf, making it easy to make a new life nearby (e.g. a few towns away). If a black slave runs away in the Antebellum South, then other villages will assume he's a runaway slave until proven otherwise - that runaway will have to escape the entire South. The serf's greater ability to escape if he's treated too poorly gave him bargaining power that limited the abuse of feudal lords.
> The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize.
I think this highlights some differences between Roman slavery and slavery in America (and many other states). While many Roman slaves were engaged in menial labour some of them were trusted enough (and presumably comfortable enough) to be in positions of responsibility in nearly every facet of the Roman economy.
Freed slaves could go on to have successful careers, sometimes rising to high positions in Roman society, something that it is hard to imagine happening in the American south.
Racism probably played a part in that, considering that many Roman slaves were Greek or Italian, while Southern slaves were black and blacks continue to face discrimination a century and a half after the end of slavery.
Slavery in the US made sense for a limited time but at some point it would have hold the US back economically. It would have lacked enough free workforce for the industrialization and so would have fallen vastly behind compared to other countries.
Slavery is very profitable for the slave holder but not for the society as a whole.
Like if you take Nazi Germany. Many companies got rich by being provided essentially free slave labor that they could free work to death. But does it really make sense to have educated people work themselves to an early grave doing menial inefficient labor that needed to be closely supervised? Could they not have provided much more to the economy if they had been free? The practice is as sustainable as eating your own flesh.
Nazi Germany could keep going as long as the war machine kept going and there were countries to occupy but it wouldn't have been a very sustainable society in the long run.
Yes capitalist have an individual interest in slave labor and in forming monopolies. But in doing so they also also create conditions for the undoing of the very society that made them rich. That is exactly the point. Slavery is amazing for the slave owner but not for everyone else.
Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality, especially if you have the power to force the slaves into utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south, and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this can only ever be done by the will of the people, against the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies and many other undesirable traits).