Welcome to Keith Tonight, don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. On August 14th of 2019, Matthew
Desmond of the 1619 Project published in the New York Times
an article stating in order to understand the brutality of
American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation where he
makes the case that the reason that America is uniquely
prosperous with regards to an overall standard of living and a
high gross domestic product is as a causal result of some
people having a recognized right at the time to force other
people to pick cotton against their will.
A book was written by Thomas Soul titled Race and Culture,
where he addresses this claim that slavery makes nations
wealthy. Referring to the economic legacy
in the aftermath of slavery, Soul says what was accomplished
by the enslavement of untold millions of human beings in
countries around the world. No doubt particular projects
here and there were the fruits of slave labor, but it would be
difficult to make the more general case that slavery
advanced the economic level of those societies in which it
existed on a mass scale. The American South, for example,
was by no means the most economically dynamic region of
the country, either during or after the era of slavery.
It was, in fact the poorest. Brazil, which imported several
times as many slaves as the United States, remained A
relatively backward country until the large scale European
immigration that began after the era of slavery was over.
The slave societies of North Africa and the Middle East,
which absorbed even more millions of slaves than the
Western Hemisphere, lagged conspicuously behind the
technological and economic level of the West both during and
after the end of slavery. Until oil, not slaves, raised
their standards of living in the modern era in Europe, it was the
nations in the Western Hemisphere of the continent
where slavery was abolished first, that led the continent
and the world into the modern industrial age.
In many parts of the world, slaves were luxuries, or at
least domestic amenities rather than capital investments
intended to yield a profit. A large retinue of slaves was a
display of wealth and power, whether in ancient Rome, China,
Africa, Thailand, Tibet, or elsewhere.
In regions where slaves were part of a lifestyle, and this
included much of the Islamic world, it can be hardly
surprising that slavery did not create any notable economic
development. That was not its role.
Moreover, even in societies where slaves were intended to
produce profits for slave owners, it is by no means
apparent that those profits played any major role beyond the
current consumption of those slave owners.
So what Desmond is doing is saying some people in America
benefited, therefore America benefited.
It would be as ridiculous as saying, well, Boeing, Northrop
Grumman and Raytheon benefit and Halliburton benefit from
invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia,
Pakistan. So therefore America benefits
when those countries get invaded.
He's making the classic confusion between a group of
parasites reaping benefits and an entire nation reaping
benefits as a cause of result of engaging in some sort of
expenditure, whether it's through through the state or
through a process of enslavement.
Some have attempted to claim that profits from slavery
provided the investments that made the industrial revolution
possible in Britain. But even if all the profits from
slavery had been invested in British industry, this would
have come to less than 2% of Britain's domestic investments
during that era. Moreover, neither in Britain nor
the Western Hemisphere was there any evidence that slave owners
were such dedicated capitalists as to invest all or most of
their incomes. Contemporary observers
frequently characterized slave owners as selfindulgent or
ostentatious consumers, often in debt.
Finally, when the total cost of Britain's naval and military
efforts against the slave trade for more than a century are
added up, they are comparable to all the profits ever made by
Britain from the slave trade in earlier times in the United
States. It's also questionable whether
all the profits from slavery exceeded the enormous cost of
fighting the Civil War, a war which would not have been fought
if there were no slavery, even if its purposes were conceived
in other immediate terms by those on both sides.
Many other slave societies which sustained no such staggering
costs also had no comparable profits from which these costs
could be subtracted. Appalling as it may be to think
of untold millions of human beings sacrificed for no larger
purpose than the transient aggrandizement of others, that
is what the historical record suggests.
Thank you for watching Keith Knight.
Don't tread on anyone. And the Libertarian Institute.
Check out this excellent book Race and Culture by Thomas Soul.