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I know that slavery was integral to the economy of the southern states, but when people say "slavery built America", it seems like they're implying that it was integral to the northern states, too. My biases, which I am actively seeking to counteract, tell me that anyone who says slavery built America is ignoring history.. but y'know, I don't actually know that much about history. I just remember learning in high school that the southern economy was agricultural and sustained by unpaid labor, while the north wasn't agricultural and didn't have any financial need for slavery.
How important was slavery to the north, financially speaking? If the textile factories weren't able to get cotton from the south, would they have ceased to be, or would they have just gotten cotton elsewhere? (Like from overseas?)
Other commenters are missing the point of GDP by labeling slavery as non-investment spending. Money changed hands, so someone saw material benefit from slavery. The question is whom. These foreign trade charts suggest we mostly exported crude materials until the late 1800s, but it wasn’t much of our GDP. On the other hand, this essay notes that US cotton provided something like 75% of British textiles. That’s potentially a lot of money flowing into the US.
But I suspect it’s a moot point. “Built on slavery” has legs because of the ideological gap between American founding principles and the peculiar institution. It’s an attack on Jefferson, Washington, etc. who saw personal benefit. Any overall economic effect is less important given the particular reverence of the American right for these figures.
No one denies that slavery brought in money, but the claim is that far more money would have been brought in if there had been a market based labor system. As compared with the alternative, slavery was a net loss.
This really does not address the point, because it is entirely possible for both of these to be true:
As you say, compared with the alternative, slavery was a net loss"; and
Slaves "built America" to some degree (BTW< IMHO, that degree is quite small)
In other words, slavery did exist, it was used for labor instead of market-based labor, and hence slave labor was responsible for X percent of US GDP being what it is today. That is true, even if current US GDP would be even higher, had market-based labor been used in the South (which, BTW, I agree is very likely the case).
Similarly, if I hire Bob to build my house, he built my house, even if Joe would have built a better house cheaper and faster.
It all depends on what the point of saying "America was built on slavery" is. My impression is that the goal of this movement is to establish that the USA's extraordinary economic prowess and status as the premier world power is due to (would not have existed without) its early reliance on slavery, rather than to its unique founding principles or constitution. If this is true, then the case for forfeiting its those founding principles to atone for the evils of slavery through e.g. reparations or affirmative action is strengthened.
the USA's position today could easily be caused by multiple factors acting together, neither one being "more important" than the other in the cause-and-effect sense.
This is simply a moral question of who to praise. Some people say it is the genius of the founding fathers direction, and others say it is the hard work and sweat of slaves.
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But the existence of alternatives isn’t really important when assigning blame. If I steal a man’s money, I shouldn’t get to keep it. That’s true whether or not I could have expected more money by working a normal job.
Maybe counterfactuals matter when trying to put an actual number on it. The injury would something like be Potential - Actual GDP. This has its own set of problems.
The question isn't assigning blame, it's actually assigning credit for success. If America's success is primarily due to slavery, then a) maybe the slaves are owed not just for the wrongs due to them but also for the lion's share of America's prosperity and b) the achievements of the founders are proportionally reduced, so fidelity to their principles is less important.
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When you're talking about whether slavery built America, it's the same America in both versions of the scenario. In other words, in your analogy you'd be stealing a man's money, but then giving the money to a church that's the same church that the man would have given it to anyway. The man is personally injured, but after you and him are dead the money is in the same place that it would otherwise be, except that you burned some of the money first (i.e. slavery is inefficient) so there's less of it.
In this scenario the church isn't to blame. And it isn't meaningfully profiting off of stolen money.
Does the burning matter in this scenario?
The question is whether the initial theft was unjust enough for a particular remedy. That doesn’t change if you burned the money, or even if you added your own to the donation.
If someone's going to give money to the church, and you stole it to give it to the church, that's not "unjust enough for a particular remedy" if by a remedy you mean the church has to give it back. (Particularly if you're going to make sure the analogy fits, in which case the church has a sort of magnetic pull that ensures that all money will get to it eventually.)
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(or it's enviable geographic position, and the misfortune of the prior inhabitants to not have cohabitated with domesticated livestock in cities, leaving them vulnerable to a lot of diseases the Europeans brought with them.)
Geographic positions (and natural resources) have remarkably little link with economic development, which is why e.g. New Zealand is more prosperous than Brazil, or places like Albania and Moldova can be poor while being close to places like Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Au contraire; geography has everything to do with economic development, just not in the most simple, straight-forward ways. Brazil has surprisingly crappy topography for development, with the Amazon jungle being surprisingly infertile, and major mountain ranges limiting the ability to move goods from the interior (such as it is) to the coasts.
The U.S. has the Missouri/Misouri/Tennessee/Ohio River systems draining incredibly productive agricultural land and moving its goods cheaply, several amazing harbors on each coast, examples of just about every single type of topography in the world (and the variety and quantity of natural resources to match), natural moats to the east and west, deserts to the south, and forests and tundra to the north. While it's possible to screw up that position, it's really hard; kind of like how France's agricultural productivity made it by far the population hub of the European continent in the late middle ages, and thus it was a power player in European politics even when its politics were a horrifying mess.
That's my point, and that such a position is not necessary for rapid economic development. And it's not that hard, e.g. Russia has lagged despite the Volga, Don, extremely fertile soil in the south, and massive quantities of oil, natural gas, and other commodities.
There's no reliable link from geography to economic development, especially the sort of development that the US has achieved. Socio-cultural explanations are essential: the only comparable successes in the 19th century had similiar cultures of bourgeois values (where an enterprising commoner could rise to high status) and policies, even when geographically very different from the US e.g. the UK or Germany.
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Yes, I am sure that is the point, and it is an extremely dubious one, but it still seems to me that the relative contribution compared to some hypothetical alternative is not particularly relevant.
Eg: Years ago, I made a bunch of money in the stock market, based on recommendation from a friend. That friend deserves my thanks, and perhaps even recompense (reparations, if you will), even if some other person might have given me even better advice. My friend provided me a service, at my behest, just as slaves did. Was their contribution enough, and their subsequent recompense sufficiently meager, such that reparations are in order? I don't know; I rather doubt it, and IMHO a much better argument for reparations is re post-Civil War treatment of African-Americans, or based on equities unrelated to the extent of slaves' economic contributions. However, it certainly does not make sense to me to enslave someone for 20 years, and then when they ask for a share of my profits, respond, "But, I now realize that my business would have been even more profitable, had I relied on free labor." That does not seem to me to be a very compelling argument.
Let's say your friend tells you to buy Apple stock and you make a 3% return. But the market as a whole went up 5% in the same period. If you had just given no thought to the matter and bought a total stock market index fund like VTSAX, you would have performed better. In that case, I don't think it's correct to say your friend deserves any thanks or credit for his recommendation. He didn't really help you in any meaningful way, since your default option was better than his suggestion.
Yes, but who says that using free market labor was the default option? Apparently, it wasn't, at least in the eyes of the landowners at the time. Moreover. they went out and compelled Africans to come to the US to work. As I said, " it certainly does not make sense to me to enslave someone for 20 years, and then when they ask for a share of my profits, respond, "But, I now realize that my business would have been even more profitable, had I relied on free labor." That does not seem to me to be a very compelling argument."
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That analogy doesn't fit the question. Blacks benefit from America being prosperous. (Or if they don't, it's because of factors other than slavery.) There's no share of your profits to ask for. There's a share of a pool, but the money would have ended up in the pool whether you enslaved anyone or not.
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