Gavin Wright: Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revis...

Gavin Wright: Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited: "Eric Williams... links the slave trade and slave-based commerce with early British industrial development. Long-distance markets were crucial supports for technological progress and for the infrastructure of financial markets and the shipping sector.... The eighteenth century Atlantic economy was dominated by sugar, and sugar was dominated by slavery. The role of the slave trade was central.... Adherents of an insurgency known as the New History of Capitalism have extended this line of analysis to nineteenth century America.... Such analyses overlook the second part of the Williams thesis, which held that industrial capitalism abandoned slavery because it was no longer needed for continued economic expansion...

...To be sure, southern slavery was highly profitable to the owners, and the slave economy experienced considerable growth in the antebellum period.... My study asserts that on balance the persistence of slavery actually reduced the growth of cotton supply compared with a free-labour alternative... the expansion of production after the Civil War and emancipation, and the return of world cotton prices to their pre-war levels...

Oxford EH: "Gavin Wright (@Stanford) delivers the @EcHistSoc Tawney Lecture on Part 2 of the Williams Thesis: did industrial sectors destroy (or have no need for) slavery by the C19?.... Indentured servitude could not have supplied enough labor for the Caribbean sugar economy.... Big changes to the global economy 1775-1815, esp. industrial revolution technology, meant that slavery became less necessary.... 'Cotton was not sugar', different work conditions, less fixed capital needed, lower efficient scale of production, 'cotton would have expanded without slavery'.... Marx was right about colonial trade in the C18, wrong about cotton in the C19.... High cotton prices, not Eli Whitney���s cotton gin, were the incentive to expand cotton cultivation in the early US in the late C18...

...Small farmers could have been as efficient as farms with many slaves (in TFP) for cotton production if they didn���t need to diversify their planting into e.g. food crops.... There could have been a wheat-based slave economy in the North if the politics had been different.... Did slavery advance the geographical frontier of cotton production? Wright says slavery retarded developments in, for example, transport infrastructure that would have further extended production.... US cotton production did not support broader development in America.... Wright: South had poorly developed capital markets and bad infrastructure. Slave south also didn���t recruit free settlers who could have extended cotton production over and above that produced by slavery....

���Second slavery��� was not necessary for Anglo-American capitalism, partly due to adaptation to abolition as well as other factors. Slavery was a drag on economic development...

#noted

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