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.