| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Southern Slave Economy Was Anti-Capitalistic |
| 2019-09-19 |
| h/t Instapundit The discussion around the political economy of slavery has been one of the central debates in the academic study of the Peculiar Institution in the Antebellum South. Traditionally, the Southern economy was considered non-capitalistic and pre-bourgeoise; a pre-industrialized economy that struggled to thrive due to the lack of incentives imposed by slave labor, the absence of a legal framework that stimulated the emergence of capitalism and a backward, agriculture-based economy. ...In other words, the South was an inefficient economy where the entrepreneurial search for profits typical of capitalist economies was secondary. Instead, a quasi-aristocratic class (the planters) acted like medieval landowners more concerned about their culture of honor, power, and appearances than maximizing profits. This analysis was challenged by the publication in 1974 of the controversial work Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery. The authors, Nobel-awarded economist Robert W. Fogel and economic historian Stanley L. Engerman, applied novel econometric techniques to the study of slavery. In a nutshell, Fogel and Engerman (F&E) concluded that: i) slavery was economically profitable; ii) slave labor was more efficient than free labor; iii) planters behaved as modern entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy; and iv) the South was not as underdeveloped as it had been suggested in comparison with the North. In short, F&E suggested that the Southern economy was mostly capitalistic despite being largely based on slave labor. To what extent are these conclusions accurate? ...In any case, the level of coordination achieved by the market process when it comes to allocating human capital to its most productive uses cannot be attained in a slave economy. Furthermore, the lack of incentives under slavery kills the productive capacity of workers, reducing the overall efficiency. Therefore, F&E’s thesis on the superior efficiency of slave labor cannot be convincingly sustained. ...It cannot be denied that the South incorporated certain aspects of capitalism due to the fact that its economy largely depended on the demand for cotton that came from several parts of the world. However, the South lagged behind the North in terms of urbanization and economic and social development precisely because market capitalism did not seep through the channels of the Southern economy. The Peculiar Institution was, without doubt, the main cause of the economic, political, and social backwardness in the Antebellum South. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 This whole thesis - slavery = the highest expression of capitalism - is retarded. Even the Marxist doctrine of history recognizes that there's no connection between slavery and capitalist competition and microeconomic models of how firms behave, models for ownership of the firm, investment models etc. More crap scholarship of the sort that has degraded the social sciences and turned so much of academe into a joke. |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-09-19 09:49 |
| #2 The Peculiar Institution was, without doubt, the main cause of the economic, political, and social backwardness in the Antebellum South. Probably didn't help that the Yankees destroyed what was there which didn't recover till WWII. Seems the rest of American after 1865 grew quite well economically without too much of a problem, thus making the contention that slavery made America more than bogus. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2019-09-19 09:15 |
| #1 The meaning of "efficient" is different in the original to the rebuttal. |
| Posted by: BernardZ 2019-09-19 08:29 |