To Start slavery in any form is immoral and needs to be abolished from every corner of the globe.
I am asking this because I heard somewhere that a big factor for the banning of slavery in these industrialized areas of the world (I.e Britain and the Northern US) was motivated by profits because it was better on profits to have paid workers rather than slaves.
That could also be 100% wrong but if it is true then wouldn’t slave labor bring more profit than a paid worker?
In: 0
This question really struck me because I did not know and none of the comments seemed that convincing to me. If slavery is less profitable why would planters keep it? Were they just so racist they’d rather take less profits? But if it were more profitable, why did industrial areas abolish it? Were industrial capitalists the type to uniformly choose morality over profit? So I did a bunch of my own googling and have come to the conclusion that there is no concrete answer.
The remainder of this is written mainly for myself based on an hour of googling.
The assumption I came to this with was that slavery must be profitable for plantation work, but unprofitable for industrial work. But I couldn’t figure out why.
Slavery is mostly profitable for labor intensive endeavors. Growing wheat is only seasonally intensive, it doesn’t make economic sense to purchase a slave that only works during harvest. However, crops like sugar, tobacco, and cotton are year round labor intensive. There is also economy of scale, so it is more profitable for a massive plantation to buy one slave than for a small farm.
But a cotton mill isn’t seasonal work, and one could easily employ as many workers as a large plantation, so why didn’t they use slaves? There are some advantages, a slave has an upfront cost that a wage worker doesn’t, and setting up a mill (or other industrial endeavor) already has a high upfront cost, so an industrialist might prefer to minimize their debt and go for a wage worker. And a slave-owner has to pay for the subsistence of their slaves already, but a wage could also be at subsistence level.
But this would imply that slave owners were just dumb for not hiring wage workers. So my conclusion is that wages were disgustingly low but rarely true subsistence; **that slaves were in fact more profitable**. Even in industrial operations. I read about slaves being used in profitable salt mines. A cotton mill staffed by slaves would be more profitable than one with wage workers.
However, slavery does not create conditions that are useful for industrialization. Under slavery, when looking to improve profit, you can simply push your slaves to work even more. Investing in new technology might massively increase profitability (like the cotton gin) but it is one tool among many. For someone employing wage labor, asking workers to work longer increases cost. So labor reducing technologies are far more valuable when labor is an ongoing cost.
Also, a slave to does not create economic demand. Many slaves grew their own food and made most of their belongings, and thus created no economic demand. But wage workers bought everything they needed, and any money they earned above subsistence also created more economic demand. This demand boosted the profits of industrialists, allowing further expansion.
**tl;dr: slavery is more profitable but creates an economic situation unfavorable to industrialization (not a definitive answer/based on an hour of googling)**
Latest Answers