> If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.
> Native Americans had slaves:
The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.
I'm not trying to point accusatory fingers anywhere, you're missing the claim. You made the claim that USA success was the direct result of slave labor. If this were true, you would expect other societies with boatloads of slave labor to be more successful. They weren't.
Since lots of places had lots of unpaid labor and did nothing particularly successful, there must be more to it. If there is more to it, it is (usually) evidence that the USA would have been successful without slave labor.
Perhaps my choice of the term "direct" is overly specific, but I feel like this is a very nit-picky quibble. The underlying point I was trying to make doesn't change, which is that the United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion. As I said, I am not making the claim, and never intended to, that slavery was the only cause of American prosperity. If this is the primary dispute you have with what I said, I readily accept the correction and we can move on.
However, if your intention is to dispute the claim that slavery was immensely beneficial to the development of the American economy, or to suggest that the morality of American slavery was somehow mitigated by other historical examples of slavery, I strongly disagree. I think in general this mentality is incredibly disrespectful. Acknowledging the role played in our success by the (unwilling) sacrifice made by millions of slaves and Native Americans is the very least that we can do.
> United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion.
I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it?
And since we don't have access to a world in which the US didn't have slavery, the best we can do to get information is to compare to other somewhat similar societies. Other places in the Americas with (and without) slave economies seem extremely relevant.
One comparison not mentioned so far: The cotton mills of England spun a lot of slave-grown cotton, just like the ones of New England. It was debated at the time how essential this was. And the civil war blockade provided a useful natural experiment, in which it turned out not to take very long to switch to cotton from other places, like Egypt.
The moral questions don't seem tightly coupled to the economic ones. Would anyone claim that slavery in what's now Haiti (or Brazil) was less of an evil act than slavery in the US, on the grounds that these places are poorer now? Or more evil, on the same grounds? And if not, then why is disputing the economic benefit of slavery in any way taken to be disrespectful of suffering?
First of all, I have heard and read from numerous sources that I trust that slavery played a huge role in the early American economy. But that on its own would be a simple factual dispute.
The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less white Americans should feel owed to pay back. So I think there’s a significant moral cost to this argument, and yes I think it’s disrespectful. But again, it’s factually controversial as well.
I had also made a variety of significant points which GP failed to respond to, instead focusing only on a hyper-literal interpretation of one subset of my argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that England, another state with a horrific history of exploitation and colonialism, was also guilty of slavery, is hardly exculpatory for the US. Whether slavery was economically beneficial in every single historical example is a separate question from whether it was beneficial to the United States.
That the slave economy was huge in early America is beyond doubt. But the more interesting debate is to what degree this influenced later American wealth. This question doesn't answer itself, we need evidence. And the presence of lots of other slave sugar plantation economies nearby is a treasure-trove. Many were also rich in the 18th C, like Barbados & Saint-Dominque... richer than the weird experiment in theocracy going on around Boston. Their 18th C riches didn't translate to 20th C riches. The "huge role in the early American economy" at early dates actually tells us very little about the effect on the trajectory in later centuries.
My argument re English cotton mills was much more focused than you credit. It was about how rapidly they switched from slave-grown cotton to non-slave cotton, once there was a blockade, not some denial that they consumed slave-grown cotton before this.
I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.
> Native Americans had slaves:
The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.
[0]: https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...