But those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers.
You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
The article was about Britain. As a matter of historical fact there's a link between the slave trade and industrial development in Britain. Maybe you're trying to defend capitalism or whatever with your hypothetical counterfactuals but that's what actually happened.
Then how did countries with de minimis involvement in the slave trade like Germany, Italy or Austria-Hungary do so much better economically than Brazil? Four to six times as many slaves went to Brazil as to all of the modern USA. The Trans Saharan slave trade where Arabs enslaved Sub Saharan Africans started earlier, lasted longer and enslaved more people than the Trans Atlantic trade too. If slavery was the reason for the Industrial Revolution why aren’t we discussing this in Arabic?
This didn't happen in a vacuum, wall street was full of slave-labor company shares. The speculators and financiers were closer to the financial center.
