Economic Impact of Slavery

The contribution of slavery to American economic growth has become a hotly contested subject. Recent attempts to identify slavery as the foundation upon which capitalism rests have suffered a fate similar to other attempts to ascribe the origins of a complex process to a single cause. This major flaw in this approach, known as the New History of Capitalism, is that it fails to engage with the important findings of ‘cliometric’ research on slavery. It likewise fails to address the central focus of its inquiry, namely, by refusing to define capitalism, and produces a misleading chronology, implying that major increases in American cotton production and exports antedated Britain’s Industrial Revolution, when in fact the reverse is true. And finally, it focuses uniquely on production, ignoring the importance of consumption to the growth of America’s plantation economy. Before cotton, the Americas were producing a wide variety of consumption goods, tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar in equally strong demand with all but the latter priced by the mainland colonies. Consumption, accordingly, is as much a part of the story as is production.