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It did elude to a good point that most of America's advancement, industrialization, economic growth and development surpassing Europe happened after 1865 and after slavery ended and between 1870 and about 1900 and continued till 1930. Which coincides with a boom in European immigration. That's what or who really built up America. Slavery was a bad deal for everyone but a few slaveholders.
"In between the oppressed slaves on the one hand and free yeoman farmers and entrepreneurs on the other stood a large number of whites who had come to America as indentured servants. Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants before the Revolution arrived under these terms. They flocked to America mainly from England, but also from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. (Germans tended to come in family groups, the others as single adults.) A few were abducted and taken aboard ship by force, but most made the trip voluntarily. They exchanged four to seven years' labor for passage to the New World.
So capitalism did come in the first ships, and in many different forms: legitimate commerce, legal cover for religious freedom, the slave trade, and individuals' exchange of labor for a ticket to America."
Why does it seem that capitalism tends to get singled the most regarding slavery when pretty much every other socio-economic or socio-political system have or do have epi. of slavery
There is a debate as to whether or not the slavery practiced in the American South can be deemed a capitalist economic system. What do you think?
It was capitalistic. Yes slaves were property. Cotton sugar, timber, rice, tabacco, hunting, domestic industries all used slave labor. Slaves were just unpaid property in which the slave owner had to pay for their shelter and well being which sounds socialistic. In terms of an economic sense slaves were cheap expendible labor which produced high yields of product for export in which slave owners recieved an handsome reward of money. I do believe that slavery in the American South was tied to capitalism. The American South sure did not use communism.
Funny thing is this. Every civilization is built on top cheap labor. Roman empire, Muslim empire, Mongol empire, Spanish empire, British empire, Russian empire were all built by the usage of cheap labor. Slavery has been with humanity since the beginning and will be here to the end. Sad but true. Using slaves got business money instead fo Sharing little to no profit with those below the business owner.
To an extent it was. Private individuals owned the capital and their slaves were considered property and they supplied market demand for goods and services. What is wasn't was a system of free market labor. It undercut the value and demand for free market laborers who were most of the white southern population. No one usually considers it was used to undercut the labor market to increase profit margin and harmed most of the free population.
All true.
Glad that you said “considered” property, which I’ll assume is your way of saying that man cannot actually have property in fellow man.
I'm not anti-capitalist or socialist, but I'm also not one to say capitalism as practiced is necessarily always free and fair as it could be either. I have read accounts that many free persons were worse off than some of the slaves in the old south.
This is where you went way over the line.
Unless you can convince me that a free black (or white) person at the time who happened to be struggling to survive, walked onto a plantation and said “make me a slave,” I find what you say to be an absurdity.
There’s not a free man in history as far as I’m concerned that was worse off than a slave. Many slaves were delusional enough in the Antebellum South to actually look down on poor whites and to think they were better off than those whites were, but that was brainwashing at work.
That said, I certainly consider Antebellum slavery to have been hugely capitalist. A malign form of capitalism for sure, but capitalist nonetheless.
I believe that the consensus view among historians is that slavery was profitable at the farm level, but that the South as a whole would have been far richer had it developed a non-slave industrial economy.
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