Profitability Of Slavery

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Recommended: Economics of the slave trade

Economic History Topic Report Name: ______Alberto de la Garza__________
ECO 3183 Prof. Weiher

Topic title: Profitability of Slavery

Briefly state the two opposing views.
A. Slavery retarder Southern Economic Growth

B. Slavery was very productive in the South

Outline in some detail the more traditional view. Where did it come from? What was it based upon?

One of the oldest disputes that have arisen between economists and historians revolves around the question of whether slavery was economically profitable
Over 200 years ago, Adam Smith declared that slavery was not profitable because it lacked adequate incentives, therefore, although the wealth consumed by a slave could be less than that of a free worker, as its production rate was very low, the cost of labor per unit of output would be greater in a slave system that in a free society, although the work done by slaves seems to be cheap, said Smith, "in the long run is the most expensive of all”. Smith explained the persistence of slavery by the idiosyncrasies of the slave owner "to dominate and subdue who was a source of pride"
Smith also rejected the inferiority as a justification for racial slavery and stated that Africans enslaved in America were probably higher than the slaveholders. The position of Adam Smith, with his total rejection of slavery, from the point of both, moral and economic, was backed by classical economists like Ricardo, J.S. Mill and J.E. Cairnes who developed these themes in his book “The Slave Power”, written in 1862. One of his principal arguments was that slaves workers had no interest on learning new techniques and therefore, compared to the northern free workers, they were being paid to learn and maintain farms better standards, thus growi...

... middle of paper ...

...ly specifically examined the profitability.
Obviously there is the need to investigate further in this direction, which would help to explain fluctuations in the import of slaves, slave prices and investment in slave regions. But what is even more important, as Fogel and Engerman showed, establishing profitability also help to determine and explain the structure of slave society.
The main obstacle to the investigation of the profitability of slavery in America has been the lack of available registers in some regions and the difficulty of collecting the material in others.

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