5 Nov, pat lauderdale wrote:
>On the other hand, the sources of the transformation of the
>planatation in the U.S. South seem critical: 1. demand for "Black" labor
>in the North; 2. plagues encouraging agricultural diversity; 3. subsidies
>for limiting production on commodities such as cotton among others; 4.
>technological innovation, e.g., from hand labor to mechanized labor.
>...are there other topics in addition to slavery, i.e., the old world
>system impact on slavery?
I believe the history is clear re/ U.S. plantation transformation.
It was _not_ a matter of cost-effectiveness, at least not directly, nor any
other "failure" of the slave system -- cotton exports and profits were
doing very well indeed, and the South bitterly resisted (to put it mildly)
any systemic change.
What happened is that the East Coast industrial elite had their own
plans for American economic development -- protectionist development of a
strong U.S. industrial base -- and this was in direct conflict with the
economic and political agenda of the South. The East Coast wanted to end
free-trade polices (which worked well for cotton), to open up more land for
capital development, and to bring the South under an industrial-dominated
economic regime. When they decided to act, they naturally exploited
existing moral sentiment, but such was never causative.
The cost-effectiveness of Slavery was an operative cause of the
transformation, but only in that industrialists didn't see slavery as
cost-effective for their development plans, not in that slavery was causing
problems in the cotton economy.
---As usual, my desire is to relate our discussion to current events. Does anyone want to offer an explanation for the current re-emergence of slavery as a significant global economic factor? I refer, as examples, to the use of slave labor in China and India, and the now-underway conversion of the immense U.S. prison system into a rent-a-crook slave-labor system for U.S. corporations.
-rkm