"Industrialization began with the textile industry, which was predicated on cotton, which was dependent on slave labor in tropical climates. "

Really? I thought it started with building engines to pump water out of coal mines. But sure - there was a plentiful supply of economically competitive cotton from the slaving south. And textiles became the big industry of the day.

"The North had larger concentrations of capital which allowed for construction of heavy industry."

Why did the north have more capital?

I am not doubting what you are saying. But it interesting. In the early days of American settlement the North was not the rich part.

"Innovation has nothing to do with industrialization."

What a silly thing to say.

"The North had larger concentrations of capital which allowed for construction of heavy industry. Japan, Germany, and Russia all industrialized rapidly, they didn't have to reinvent the wheel."

Just because Japan, Germany and Russia applied innovations invented elsewhere (Britain) doesn't make their industrialization any less based on innovation. The whole reason that the work place moved from people's home to factories was the machinery, which wouldn't even have existed if it hadn't been for the invention of steam engines.

The northern colonies were merchant/trade based, because the land was not as suitable for agriculture. Trade required access to specie/currency, and thus New England early on developed a banking industry even though England discouraged it. Northern banks allowed a greater concentration of capital, as southern colonies instead focused on what made them rich, exporting staple crops.

"The whole reason that the work place moved from people's home to factories was the machinery, which wouldn't even have existed if it hadn't been for the invention of steam engines."

The steam engine was invented in Britain, so why was innovation necessary in the States? Like the other countries mentioned, the US simply borrowed technology invented elsewhere. It's also difficult to have innovation without the capital required to make the products.

Maybe that is the key factor why Britain industrialised - it's banking system.

I'm going to try to explain this as clearly as I can, and it'll be long, so bear with me. If you don't want to read it all, then just read this: Slavery was beneficial to Africa and to the world because without slavery there wouldn't have been an industrial revolution.

Before I start, I'm going to side-track a bit here. Innovation doesn't necessarily mean industrialization. It is necessary to make the advances for industrialization to happen, but industrialization is the mass adoption of certain innovations, and conditions need to be economically right for that to occur. The process of industrialization itself is just repetition and expansion, not innovation.

Now, back to the point, that's quite a claim I'm making there. To explain, you have to understand why nations industrialize in the first place. There are two fundamental inputs into everything that is produced: labor and capital. It is when there is a scarcity of some of these inputs that innovation occurs to try and decrease the cost/increase the supply of one of them. I spent a solid two months last year studying the question of why the industrial revolution didn't occur in the 12th century in China under the Song Dynasty (if my years are off, forgive me. I know the Mongol invasion was around that time). The Song were easily the most advanced civilization on Earth up until that point in time, and would not be surpassed until Georgian England. They invented gunpowder and created their own paper currency (first in history) and sailed across the Indian Ocean. They had all of the per-requisites, so why did nothing happen? The answer that many historians came up with is that they the incredibly low labor costs prevented them from researching and adopting new farming techniques (every industrial revolution must be preceded by an agricultural one). There was no need to develop capital intensive industries because labor - though less efficient - was too cheap to make it worthwhile.

Now, let's transfer this over to England. There was a huge shortage of land in England, so people had to be much more efficient with how they used it. For the longest time there wasn't enough of a population for this to be a problem, but in the decades after the English Civil War, the population of England began to rapidly increase. This forced innovation in farming, which in turn resulted in better yields and helped set the stage for the cottage industry. This is where I shall contend that advances would have ended were it not for slavery in the Americas.

Without slaves, the plantation economic system would not have been viable in the Americas. Native Americans proved to susceptible to disease and indentured servants were not a permanent solution - and nor were they as effective as slaves. The great wealth creators - chocolate, sugar, tobacco, cotton, etc - would have been produced at a much, much smaller scale than before. Also, mind that this was a mercantilist system - not a capitalist one. There was restricted movement of labor and capital, so the options plantation owners would have had were very limited.

Without the large supply created by plantations, I contest that the textile industry - the driver of industrialization - would never had expanded beyond the cottage industry. This is simply because the economies of scale - both in supply and demand - necessary for it to work simply wouldn't exist without 1) Ample supplies of cotton 2) Wealthy traders and brokers to take purchase of large amounts of finished goods (Would the East India Company have existed if the colonies were unprofitable?) and 3) Large markets in the colonies to sell finished goods to.

tl;dr - slaves were the only ones who could make mad cotton to feed the mills.

But there were other sources of cotton other than the new world. For example during the American Civil war Britain simply started importing cotton from Egypt and India.

Plus, didn't the Industrial revolution in Britain start before large scale cotton farming in the South?

Correct, but Egypt didn't have mass production of cotton until its split with the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s (I believe), but on India you may be correct. I don't know enough about that. And before large-scale cotton farming, yes. That didn't really start in the Americas until the 1820s, I believe. But what state would the Americas have been in without slavery? Do you think the West Indies would have been successful colonies still? Or much of Central and South America (besides the gold producing regions). I would think not. So it's not just in terms of supply I'm referring to, but demand as well. The wealth of all three continents was built off of slavery.

Was Indian and Egyptian cotton of the same type and quality as American cotton? And what was their system of labor?

I couldn't answer you on that Putin, because I'd be pulling it right out of my ass. Good information to know, though.

Also, while comparatively neglected, African slavery also brought wealth to Muscat and other Afro-Arab kingdoms along the Swahili coast.

"Was Indian and Egyptian cotton of the same type and quality as American cotton? And what was their system of labor? "

I don't know about Egypt, but in India I would imagine that there would have been a plentiful supply of cheap local labor (slavery isn't necessarily cheaper).

The fact is Britain did Industrialize and it did buy its cotton from America which in turn led to increased slave trade and an increased cotton output from from American which in turn fed into further industrialization. So you could argue that industrialization is responsible for the increase in the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century.

But can you infer from this that industrialization would not have occurred it were not for slavery - I am not convinced. I think if British industrialists had not been able to source cotton from the slave states that they would have bought it elsewhere.

spyman - My argument was two-pronged, and perhaps the supply-side part was the weaker of the two arguments. Other slave industries - sugar in particular - created vast sums of wealth both in the Americas and in Europe. The decision to build water-powered factories (the first true stage of industrialization) was built on both supply and demand factors. Perhaps without the huge reaping of wealth from the Americas, the markets to sell manufactured goods wouldn't have developed. Its all a bit speculative to say that Industrialization would never have happened, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that slavery was a key part of the Industrialization process (to water down my argument a bit)

We have a good test of your hypothesis which you already mentioned. There was a cotton embargo during the US civil war which led to a shift in the sources of British cotton. The question is did the British continue to import cotton from these new sources, or did they resume importing US cotton after the embargo ended? I think this goes a long way in explaining whether British textile production would have expanded to the same degree without New World supplied cotton.

http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A147632

This paper, specifically Figure 2.2, seems to indicate that the British reverted back to US suppliers.

I really don't know the answer Goldfinger, my posts are speculative.. It is an interesting question to ponder. Undoubtedly slavery (and industries that slave labour) were a source of capital.

If I had to pick a vital ingredient my first choice would be Britain's financial system. You can earn capital, but you can also borrow capital - so long as you invest it well. Britain was usually able to borrow money at a lower interest rate than most other European countries.

What about Japan? How did they industrialize? Obviously they were able to take technology from the west, but what about capital - they weren't involved in the slave trade. Where did they get their capital from?

'What about Japan? How did they industrialize?'

The government supplied the capital and targeted the investment in heavy industry.

That doesn't really answer the question though. Where did the Japanese government get the capital from?

Regarding Britain reverting back to the USA - thus you can the USA was the Britain first choice (it is closer for one thing), but I don't think this supports the argument that slavery was a necessary pre-condition for industrialization.

"That doesn't really answer the question though. Where did the Japanese government get the capital from?"

Taxation and tariffs.

"(it is closer for one thing),"

Closer than Egypt?

"but I don't think this supports the argument that slavery was a necessary pre-condition for industrialization."

If it was the quality of American cotton that allowed rapid expansion of the British textile industry, with Indian cotton being of a harsher quality not fit for British spinners, then I would say it does so long as it can be shown that US cotton production could have not been what it was without slave labor.

The real question is could New World plantations have produced as much cotton with a system of free labor. If it could have, then it is a wonder why the slave labor system persisted in the US South, as it would have been more profitable to scrap it.

I agree that new world plantations would not have taken off it were not for slave labor. There was not enough labor in the new world.

spyman has it right on the labor issue. Indentured servitude didn't didn't provide enough labor and was too expensive to carry through (not necessarily for the landowners, but for the governments that had to reward land to the indentured servants).

You raise a good point about Britain's financial system. Britain and the Netherlands had the strongest banks in Europe at the time (besides the Vatican and a few Italian banks, but they weren't involved in colonial ventures). This was for the most part built off of strong trade revenues from the mercantile system, if I recall correctly.

"The real question is could New World plantations have produced as much cotton with a system of free labor. If it could have, then it is a wonder why the slave labor system persisted in the US South, as it would have been more profitable to scrap it."

That assumes that slavery was merely an economic system. It was not. It was a system embedded into the social fabric of the south. To southerners, slavery provided status, slavery provided safety, and slavery provided a de jure modicum superiority to even the most downtrodden whites. Even if Southern planters could have crunched some numbers and realized that free labor would be more profitable, it does not follow that they would acquiesce to the end of slavery. It was embedded in southern society, culture and identity. It was truly, as Southerners argued, a way of life.

If you want examples of slavery persisting in areas where it was not profitable look at the upper south. Slave labor and the tobacco trade drove several southerners, including the founding fathers to staggering amounts of debt. Yet they continued to till depleted soil with slaves, or engage their slaves with less profitable endeavors like nail making (looking at you Jefferson) rather than cut their losses. Slaves meant status in a time that status meant an incredible amount more than it does today.

I don't think goldfinger's argument works, for a couple of reasons. The argument seems to be three-fold: slavery is necessary to create the raw material for industrialization; slavery is necessary to create the capital for industrialization; slavery is necessary to get the human beings in place (both as laborers and consumers in the colonies) for industrialization.

I described above why I think that's not accurate about capital. It's not like people were putting the money they made from sugar plantations directly into textile mills, and it's not like colonial income alone entirely changed the fortunes of the English economy. Doubtlessly a richer England was better suited to industrialization, and colonial ventures founded in part by slavery related to that, but I would argue that it's not necessary for industrialization and could in fact be harmful: in the long run, Spain got poorer, not richer, because of its slave-based colonies. England was the least effective colonizer of the 1500s and 1600s, and ended up the richest. That is not coincidental.

It also doesn't appear to be correct, or at least not entirely correct, with regard to the production of agricultural raw materials. I'm not as familiar with the situation in the Caribbean or South America, but, it's certain that American agriculture could be just as successful without slavery [Santa above accurate points out that the relative profitability of slavery to free labor, in the South, was in the big picture beside the point]. We know this, because American agriculture was just as successful without slavery. Production didn't collapse because slavery ended; it took a while to get recovered from the worst war in American history, but by 1879 (the earliest number I could find in a couple of minutes of Googling) American cotton production was above pre-Civil War levels. In fact, the USA was quickly to the point where farmers produced too much for prices to stay high, even before the end of the 19th century. Some of this is because of innovations associated with industrialization, like chemical fertilizers, but it still indicates that slavery is not a crucial ingredient (at least in the United States) for massive agricultural output and therefore industrialization.

Thirdly, slavery is not necessary for laborers or consumers in the New World. In fact, it's antithetical to them: the highest levels of free immigration happen in those places where there's a large demand for free labor. The South by and large was not a destination for immigrants coming to the USA, unless they had chains on, until well after slavery ended. It's clear that free laborers would produce cotton (again, they actually did), and likely a free labor system would have produced even more -- any gains lost with the removal of coercion as a tool would have been gained by the incentives of profit. The southern slave system made three kinds of people very rich: the merchants trading the raw material, the industrialists turning it into finished goods, and the plantation owners. You can have the first two, and the associated capital etc for industrialization, without the last. It's possible it would have taken slightly longer for the South to get populated, but, once it started, it would have gone even faster than it actually did. And, since we are considering consumption as well, free laborers provide a better market for finished consumer goods than do slaves. It's not like plantation owners were buying lots of nice clothes for their slaves.

Finally, let's recall the point of this argument. The idea is that the whole world would be so much poorer without slavery that Africans, who have had much of their continent ruined by slavery and associated evils, would be even worse off without the slave trade. Even if industrialization had happened later or less fully (which, as described above, I think is the opposite of what would have actually happened without the slave trade), Africa would still be better off economically.

@goldfinger- Just because 2+2=4, it doesn't mean that 3+1 doesn't also equal 4. In other words, because it might have happened that way doesn't mean that it was necessary.
imo, industrialization was combination of a by-product of the scientific revolution and nationalism, not a result of economic conditions set in motion by slavery.

@COTW - Industrialization is always a result of economic conditions involving the relative prices of capital and labor. That's just a fact supported by the majority of economic historians.

I think it would also do well to set a timeline here for the debate. The era I'm talking about predates much of the information used. The Industrial Revolution truly began in the 1780s or so, in England. Thus any argument centered around the idea that the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened without slavery must, by necessity, predate this. So in my mind, this argument has been about the colonial economics of the 1600s and 1700s. It was during this time that slavery was being used already in huge quantities in Brazil and the West Indies - though it wasn't to the scale in the American South that it would later be.

Everyone knows about the "triangle trade" of colonial times that they learned about in high school. Without slavery, two points in the triangle would be broken - the African point and the West Indies point - and the effects of that being broken, in my mind, would have put substantial pressures against the viability of the Industrial Revolution happening.

But, there are many weaknesses to my plan, as Santa has pointed out about the economic viability of slavery in the Americas and as ckroberts has pointed out with his points on how large and important the colonial markets affected by slavery really were to English producers

"Spain got poorer, not richer, because of its slave-based colonies."

This is just nonsense. Cuba, for example, was held to be the richest colony in the Caribbean in the mid-1800s. It became such precisely at a time when Spain elsewhere was in decline. It also had slavery long after Spain abolished it elsewhere in its Empire (only abolished it in 1886).

Spanish decline was not due to slavery. Spain was already declining significantly in the mid-1600s. It was due to a lack of revenues. Spain was an autonomous confederation of sorts with no real central administration, making raising revenues extremely difficult. Its territories in Italy for example had no interest in paying taxes to Madrid except if the Turks threatened. Spain spent an inordinate amount of money on military expenditures during the 1500s and 1600s because it was continuously at war, depleting the limited fiscal resources it had. Even with bullion arriving from New World colonies, Spain still extracted the lion's share of its revenue from Castille. Spain's economy, even at the height of its power, was dependent on foreign sources of manufacture and Dutch ships. By the mid-1600s France had already supplanted Spain as the leading European power. It had nothing to do with slavery. In fact, Britain, the power you claim was 'ineffective' during the 1600s, had scored major victories against Spain in the 1650s, taking profitable slave colonies like Jamaica in 1656.

"I'm not as familiar with the situation in the Caribbean or South America,"

After slavery was abolished in St. Domingue it went from being richest tropical island to being one of the poorest.

"Production didn't collapse because slavery ended"

After the war, cotton farmers could barely make a living off of cotton farming because the price had plummeted. Many were in debt and/or insolvent. Congress reported on the horrible state of cotton farming in the late 1800s.

https://archive.org/details/reportofcommitte02unit

"The southern slave system made three kinds of people very rich: the merchants trading the raw material, the industrialists turning it into finished goods, and the plantation owners. You can have the first two, and the associated capital etc for industrialization, without the last. It's possible it would have taken slightly longer for the South to get populated, but, once it started, it would have gone even faster than it actually did."

Considering the slave system resulted in the US South producing 70% of the world's cotton and 50% of American exports, it's hard to imagine any kind of alterations leading to even greater levels. It seems like wishful thinking to me.