United States.
It is interesting to see David Brion Davis admit in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery that modern economic historians have found that slave labor in the nineteenth century South was more efficient than “free labor” in the nineteenth century North.
As always, Yankees destroyed what they did not understand on the basis of fashionable crank utopian theories:
“Indeed, many historians initially attacked the economic historians’ discovery that Southern slavery, despite its ghastly evils, was more efficient, productive, and profitable than free-labor farming in the North.”
You would think it would have been obvious: if free labor really was superior to slave labor, planters would have abandoned slavery for the obviously superior free labor system.
It is hard to believe that Yankees were still pushing this discredited theory after the collapse of plantation agriculture in Haiti and later in the British West Indies which were unable to compete with slave labor in Cuba and Brazil.
He writes of Haiti:
“In most respects the very existence of Haiti was a godsend for the abolitionists’ opponents. Sanguine predictions of the moral and educational advance of the people, of economic enterprise that would soon lead to thriving towns and to Haitian ships entering the harbors of the world, increasingly gave way to reports of political upheaval and hopeless poverty.”
Who could have predicted that?
“In contrast to Northern family farms, the larger Southern plantations were more like the agribusinesses of the later twentieth century in terms of size, efficiency, and complex organization…
Scholars still dispute some questions relating to the economics of American slavery, but during the past thirty years a broad consensus has confirmed the arguments of Stanley L. Engerman and the Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel concerning the extraordinary efficiency and productivity of plantation slave labor, which in no way implies they the system was less harsh or even less criminal. The historian Seymour Drescher has shown that most of the political economists of the early decades of the nineteenth century rejected Adam Smith’s overconfident assertion in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, that because of its incentives, free labor was always cheaper and more efficient and productive than slave labor.”
Efficient, productive, and profitable are words which have never been associated with black people – especially with the Black Undertow – under the free labor system.
“The large planters soon ranked among America’s wealthiest men. Indeed, by 1860 two-thirds of the wealthiest men in America lived in the South – a fact that became difficult to believe after the devastation of the Civil War and the full industrialization of the North.”
Unlike West Indian slavery, Southern slavery was also a middle class institution – the typical slaveowner owned less than 10 slaves, and most planters owned 20 to 40 slaves.
In the West Indies, hundreds of slaves worked on sugar plantations that sprawled across thousands of acres. They also processed and refined the sugar in Cuba. Huge plantations also existed in South Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta
“The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre-Civil War decades.”
After the South was annihilated, the slaves were emancipated, and freedom and equality triumphed, the subsequent impoverishment of the South was cited as proof by Yankees of the backwardness of slavery.
“By 1840 the South grew more than 60 percent of the world’s cotton and supplied not only Britain and New England but also the rising industries of continental Europe, including Russia. Throughout the antebellum period cotton accounted for over half the value of all America’s exports, and thus it paid for the major share of the nation’s imports and investment capital. A stimulant to Northern industry, cotton also contributed to the growth of New York City as a distributing and exporting center gust drew income from commissions, freight charges, interest, insurance, and other services connected with the marketing of America’s number one commodity.”
As an independent nation, the plantation South could have supplied the world with cotton while easily growing its own food and relying upon Britain for manufactured goods and financial services.
‘Tyminski’? ‘Krauss’? Huh, those names don’t sound very “Anglo-Ulster” or “Southron”…
Neither does mine, so what’s your point?
It’s all good in Dixie. We like white people here.
Deo Vindice
Hey Chris,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1131289/-Is-Detroit-a-cautionary-tale-of-the-future-of-the-United-States?showAll=yes
Your people are calling out for you register over at the Great Orange Satan.go for the love of god, go join your folk!
Hunter on another note ought to deconstruct this stupid stupid group of libs. Let’s have it out.
Hey John,
Really, what are you even doing in this country anyway? All you do is trash this place, so why do you even live here? I can understand native-born, lifelong Americans voicing bitter dissent — they’ve earned that right. But you.. I imagine you’re living better here, than you would in back in the Afro-Islamic Republic of Britainistan, so why do have such a hard-on to see this place destroyed? Did it ever occur to you that there are plenty of white people who even now, in spite of everything, still feel a geniue loyalty and affection to the land of their forefathers? You don’t know shit about Americans or their hearts. You aren’t Southern. The Civil War was long before your time, England wasn’t involved, and the war had nothing to do with you personally, so what is your problem?
Destroyed? I have several properties that I’d like to have protected. At this rate I’ll need South African mercs.
See this place destroyed? Northern whites are letting the nigs destroy it.
Chris, you are the very definition of a churl.
Being pro-Southern, John has more intelligent and thoughtful things to say than you.
Englishmen are always welcome among Southerners. Most Southerners have English blood, you know. John is one of our kinsmen. Which is probably why he attracts your ire.
Turks are really a strange people. Turkish yankees are even stranger.
Deo Vindice
@Apuleius
Oh, so it’s all about whether they’re “pro-Southern” or not, huh? That sounds cheaper than “Yankee Amurrican” birthright-citizenship. Good luck building homogenous nation out of that.
And I think YOU are actually the “Turk”, you Sicilian GUINEA.
@John
You keep dodging my question. Why do you choose to reside in America, if you dislike it so much?
Maybe you deliberately missed the part about blood ties, Chris, aka “Johnny Turk.”
Deo Vindice
I don’t hate it at all. Just the infection of darkling minorities and even that is a recent phenomenon.
Litka Tatar is just a fancy name for Turk.
Are you Muslim, too?
What are you even doing in this country anyway? All you do is trash this place, so why do you even live here? I can understand native-born, lifelong Americans voicing bitter dissent — they’ve earned that right. But you.. I imagine you’re living better here, than you would in back in Poland…
Deo Vindice
@Apuleius the Moor
What am I doing here? I was BORN here. My parents were BORN here. Both sets of my grandparents were BORN here. And my mother’s people have been Catholic as far back as I can trace, you bitter old idiot.
And don’t rephrase what I said to John, in an attempt to use it on me. I actually fighting to PRESERVE my country, unlike you, who lays down and lifts his sack and spreads his legs — fantasizing that “God will vindicate you” and “Dixie will rise again”.
You actually might someday get your independent South, but it won’t be the silly Cotton Kingdom that you jerk-off to. It will be a lawless, landscape of nigger gangs and warlords, similar to Somalia. And it will last about a month before us white Northerners come down and clean it up like we always end up doing for ungrateful fools.
British and Yankee slave ships….. and the southerners were hmmmm, a pure confederation of anglo-saxons in the manner of the ancient alamanni, i think you are splitting hairs conviently here, the yankee merchants were merely providing a service, as they had the major ports in the american continent. wasn’t industrialization started in england with the threshing machine? of course they needed the slave market at the time, but once they obtained a more effcient way to harvest it, niggers became instantly a bad investment. latin america was unable to federate due to the mulattoes, there could be no bolivairian republic, because of the metizos and mulattoes. the racial caste system is a TEMPORARY barrier, you cannot share a language with the kaffir or the redman, even “cattle”.
sorry i mean shimmering norman adventurers, who lorded over the lowly germans, catholics all conventiantly branded with the word of evil, that badge known as yankee.
say it loud, YANKEE AND PROUD, say it loud, WE BUILT THE MOTOR CAR, say it loud, WE BUILT THE AIRPLANE
REACTIONARY BULLSHIT
yeah MURRICAN AND PROUD, GTFO you limey fucking bastard john, SIN FEIN!
“And it will last about a month before us white Northerners come down and clean it up like we always end up doing for ungrateful fools.”
Methinks the Turkish janitor is feeling slighted.
Here’s a mop and bucket. Try to do a better job with the clean up than you did with Detroit, Chicago, or Philadelphia. Take a bath while you’re at it.
How do you know a turk has been breaking into your house?
Answer: When your trash can has been looted and your dog has been raped!
Deo Vindice
“Southern slavery, despite its ghastly evils, was more efficient, productive, and profitable than free-labor farming in the North.”
Is that slave-powered plantation agriculture versus ALL northern farming in general, or versus the most highly efficient (in terms of capital and energy invested per unit of crop production) Pennsilfaanish Deitsch family farms in particular? In any case, it is a comparison of very unlike things.
A debate goes on, today, over the true efficiency or value of industrial-scale “mega”-agriculture versus traditional farms.
Was the extra profit generated by importing the Africans REALLY profitable in the long term? Is the greater efficiency of contemporary MEGA-scale agri-systems REALLY beneficial overall, when all effects are considered?
Sinn Fein is currently inviting in every shitskin imaginable. Dublin is overrun with Nigerians. SinnFein Gerry Adams is actually the owner of a few properties he’s renting to niggers. Sinn Fein is a Marxist organization.
Brits out Nigs in!
That’s Sinn Fein for you You Plastic Paddy you!
Wait Chris is a Turk? WTF!
Bwhahaha.
Yankees invited the blacks to move North to work in their factories. The Jews were also invited to move to the North for the same reason. They were welcomed there as citizens and the equals of White people.
As the black population in the North grew, “civil rights” revived because Northern politicians competed with each other for the expanding and increasingly important black vote.
Northern Jews also found in blacks a useful and reliable ally.
Re: “it will last about a month before us white Northerners come down and clean it up”:
While some white northerners and white southerners seem to be thinking of fighting each other again, they’re overlooking the opportunity for a repeat of “the last just war,” of exactly thirty years ago, in the VERY deep south, while the brown invaders have not forgotten and are preparing for their next assault: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EJeM6ifRbA&feature=relmfu
The small mono-ethnic white population prepares to defend their little homeland and way of life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrtUAMii7DA&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yJ87y7BR80&feature=youtube_gdata_player
poor plastic paddy, meet the new Oirish!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jKHPj1Pp7g&feature=related
“The Jews were also invited to move to the North for the same reason.” Interesting. Please elaborate.
Great article as always, Hunter! Awesome posts, Apuleius! Our Yankee friends don’t seem to understand that admitting the “horrors of slavery” is the fist step in surrendering the moral high ground and the admission of “you owe me” attitude that is killing this country.
who cares its cryptos john you know that, fine ill just fling the ol’ faugh a balagh at your fat limey ass. lets go kiss some more jew ass since they helped us get slaves, boy they were so pro-white back then, gee slavery must have been a noble quality, not prone to disaster, especially when used with idelologies like christianity and democracy. come on this is reactionary, you cant have the old slave society back EVER, reconstruction was horrible, BRA is horrible, there is a southren identity, but you can’t be little cigar smoking planters anymore.
key phrase here: move North
who let in the parasites?
I had plans to retire to Connaught as well. Good Trout fishing. The nigs will beat me there it seems.
Gerry Adams has a terrorist organization that could exterminate the blacks.
Davis says the mainstream consensus is that Southern plantations were more like modern agribusiness in their scale, profitability, and efficiency. He doesn’t single out the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Slavery was also extremely adaptable. Not only did slaves grow major export crops like cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, they were also hired out in the cities, worked in mines, built railroads, raised livestock, planted and harvested Northern crops like wheat and corn in the Upper South, and worked in the Confederate wartime industries.
Southern plantations were regimented like factories to maximize production and return on capital. In free labor societies, a huge percentage of the population doesn’t work, but slave societies employed the entire African population including young children, the elderly, and women in a variety of tasks.
My understanding is that many northern factories, especially textile mills, and clothing factories, were begun by late nineteenth century Jewish immigrants from Europe. What role did the Jewish transplants from the southern states play in the factory system?
That “ ‘civil rights’ revived because Northern politicians competed with each other for the expanding and increasingly important black vote” is very clear. If the immigration had been less, and they would have remained a small, insignificant voting bloc, then the “civil rights” issue might not have developed or reappeared in the mid-twentieth century?
Pennsilfaanish Deitsch family farms weren’t the economic engine of the early republic, or colonial america.
Slavery worked.
It was an extremely profitable system. Slave societies took blacks from Africa and transformed them into a regimented workforce that drove the prosperity of much of the Western world.
We’re used to thinking of blacks as nothing but a drag on our society. The present racial situation is the result of the foolish utopian experiment in abolition. The free negro is and always has been a failure.
By removing freedom and equality from the equation, slavery solved the Negro Question. Instead of poverty, there was once wealth. Instead of declining property values, there used to be rising property values.
While hordes of armed free negroes commit most of the crime in our society, slavery removed them from the streets, disarmed them, prohibited alcohol, regulated their behavior, and profitably employed them in ways that were useful to society.
The only compelling argument for the presence of the negro here is, was, and remains slavery. Abolition removed that argument and unleashed a social and economic catastrophe from Maryland to Brazil.
“In free labor societies, a huge percentage of the population doesn’t work”:
In EVERY there are the elderly, juvenile and infirm, and academics, politicians and clerics who don’t or cannot engage in physical labour. Those ethnic groups who do NOT value hard work for its own sake DO enjoy leisure when given the opportunity.
Correction: “In EVERY there are…” should have been “In EVERY society there are…”
Connaught, is where my ancient yankee ancestors once dwelled, before they came over to the USA to oppress the ulter scots
sorry you may purge my anger bursts, they serve no purpose, and you do spend time researching this so i apologise, but i do not recind my opinions on slavery, they stand. even the ancient vikings cross bred with the inferior slave peoples. again the example of simon bolivar and his hatred of the mixed races, how they doomed latin american federation
as there was no white armies to protect white establishments from getting “tousant l’overetteed” or how ever that niggers name is spelled, you know the big unga bunga in haiti
“Pennsilfaanish Deitsch family farms weren’t the economic engine of the early republic, or colonial america.”
Very true. No matter how efficiently productive they were, they certainly weren’t (and aren’t) “dynamic”! They did feed George Washington’s army in the winter starving time, and the same people in the Shenandoah Valley created the “breadbasket” of the Army of Virginia.
But then, how many other ways can efficiency and wealth be defined?
“Slavery worked. It was an extremely profitable system. Slave societies took blacks from Africa and transformed them into a regimented workforce that drove the prosperity of much of the Western world.”
I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Wallace. You’ve now confirmed what I told you long ago: the only thing the South cared about was money.
“The only compelling argument for the presence of the negro here is, was, and remains slavery”
Not compelling.
There were white armies that kept the Haitian blacks in line. Except, they were fighting each other. The Haitian revolt only worked because France and Britain were at war at the time.
Re: John Bona
In my state, Alabama, whiteness was the basis of our society: negroes were not citizens or voters, the overwhelming majority of them were slaves, and free negroes did not have the same rights as White people, among other things the right to own firearms or testify in court against White people or marry outside their race.
In your state, Pennsylvania, whiteness was not really important. In 1780, Pennsylvania repealed its anti-miscegenation law. Blacks were citizens and voters in Pennsylvania until the late 1830s. A mere two decades later their citizenship and voting rights were restored.
Blacks have traditionally been your equals in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush believed in negro equality. What are you complaining about?
As if the north wasn’t an economic experiment as well? How about all the White ethnic groups yankees brought north to cut the wages of native born White men? Or all the negros yankees traded in to make money. The slave ships they built? Or the ships they modified? Or how long yankees engaged in the slave trade after it was band. Or the war the yankees launched because they wouldn’t forgo tariff money. Or how the yankees nullified the embargo acts under Jefferson because it hurt their economic interests…
You don’t know fuck john b despite all your fancy book learning. Actually I’m fair certain you have no real book learning only a self delusional form of intellectualism and a false sense of superiority.
Wealth isn’t everything, wealth is the only thing.
It more general than money of course. Time off to do what you enjoy is a form of wealth.
“Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush believed in negro equality.”
And yet when they founded the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1785 they both still owned slaves! LOL
“Wealth isn’t everything, wealth is the only thing.”
I’m surprised to hear that from you John. Based on some of your previous posts I had erroneously assumed that honour was still a value you at least occasionally gave lip service to.
You’ve become more of a modern “American” than you even know.
Meant half in jest. I’m not a money grubber, I realize it also sounds a bit Televengelical. Which made me feel a bit sick.
To lighten the tone for a moment. Here’s the Gettysberg address in Ebonics:
“sup muh niggaz? A crib divided against itself cant stand but let me aks you dis…does I not be destroying muh enemies when I shoots dem mufuggas?”
Anyone who makes repeated defenses of an institution as repulsive and suicidal as nigger slavery in white countries, even with the full benefit of hindsight, is simply beyond reason.
Hunter is so overwhelmed with loathing of modernity that the only way out of the psychic grave he has dug himself is to justify everything his hallowed ancestors did and thought. Other WN intellectuals react to this not uncommon mental ailment by reaching for loopy esoteric philosophies like Rene Guenon’s. Obviously such people cannot be counted to deal with the world as they find it.
Hunter,
Slavery may have been more efficient when it comes to farm labor, especially under conditions of abundant land and scarce labor supply, but the numbers don’t seem to stack up in the modern general economy.
Consider a supermarket owner contemplating a slave labor force. The costs of ownership would be about $100/week for housing and utilities; $75 food; $100 supervision and security. So not including expenses for clothing, insurance and medical, that’s already $275 per slave per week. At a free market wage of $7/hour and 40 hours per week there’s no edge in it at all. The slaves would have to be worked much longer hours to make the enterprise pay, but there’s every reason to believe that employers of free labor would gain a “freedom incentive” efficiency edge from their workers, enabling them to beat out slave-run competition. And remember, the idea that even if the institution of slavery survived it would be immune from the wider changes in cultural attitudes is plainly ridiculous; employers of free labor would thus enjoy a great deal of consumer preference — a factor by itself perhaps capable of making slavery unprofitable.
Unlike West Indian slavery, Southern slavery was also a middle class institution – the typical slaveowner owned less than 10 slaves, and most planters owned 20 to 40 slaves.
That’s a stretch. Only one in four whites owned slaves and 50% of those owned five slaves or less. That’s more elitist than it is middle class.
It wasn’t enough though to destroy our prosperity, make blacks into citizens, and transform blacks into our rulers to pillage our states. “Progress” also required the destruction of patriarchy and “women’s rights.” Now the definition of marriage itself has similarly come under attack for excluding homosexuals.
Your prosperity wasn't destroyed; its basis was just given a moral footing. Neither progress nor emancipation requires integrating with former slaves them or making them citizens; those things happened, but neither the morality of emancipation nor the desire for progress requiresthose things. That’s why someone like me who approves of women’s rights and the loosening up of patriarchy, favors abortion, and is happy to turn a blind eye to homosexuality, can have no problem with racism and segregation. (Do let me know if this is overloading your rational faculty.)