International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

As late as 1918 in American Negro Slavery, U. B. Phillips, a historian (and open racist), used trends in slave and cotton prices in the pre-Civil War United States to support his assertion that slavery had become unprofitable. The earliest scholarly challenges to the view that slavery was unprofitable and inefficient came from historians , notably L. C. Gray (1933) and Stampp (1955). But it was the practitioners of the “ new economic history ” or “ cliometrics ” who most forcefully contended that slave labor was profitable and efficient. Conrad and Meyer in the Journal of Political Economy ( “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” 1958 ) touched off the cliometric revolution, with its sophisticated and rigorous quantitative methods. They concluded that slavery was in fact remunerative for the average slaveowner . After much back-and-forth debate, within over thirty published items in the technical literature, that finding at least was firmly established. Slave labor p...

Many classical economists, starting with Adam Smith , contended that slave labor was inefficient and, therefore, usually unprofitable. Smith’s discussion of slavery appeared in The Wealth of Nations (1776). “[G]reat improvements,” he wrote, “are least of all to be expected when they [proprietors] employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.” Smith implicitly assumed that slavery operated like a tax on work. But if this is correct, why had slavery persisted for millennia? The answer Smith gave was that “[t]he pride of man makes him love to domineer.” In other words, a kind of conspicuous personal consumption causes employers to “prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen,” but with an important caveat: only “[w]herever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it . . .” Smith believed that slav...