Classical Economists.



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 slavery was a major cause of the economic stagnation in the ancient and medieval eras. But by his time, he noted, this backward labor system flourished only in the production of such staples as sugar and tobacco, which enjoyed exorbitant returns and government protections. 

Not every early economist entirely agreed with Smith that slavery was usually unprofitable, but the condemnation of slavery as inefficient was almost universal among those economists who discussed the question at length. These included Anne-Robert-Jacques-Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, Heinrich von Storch, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and John Cairnes. The classical economists also usually integrated their economic analysis with an overall moral condemnation of slavery. When Thomas Carlyle attached the sobriquet “dismal science” to economics, he was reacting not to Thomas Malthus’s pessimistic projections about the effects of future population growth, as frequently presumed. The term “dismal science” first shows up in Carlyle’s anonymous 1849 essay, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Classical economists, to his disgust, had played a major supporting role in ending slavery within Britain’s West Indies colonies more than a decade earlier. That is why he regarded economics as “dismal.”

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