The comment I left may be helpful in clarifying where I'm going with the historical discussion, so here is the relevant part.
Even granting that the real source of the increase is the free market -- things like the miracle of compound interest, or the ability to invest in growing industries and factories and the like -- the premise leaves out something very important about how one obtains the capital to make such initial investments. Let's say that, due to these economic miracles, we could become rich with an investment of merely $100,000 -- that this will produce an increase like she's discussing, so that it will become worth $2,500,000 in time (and that will continue to grow).Yet I do not have an extra $100,000 to invest. If, however, there is a legal and successful way for me to rob another man for it -- taking it out of him in labor, or a legally contrived way of stealing his house, or whatever else -- then I can make the investment. And then I will become rich, and my descendants even richer! He will become destitute, and his descendants will not enjoy the increase in wealth that mine do. They may become better off if 'a rising tide lifts all boats,' as they may become well-paid servants of my descendants. Nevertheless, the initial theft really matters and produces long-term differentials in wealth and power.
The particular example I'm going to discuss is the economic history of the American South, but I think the general issues outlined here apply also to the other examples the original author gives, e.g., British India, the West African slave trade, and so on. To quickly outline one of these examples: The West African slave trade enriched a lot of West African slavers, as the author notes; they did not become nearly as wealthy as some of the others it enriched because they did not plug that wealth into the new industrial-age free market and investment system like the owners of the slave ships in Boston and New York had done. Even granting her point about the importance of the free market and investment systems, though, the initial investment that made Boston and New York so wealthy compared to other places was provided at least in part by inputs from slaving in the famous Triangle Trade.
I. Antebellum Theft
America's South has long been its poorest and most benighted region, but this was not always the case. Before the Civil War, it was a tremendously prosperous region. This was driven by one of these forms of stolen wealth too, the slave system, whereby a man's whole life of labor was plugged into investments by another man who stole it.
America's South has long been its poorest and most benighted region, but this was not always the case. Before the Civil War, it was a tremendously prosperous region. This was driven by one of these forms of stolen wealth too, the slave system, whereby a man's whole life of labor was plugged into investments by another man who stole it.
This combination of theft and the new systems of compound interest and investment in emerging industries worked extremely well. Plantation houses built in the South were some of the finest homes being built anywhere in the world, and they were accompanied by beautiful gardens, fine churches, elegant cotton shipping cities like Savannah or Charleston or Mobile, colleges and education. One of the highlights of this period was the poet Sidney Lanier of Georgia. In addition to his own poetry, he was a scholar of music and a translator of works out of Middle French and Middle English. He was especially interested in popularizing the high civilization of the Middle Ages for boys, and one of his works -- The Boy's King Arthur -- was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth and is still in print today. (I highly recommend both this and The Boy's Froissart for anyone with boys old enough to read longer works.)
Now this land, so rich and prosperous, had been a positive wilderness not very long before. Indeed, parts of Alabama and Mississippi were still in the process of being settled and transformed even as the civilization was flourishing. Just a few decades earlier, at the time of the Revolutionary War, most of it was unsettled; King's Mountain in North Carolina was the site of a battle in which a militia of outright frontiersmen had defeated the British Army.
II. The Effects of Post War Theft
Just as illustrative of the principle of stolen wealth's effect on the system, though, is the story of what happened after the Civil War -- the transformation of this region from wealth and education into poverty and a lack of education that made it the mockery of America for generations (indeed, one sees it still). The war itself was devastating, but what really destroyed the South for generations was the economic system imposed upon it after the war. This was a form of economics also used in colonialist economies in South America and India, and will help to illustrate those cases too.
I've written about this before, for example in 2013 when discussing a mystery that bothers historians -- why were the slave narratives captured by the CCC in FDR's day inclined to describe the antebellum South as a happy time?
There are some other theories about why the former slaves had such positive things to say about their lives on the plantation. The one to which I am most inclined is that they were all much older when they gave the interviews, and spoke with the natural nostalgia of the old for the sunny days of youth. Memory paints the memories of those days, in nearly all of us, with rose colors.But there are other possibilities too. For one thing, economic conditions in the South cratered after the war, so that life after the war was markedly harder for everyone -- especially, as is usual, those on the bottom. The traditional market for Southern cotton was lost, as the English mills had turned to India during the war's blockade. The South's mills were destroyed, so it was relegated to being a producer of raw materials for Northern mills at rates set by Northern banks. The economic system imposed by the North was a brutal colonial-style monoculture built around cotton production, and colonial monocultures are notoriously harsh places to live (here as in Latin America, India, and elsewhere). Until the boll weevil collapsed the cotton economy in the late 1920s, the South was ground down by the usual effects of such economies: the price of the monocultural good (cotton, here) dropped every year, because supply increased every year as those commanding the economy forced ever-greater production of the single cash crop. Under those circumstances, quality of life dropped, again especially for the poorest and those most dependent on agriculture. Naturally those who had been slaves who had only known how to work cotton farms, or who were directly descended of slaves who had, were very likely to be a part of the very lowest agricultural classes tied to the cotton monoculture. They would have endured the worst conditions imposed by the economic system.So it is possible (indeed it doesn't seem unlikely) that happiness is greatly influenced by economic realities. When the interviews were conducted from 1936-8, the boll weevil had collapsed the cotton economy, and the Great Depression had followed on its heels. While the boll weevil eventually allowed the South to escape the monoculture economy, at first it meant a severe economic depression for the region, which was then followed on by a severe depression worldwide. The former slave speaking in 1937 would be looking back on a life that had, in economic terms, ground ever worse each year of his or her life, capped by ten years' complete economic failure. The pre-war plantations may really have seemed like a better place by comparison to that. They may really have been, if not a better place, a happier place.
Another thing the CCC was doing at that time was reforesting Warwoman Dell in northeast Georgia, which had been denuded by this system so the land could be used for cotton production -- required by the banks in order to obtain the loans, at interest. Warwoman Dell is in the mountains in land completely unsuited for cotton, but the system was totalizing and grinding.
All that money -- all that interest -- impoverished almost everyone in the South, black and white, except a few robber barons called the Bourbon Democrats who managed to sit atop the misery in comfort. The invented the deep racism and the Jim Crow system to keep the poor whites afraid of the poor blacks, with whom they shared almost every practical and political interest. Instead, they spun narratives -- two exemplars of this being Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind -- out of the bones of the old civilization, still widely visible a hundred years ago in ruined plantation houses and the remains of old mills. That civilization was indeed gone with the wind, destroyed not so much by the war as by the effects of seven decades of economic theft activity by northern banks and the aforementioned robber barons.
Nevertheless a lot of wealth was extracted from this system, even though it led to an ever-increasing decline in the price of the cotton it was over-producing (the ever-increasing supply being the reason for the ever-decreasing price). The ever-cheaper cotton went north to be turned into finished goods and sold at a profit. The interest on the loans went north and was added to the banks' capital, to be invested in emerging industries. Between the one form of extraction and the other, a great deal of investment was available to be invested for the miracles of the free market, from compound interest to new forms of technology. This partly explains how the United States became the richest nation in the world in the same period, capable of raising armies and navies that would be victorious in two World Wars.
These investments may eventually have produced a rising tide that lifts all boats; things are better in the South economically than they once were (although the last two years have reversed many recent gains). Yet the reason the South has long been the poorest and most benighted region of the United States is because of this economic theft; and the reason it was once extremely wealthy and profitable was because of another economic theft. The free market and these economic miracles it produces may well drive the vast increases in wealth; but whose children become wealthy is very much informed by acts of extraction.
Regarding "Slave Narratives", we have contemporary comparisons of interviews with Blacks in South African today who speak with, hmmm, a lack of utter hatred for apartheid. Being the least prosperous person in a wealthy society is better than being the least prosperous person in an impoverished society, right?
ReplyDeleteThat’s surely true, but we would like to believe that being free is categorically better than slavery. And indeed I do believe that.
ReplyDeleteYet life under Jim Crow, which ruled by intensive racism, fear, and lynching, may have been little improvement over slavery. Add the economic effects of misery and you could account for they mystery.
Another minor point about her article that I am inclined to dispute is her distinction between theft and trade with regards to these colonial economies. Yes, in a way, people were involved in trade; they were paid for their cotton. But at the point at which the trade is so one-sided that people are denuding places like Warwoman Dell to try to service their debts in the only cash crop you'll accept as payment, there's something at least like theft going on.
ReplyDeleteNot every form of trade is sufficiently decent to fail to deserve the name of theft; right now in Afghanistan relatively wealthy tribal leaders are accepting pretty daughters as Islamic-law wives in return for assuming the debts of the poor. You can call that 'trade' or 'theft' or 'slavery,' but it's not right, and it's not decent to elide it into the mere category of 'trade' without at least noting the wrongness of it.
I get where you are coming from, and I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying but I think your argument gets off on the wrong foot from the start. To borrow the phrase from AVI, the South was rich compared to whom in 1860?
ReplyDeleteThe South may have been rich compared to themselves 100 years prior or other less developed contemporary areas but certainly not when held up against the most direct object of comparison, the northern states. Quoting from a quick Google (https://www.nps.gov/articles/industry-and-economy-during-the-civil-war.htm)
... By 1860, 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output came from northern states. The North produced 17 times more cotton and woolen textiles than the South, 30 times more leather goods, 20 times more pig iron, and 32 times more firearms. Only about 40 percent of the Northern population was still engaged in agriculture by 1860, as compared to 84 percent of the South.
Even in the agricultural sector, Northern farmers were out-producing their southern counterparts in several important areas, as Southern agriculture remained labor intensive while northern agriculture became increasingly mechanized. By 1860, the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as did the slave states, leading to increased productivity. As a result, in 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation's corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats.
Quoting from Ms. McCloskey
That school[King Cotton] has been devastated recently in detail by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of UC Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. They point out, for example, that the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the share of slaves in U.S. wealth. Piketty’s estimates were then used by Baptist to put slavery at the center of U.S. economic history. Slavery was evil, and central to U.S. social and political history, sure enough. But the evil was not a cause of economic enrichment.
Olmstead and Rhode note, too, that the price of slaves increased from 1820 to 1860 because of an astonishing rise in the productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Innovation, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a king, though a little one.
The based in theft argument only holds so far as one could trace all or most of the capital to the illicit activity but as the statics I quoted earlier indicate, economic activity in the northern states was orders of magnitude greater than that in the South already by 1860. The northern states didn’t accumulate wealth exclusively from turning cotton into textiles or exporting it. They were whaling, and importing consumer and luxury goods, and moving immigrants inland, and dealing in lumber and agricultural products from their region as well. Money is fungible but you have to draw the line somewhere and say this dollar, and its gains, didn’t come from this source.
I think the north actually benefited a lot more from slavery on the model I’m suggesting. They received capital from the Triangle Trade. That was far more effective at generating wealth via investment in emerging industry, or through interest income, than actually trying to use slaves to raise cotton.
ReplyDeleteIn fact it explains the differential you’re pointing to better. If the real way theft produces income is not through direct increase but by creating pools of capital for investment and loans at interest, the North’s approach was categorically better as a means of creating wealth. The South’s was less effective; though it still produced significant wealth via investment in an agricultural economy where had very recently stood a wilderness.
Olmstead's Cotton Kingdom says he was surprised at the amount of poverty he found in the pre-Civil War South. a review of his work and the book
ReplyDeleteI linked to this at my own site.
ReplyDelete@ James - I was quite surprised by that book.
I have a book somewhere by someone who traveled in the pre-Civil-War South; IIRC he was a Brit. His description of the living conditions of the plantation owners he visited was pretty dismal. Obviously there were also those who lived in luxury and elegance; don't know what the mix was.
ReplyDeleteI think the north actually benefited a lot more from slavery on the model I’m suggesting. They received capital from the Triangle Trade.
ReplyDeleteI apparently misunderstand what period of US history you refer to that encompassed the "Triangle Trade".
I sort of begin with the (mistaken?) idea that the "molasses to rum to slaves" triangle ended in 1808 or shortly after when Congress outlawed the import of African workers held in perpetual bondage. The cotton gin, credited with the seeds of the King Cotton Southern economy, was invented in 1794. In the interval when the gin was running and labor was imported, about 80,000 Africans arrived in the South. (So about 8 percent of Blacks in the US in 1810 were new forced immigrants, the rest of the million or so already here had been born here. ) The half-century after saw massive increases in the number of African-heritage laborers held in perpetual service, (about 4 times as many as worked in the US in 1810), but that increase was not due, as far as I can tell, to the "Triangle Trade" of newly imported workers.
So I guess you mean something else, some other type of trade or period of trade. If it's no trouble I beg your clarification.
Slavery did not encourage economic efficiency. Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, visited a shipyard in New Bedford shortly after obtaining his freedom. Here are his comments on observing a cargo being unloaded:
ReplyDelete"In a southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox attached to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox, worth eighty dollars, was doing, in New Bedford, what would have required fifteen thousand dollars worth of human bones and muscles to have performed in a southern port."
Also, there was a guy in the pre-Civil-War South named William Gregg, who argued that the region was harming itself by leaving the milling of the cotton in Northern or European hands, and that industrialization was necessary for Southern prosperity. He did build and run one large mill, but was unable to inspire others tmany o do the same...most planters didn't see manufacturing as something a Gentleman should be involved in. There were also difficulties in attracting skilled workers from either the North or from Europe.
How much did the "Post War Theft" influence the "War of Northern Aggression" narrative? Looking at how things turned out for Southerners, why wouldn't they believe that was what the North wanted from the beginning?
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in Texas, I didn't get much of that. Our myths involve the Alamo and Cowboys rather than the Civil War.
@JMelcher:
ReplyDeleteIt's no trouble. The Triangle Trade actually refers to different economic systems when different people use it, so it's probably not a specific enough term to use for a cautious discussion. There were several in operation between the 1500s and the 1800s, of which American companies participated in at least two: the British triangle system and the later American one (which is the one you're thinking about). The earlier one moved sugar and tobacco as luxury goods to England, as well as cotton to be turned into finished products; the textiles to Africa for slaves; the slaves to the Americas to work on sugar and tobacco farms. The later one mostly moved sugar not as a luxury good but as a raw material to New England, where it was turned into rum to be traded for slaves, etc.
Note, for the plausibility of the North benefitting much more than the South from the trade, that very few slaves were imported into the United States overall -- perhaps 10%, from what I understand. The vast majority were sold in the Caribbean or to Latin America, where they were often worked to death and replaced. In the American South, far fewer were needed because the slave population there had a natural increase (that is why the South did not object to ending the trade in 1808, decades before the war and while slavery was still a growing concern). Thus, the vast majority of the revenue of the slave trade did not enter into the Southern part of the economy at any point; rather, they spent the capital they were producing with cotton (separately sold to England, not in a triangle trade) investing in building out a slave-based agriculture.
Worth noting also is that these trade routes were generally not things a single ship did. They usually required companies to operate: the company would charter a fleet of ships optimized for moving human beings, and a separate fleet for moving trade goods or dry goods. The need for capital to invest in multiple voyages of multiple vessels to leverage these triangles thus furthers (I believe) my suggestion that the shipping states in the North, as in England earlier, benefitted most from the trade -- and also from diversifying their capital returns into other forms of more industrial investments.
So it's rather different than just having a ship sailing in a triangle, which ship might have sailed from anywhere. It required an investment model built around leveraging capital from the start.
@Patrick:
ReplyDeleteCertainly by the end of the 19th century, and the early 20th century, that dynamic is in play. There were a number of historians of Southern extraction or sympathy who described the war as a kind of glorious lost cause, fought to preserve the original spirit of the Revolution against greedy Northern capitalists bent from the beginning on subjugation of the whole thing to the northern banks.
You can easily enlist Tennessee frontiersman and President Andrew Jackson's (successful) crusade against the Bank of the United States as a early data point for projection along that line. Once you have two or three data points to emphasize, projection to the desired conclusion is fairly easy to construct as a narrative.
This is also, by the way, why all those giant military bases in the South that were constructed to provide for recruiting and training the armies for the two World Wars are named for Confederate generals. The thought of having the US military re-occupy very large portions of the South was supposedly made more palatable by naming the institutions after Southern heroes. At the time when all this was most deeply felt, and memories of the post-Civil War occupation still bitter with contemporary miseries, maybe it prevented another insurrection.
@Grim's 5:56
ReplyDeleteMs. McCloskey makes, to my reading, pretty much the same argument, just in a different tone.
In the zero-sum world before 1800, stealing and enslaving got the jerks 10, 50, even 100 percent richer. Hallelujah.
But the Great Enrichment has been two-and-a-half thousand percent. By fourth-grade arithmetic, the present $50 minus the miserable base in 1800 of $2 is $48, which divided by the base is about a factor of 25, or about that 2,500 percent. Blimey. Stealing can’t come remotely close to accounting for it. Stealing from the wretched of the earth doesn’t even sound like a good criminal plan. And anyway, stealing from Peter to pay Paul can’t enrich both, and certainly not by 2,500 percent.
Consider, for example, British imperialism. Half of the Royal Navy, which was paid for by Britons at home, was assigned to protect the sea routes to India. Glorious. Yet India itself yielded no stolen benefit to the average Briton. Not a shilling. India traded with Britain, sure. But trade is not stealing, and the trade would have happened regardless of whether the Raj was Britain or France or the domestic rajas.
You are both stipulating a group which perpetuates an economic system based on expropriation or exploitation will fall economically far behind a similarly situated group that unleashes human capital in any reasonable semblance of free exchange, even if one can point to instances where the exchanges are extremely unbalanced. I think her comment about trade in the excerpt should be read in a similar fashion, as she voices the same idea in comparing the East and West African slave trade. How the people who did the exploiting used their gains did matter. When the Spanish imperial model of direct exploitation crashed and burned it took the Spanish homeland down with it. While the British Empire devolved over time, Britain itself remained an immensely wealthy country.
What mattered was not that every instance of exchange suddenly became scrupulously honest, equitable, and honorable but that the West started to make slow halting steps towards an economic model that liberated human potential. Continuing on the model of exploitation and expropriation would not have produced the gains in standards of living that we see now. One can easily point the Chinese experience as a contemporary example, even though it is also far from a model of perfect liberty.
I certainly agree that the tone of her discussion of instances of exploitation by the West is jarringly flippant as illustrated by the excerpt above. I still think that she proves the meat of her argument that the expansion of living standards worldwide strongly refutes the claim that the West's present wealth is the result of continued economic exploitation down to the present day.
James beat me to it, re Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom books that point out the relative poverty of the antebellum South.
ReplyDeletePatrick:
Growing up in Texas, I didn't get much of that. Our myths involve the Alamo and Cowboys rather than the Civil War.
My mother told me that after her Oklahoma childhood,hearing elders rehash and rehash the Civil War, she was no longer going to fight the Civil War. Her grandparents were born in Tennessee before the Civil War and moved to Texas in the 1870s. Then to Oklahoma. In 1980 I recorded my grandmother's tales about the Civil War that her parents told her. My grandmother was born and raised in Texas.
Grim, thank you for elaborating on "The Triangle Trade". I confess I can't hear the term without beginning to hear mental echoes of the SONG from Peter Stone' musical play "1776". Later readings in more detail can't overcome the initial response to fine art.
ReplyDeleteGoing on, you write: Note, for the plausibility of the North benefitting much more than the South from the trade, that very few slaves were imported into the United States overall -- perhaps 10%
This gets us back to your original post. Versions of "theft". A whole lot of theory is devoted to questioning the division of wealth created in voluntary trade. The North and South traded voluntarily, but the North walked away from the trade with "more" of the excess value created. Much of the theory assumes a privileged observer with a God's Eye View who can call fair and foul on the trades. Simple toy model in contemporary life: I bake LOTS of cupcakes for a dime each and sell them for a dollar apiece. You buy the snack because making just one costs you (overall, in time and tools and everything) more than a dollar. My 90 cent profit is clearly visible, but how is YOUR value created from the trade created measured?
In theory your increase in personal value MUST exist or you would not have made the deal. Further, I can bank, invest, draw interest on the cash I accrue from the trade, but what can YOU accomplish from the value you derive from the trade? Is it correct that the difficulties in measuring or making subsequent use of your gains in implied value must mean that our mutual agreement to trade was morally MY (and only my) theft -- or expropriation?
Back to the North South thing -- the gains in trade for the products of slavery in the US 19th century economy seem to be counted as monetary in the North (more money in the bank) and biological in the South(more land under cultivation, (more of a Black, naturally increasing population.) Or not?
@JMelcher:
ReplyDeleteIn theory your increase in personal value MUST exist or you would not have made the deal.... My 90 cent profit is clearly visible, but how is YOUR value created from the trade created measured?
That only follows if one equivocates on 'value.' My wealth has declined, because I have expended it to buy something I wanted. My pleasure may have (temporarily) increased for the same reason. These are both sorts of value, or things that we value, but it's hard to measure the way in which they are alike.
Except, of course, with money -- as you say, I was willing to make the deal, so I must value the pleasure more than the cash. Or, Aristotle says, with rhetoric: even where a means of exchange like money isn't possible, we can find a means of comparing unlike things in terms of how we talk about them. Is courage better than wine? You can't readily exchange the one for the other, but you can compare them in rhetoric.
Maybe your cupcakes are worthy of song.
Back to the North South thing -- the gains in trade for the products of slavery in the US 19th century economy seem to be counted as monetary in the North (more money in the bank) and biological in the South(more land under cultivation, (more of a Black, naturally increasing population.) Or not?
Well, the first point is that the South participated in a very small portion of the trade comparatively: most of it passed them by entirely, heading to ports in England and New England, in exchange for slaves that went nowhere near the South. So part of the issue is that the North participated in the theft (of human lives) to a much greater degree, since almost all of the flow of cash for lives never passed through the South at all. It did pass through the joint stock companies in the shipping centers.
But it is also true that the South used what capital it was obtaining (through cotton sales) to buy a kind of human capital for use as labor. Labor does increase value, but not as much as investment capital can do. The West African slave kings the original article cites appear to have spent their wealth buying luxury goods for themselves, which (perhaps like the song-worthy cupcakes) were used and then gone, so that wealth was arguably expended rather than gained.
So there is a clear lesson about the wisest use of capital, if you are able to get it. I think, also, that there is a clear lesson about the value of theft in obtaining that capital, which can then be used wisely or not.
That only follows if one equivocates on 'value.' My wealth has declined, because I have expended it to buy something I wanted. My pleasure may have (temporarily) increased for the same reason. These are both sorts of value, or things that we value, but it's hard to measure the way in which they are alike.
ReplyDeleteYes, you're right. It's hard in the same way we've encountered and discussed before, in the arena of beauty, or virtue. Is a durable form of beauty, as a statue's, somehow (and by some measure) more beautiful than a momentary beauty, as of fireworks? Is it more virtuous to have a habitual virtue, courage or honesty or whatever; or a heroic moment in which to act bravely or tell the truth even in circumstances where all instinct is to be or do otherwise?
So by differentiating among kinds of value -- wealth, capital, preference, we ALSO make something of an unexamined meta-assessment that "capital" (as value invested or capable of being invested -- over time value) is superior to "money" (which at least can be measured by simple count at any given moment) which is superior to the value of a free agent trading to obtain a "preference" (for which we know there can BE no accounting -- de gustibus non est disputandumvia ). It's such a ranking of values that allows the idea that voluntary trades resulting in capital flows in one way and preferences the other is equal to, (or can be equivocated to) "theft".
Fair analysis or am I missing a critical step in the thinking somewhere?
Since you would like to be rigorous about this, you should also do more to explain what exactly is meant by the terms you put in quotes -- especially theft. I have raised as a minor criticism that the original author is treating it as categorically different from trade, when there are clear examples of cases in which they overlap. Trading anything for slaves (or very young girls as wives, which may or may not be the same thing depending on whom you ask) strikes me as a clear case in which both a trade and a theft is occurring. Two of the parties are trading, but one is also stealing, and the enslaved is having something stolen; and even the non-thieving partner is buying stolen goods, and thus in a strong sense a partner to the theft.
ReplyDeleteThere are more vague cases. We often say things like 'this deal is a steal,' but that's probably usually a trade in which the party to the deal that appears to be losing thinks it is worthwhile. There are cases where a published price was accidentally set too low, below cost, and a buyer insists on having the published price honored even though it was a mistake. That's more analogous, because it's not a deal to which all parties are truly consenting in a fully rational and informed way.
The original post you quote references theft and you conclude your own remarks attributing wealth and poverty to a more specific "economic theft".
ReplyDeleteYet the reason the South has long been the poorest and most benighted region of the United States is because of this economic theft; and the reason it was once extremely wealthy and profitable was because of another economic theft.
The theft of a person's freedom, agency, labor, etc is one thing and I do not quibble. The South grew wealthy during an age of increasing numbers of slaves. In tobacco as well as cotton, to tell the truth. So I have some dimly dawning idea of what you mean on this side of the process.
The South lost wealth, in great part, via WAR. Vandalism. Railroads and telegraph lines and mills and housing stock burned. It's not at all clear that the Union or later the North directly benefitted from the destruction of the Confederate's and South's infrastructure. Indirectly the destruction certainly reduced competition. This seems to me to be a whole 'nother thing from the "economic theft" in the first part of the analysis. I keep trying to wrap my head around how you incorporate the two cases into a larger, more general case.
I also go back to my own remarks about contempory African nostalgia for Apartheid. It's as if the wealth of railroads, telegraphs, printing presses, etc etc somehow indirectly benefitted the slaves of the South, again in fashion difficult to measure, or see, or even imagine. When the wealth of that infrastructure vanished -- stolen or merely destroyed -- the poor and oppressed found themselves poorer still and even more oppressed. Post-Apartheid South Africa has driven wealth -- or at least, some wealthy white citizens -- out of their economy, and those left recognize but can't pin down what specific kinds of wealth have been lost, or stolen, or forfeited, in the handover of political power.
I keep trying to wrap my head around how you incorporate the two cases into a larger, more general case.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see at least one of the issues. I am not in fact trying to incorporate war and economic theft.
I'm talking about two separate cases of economic theft. You'll notice I have labeled them "I. Antebellum Theft" and "II. Post War Theft." At no point was I describing the destruction of wealth in the war as any sort of theft. The massive loss of blood and treasure at war was not, in my view, an act of theft.
(War can involve theft, however; indeed in the ancient world, theft was often the point of the war. Cf. the capture of the women of Troy to perform slave labor as weavers, whether as formal slaves or as 'wives.' Such fine textiles were highly valuable, and therefore so were the women, apart from whatever other reasons people had for valuing them. That said, I do not regard the Civil War as an intended act of theft by either party, except insofar as one were to speak of the Confederacy of defending its possession of stolen property)
Antebellum theft is easy to understand: the South participated in an international system of labor and freedom theft, and built an economy based on the exploitation of that labor.
Post War Theft is not intended to embrace the direct consequences of the war to Southern wealth, which were dire. (Those who mention that their ancestors went West after the war are in good company; the mountain West had a very large demographic of former citizens of the Confederacy seeking a new life.)
What I am talking about there is the way in which the poverty grew worse every year for six decades after the war, until the boll weevil destroyed the monoculture system imposed by the banks and the politicians upon the populace. (It still got worse for a while after that because, coincidentally, the Great Depression struck immediately afterwards. But things began to improve after the boll weevil, as people could diversify crops, recover ruined land, and escape the burdens of a system exactly similar to that imposed by colonial powers on outright colonies in Latin America).
It is that part that I am discussing under the heading of economic theft. This is one of those cases which is a sort of trade, but is also I think a sort of theft -- so much so that people were laying waste to the mountains to try to meet the imposition to produce cotton, somehow, anyhow, in the face of ever-decreasing prices and oversupply. That is clearly not pure trade, as a free market would stop oversupplying in that case -- and definitely not lay waste to other resources to continue and further the oversupply. This continued only because of a combination of wealth and power by the rich and powerful being brought to bear on the poor of the region.