What has been the relationship between slavery and economic development in the past four centuries?

Résumé du document

Most of the developed countries in the present era were once slave owners and slave traders, whereas many current developing countries represented potential sources of coerced labor force. Slave trade and the triangular trade might help to understand some evolutions that have occurred during the last four centuries among different continents. For instance, one can observe that the centers of power in the Americas have shifted from the Latin or central part of the continent to the northern and temperate areas. Whereas powerful empires such as the Inca or the Aztec ones were the leading societies of the continent and the wealthiest ones a few centuries ago, however the current American centre of gravity is no longer Mexico but the United States.

Extraits

[...] David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Slavery in the Development of the Americas, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge p op.cit. [...]

[...] At least, those studies insist on the profitability of slavery and its related activities. The dominant thought according to which slavery was not economically profitable is still widespread today. Yet, such ideas, even though the Abolitionists largely spread them out, may not fit the historical evidence. Even at the very end of its use as a productive process in plantations, slavery was still efficient in order to produce sugar or tobacco at low cost. Caribbean or Latin American economies had high incomes thanks to the use of slaves in the producing process: basis for the high incomes generated by plantation economies was the economies of scales made possible by the use of human beings, whose wishes could largely be disregarded.”[2] It was thus more profitable to use slaves than free waged workers. [...]

[...] This vision of the history of slavery would mean that development and slavery are contradictory notions. A developed country should always ban this institution from its producing process since it not efficient. Historical evidence, however, tends to show that slavery was economically very profitable, even at the time of its abolition. First of all, some authors argue that the Atlantic Slave trade had large consequences on the development inequalities between the northern and the southern countries. They defend the idea that development was enabled by slavery and activities related to it. [...]

[...] The accumulation of capital permitted this revolution, since the capital was invested in factories and in machines. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery, writes that this capital accumulation is mainly the result of the large surplus generated by the Atlantic slave trade. According to him, profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.” However, these interpretations are not really acceptable. First of all, they see trade as a zero-sum operation. [...]

[...] For example, masters allowed slaves to make pauses and to stop working for a few minutes during the day, observing that their slaves were more efficient if they had had some rest. According to Robert William Fogel, planter, for example, experimented with the number and frequency of the rest breaks he should provide during the day, and reached the conclusion that, in addition to breakfast and lunch breaks, a five-minute rest every half hour increased the productivity of the slaves by The author even adds that the productivity of the plantation was so high, the average workweek was shorter there than in the English factories at the same period. [...]