учебный год 2023 / (Encyclopedia of Law and Economics 5) Boudewijn Bouckaert-Property Law and Economics -Edward Elgar Publishing (2010)

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Labor-force transitions and profits from slavery

One potent piece of evidence supporting the notion that slavery provides pecuniary benefits is this: slavery often gives way to other forms of organizing the labor force when the costs and risks of maintaining slaves become too large. In Europe, for example, serfdom evolved in part as a way of shifting some of the risks of poor crop yields away from masters (Bloch, 1975; Bush, 1996). A similar system arose within Africa in the nineteenth century. Slaves paid their masters for the right to work on their own; in exchange, masters no longer paid for the slaves’ upkeep (Watson, 1980). The Spanish Crown for a time favored a system of forced labor called encomienda, whereby the indigenous population could not be bought, sold, rented, bequeathed, or removed from the area. Scholars have speculated that this form of coercion, relative to outright slavery, reduced threats to the security of the Crown’s interest (Yeager, 1995). Thus, other types of labor take the place of slaves when slavery costs too much.

In like fashion, slavery replaces other labor when it becomes relatively cheaper. In the early US colonies, for example, indentured servitude was common. As the demand for skilled servants (and therefore their wages) rose in England, the cost of indentured servants went up in the colonies. At the same time, second-generation slaves became more productive than their forebears because they spoke English and did not have to adjust to life in a strange new world. Consequently, the balance of labor shifted away from indentured servitude and toward slavery (Galenson, 1982, 1984, and 1986; Grubb, 1985 and 1994; Engerman, 1992). Georgia offers a compelling example. Its original 1732 charter prohibited ownership of black slaves. Yet by 1750 the trustees of the new colony had to relax the prohibition because Georgia growers simply could not compete with producers elsewhere who utilized lower-cost slave labor (Grindle, 1990).

Profitability and race

One element that contributed to the profitability of New World slavery was, for several reasons, the African heritage of the slaves. Africans, more than native people, were accustomed to the discipline of agricultural practices and knew metalworking. Some scholars surmise that Africans, relative to Europeans, could better withstand tropical diseases and, unlike native Americans, also had some exposure to the European disease pool (Coelho and McGuire, 1997).

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Africans, however, was their skin color. Because they looked different from their masters, their movements were easy to monitor. Denying slaves education, property ownership, contractual rights, and other things enjoyed by those in power was simple: one need only look at people to ascertain their likely status. Using color

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was a low-cost way of distinguishing slaves from free persons. For this reason, perhaps, early colonial practices that freed slaves who converted to Christianity quickly faded away. Deciphering true religious beliefs is far more difficult than establishing skin color. Other slave societies have used distinguishing marks like brands or long hair to denote slaves, yet color is far more immutable and therefore better as a cheap way of keeping slaves separate.

Among those who profited from slavery were men who worked as slave catchers and received fees for returning escaped slaves to their masters. Because skin color was the principal identifying mark, however, free blacks also faced the horrifying possibility of capture and sale.

Efficiency of antebellum slavery

So New World slavery was profitable; was it an efficient way of organizing the workforce? On this question, considerable controversy remains. Slavery might well profit masters, but only because they exploit their chattel. What is more, slavery could have locked people into a method of production and way of life that might later have proven burdensome.

Fogel and Engerman (1974) claim that slaves kept about 90 per cent of what they produced. Because these scholars also found that agricultural slavery was 35 per cent more efficient than family farming in the North, they argue that slaves actually may have shared in the overall benefits resulting from the gang system. Other scholars contend that slaves in fact kept less than half of what they produced and that slavery, while profitable, certainly was not efficient (Vedder, 1975; Ransom and Sutch, 1977, 1988).

Gavin Wright (1978, 2006) critiques the work of Fogel and Engerman by focusing on the exceptional nature of the crop year they used to calculate their statistics and by using alternative data to attack their estimates of total factor productivity. Wright calls attention as well to the difference between the short run and the long run. He notes that slaves accounted for a very large proportion of most masters’ portfolios of assets. Although slavery might seem an efficient means of production at a point in time, it ties masters to a certain system of labor that may not adapt quickly to changed economic circumstances.

Wright’s argument has some merit. Although the South’s growth rate compared favorably with that of the North in the antebellum period, a considerable portion of wealth was held in the hands of planters – and much of that ‘wealth’ depended upon the accounting convention of treating the human capital embodied by slaves as personal property owned by slaveholders. The consequence was a far different portfolio from that of the North, where immobile land was the largest investment. Consequently,

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commercial and service industries lagged in the South. The region also had far less rail transportation and internal improvements than the North (Wahl, 2007).

Yet many plantations used the most advanced technologies of the day, and certain innovative commercial and insurance practices appeared first in transactions involving slaves (Wahl, 1998). In Cuba, planters were behind the move to construct railroads (Moreno Fraginals et al., 1993). Slaveowners led in using new inventions, such as the circular saw (Wahl, 1998). What is more, although the South fell behind the North and Great Britain in its level of manufacturing, it compared favorably to other advanced countries of the time. In sum, no clear consensus emerges as to whether the antebellum South created a standard of living comparable to that of the North or, if it did, whether it could have sustained it.

Profitability and efficiency of slavery elsewhere

What of the profitability and efficiency of slavery in places and times other than the ancient world and the antebellum Americas? Much less empirical economic work exists on slavery elsewhere, although Orlando Patterson (1982) and Eugene Genovese (1974) portray slavery in Islamic societies as nonproductive.

Yet to the extent that slaves perform domestic and other chores, they free masters from drudgery and therefore confer some benefits, though not necessarily market profits. Even slaves who appear merely ornamental must provide some pleasure to the masters, or else they would go free. We can still consider slavery an economic enterprise simply because it provides more benefits to their owners – pecuniary or otherwise – than costs.

Slavery in modern times

Rising British sentiment against slavery culminated in the Somerset case, which outlawed slavery in England in 1772.1 Britain and the US abolished the international slave trade in 1807–8; Britain freed slaves in its colonies (except India) in 1833, with full emancipation in 1838. Slavery in the US officially disappeared by the end of the American Civil War in 1865.

Abolition came later elsewhere, often accompanied by a rise in other forms of servitude (Watson, 1991). Eastern Europe and Russia kept slavery alive into the late nineteenth century. In 1890, all major European countries, the US, Turkey, Persia, and Zanzibar signed the General Act of Brussels in an attempt to suppress slavery. Forty years later, an international labor convention acted to outlaw forced labor in the former Ottoman and German colonies. In 1948, the UN General Assembly declared that all forms of slavery and servitude should be abolished (Bush, 1996).

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Yet slavery in Southeast Asia, the Arabian peninsula, and parts of Africa continued well into the twentieth century (Watson, 1980; Lovejoy, 1983; Klein, 1990 and 1993). Perhaps the saddest legacy of American slavery is that the system established to supply the New World with slaves also shaped society at home. Some scholars believe that slavery was endemic to Africa, others date its origins to medieval Muslim society or the later European infiltration. Regardless of beginnings, slavery within Africa burgeoned along with the Atlantic trade – in 1600 Africa had a minority of the world’s slaves, in 1800 the overwhelming majority. The Great Scramble for Africa spread slavery further. Regrettably, the tragedy continues: Angolan slaves fought bloodily for freedom in 1961, Mauritania kept slavery legal until 1980, Nigeria still had slave concubinage in the late 1980s; and numerous African regions actively practice slavery today.

Some of the harshest forms of slavery have arrived only recently. Modern weaponry, increased population density, and mass communication and transportation technology have made it that much easier to capture and move purported enemies as well as to incite one’s allies to do the same. The classic mechanism of modern slavery, patterned after the practices of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is this: Officials in power arrest suspected opponents of the current political regime, or those considered racially or nationally unfit, and throw them into forced-labor camps to work under terrible conditions.

Unlike slaves in earlier societies, the unfortunates who landed in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps were not privately owned and traded in open markets. Rather, they served as property of the state, sometimes to be rented out to private interests.

Modern slaves consequently represent something far different than their historic counterparts. From pre-classical times through the nineteenth century, masters – including public entities – typically viewed their slaves as productive investments, as bookkeeping entries in their wealth portfolios, as forms of valuable capital. Slaves in these circumstances could often count on minimal food, shelter, and clothing, and time for rest and sleep. This was true even for government-owned slaves, because these slaves were typically used in money-making enterprises that just happened to be government-run, and they could potentially be sold to private owners. Not so for the ‘publicly owned’ slaves of the twentieth century. Because these people were ‘acquired’ at very low cost with public money and served primarily as political symbols, their masters had little incentive to care for them as assets.

To be sure, when Nazi Germany needed labor to fuel production of her war machinery, the country turned to the inmates of concentration camps. Likewise, the Soviets rounded up peasants to work on public projects and

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mineral extraction. Various regions across Africa, Asia, America, and Europe have done the same. Yet these sorts of ‘slaves’ are often worth more dead than alive. Killing one’s political adversaries makes the state that much easier to run. Exterminating those labeled as unfit ‘cleanses’ society – in a truly twisted sense of the word – and binds together the ‘chosen.’ Accordingly, modern forms of mass slavery seem far different institutions than those of earlier times.

Re-examining the economics of slavery

Despite differences between modern slavery and its earlier counterparts, slavery in any time and place cannot be thought of as benign. In terms of material conditions, diet, and treatment, slaves in some societies may have fared as well as the poorest class of free citizens. Yet the root of slavery is coercion. By its very nature, slavery involves involuntary transactions. Slaves are property, whereas free laborers are persons who make choices (at times constrained, of course) about the sort of work they do and the number of hours they work.

The behavior of American ex-slaves after abolition clearly reveals that they cared strongly about the manner of their work and valued their nonwork time more highly than masters did. Even the most benevolent former masters in the US South, for instance, found it impossible to entice their former chattels back into gang work, even with large wage premiums. Nor could they persuade women back into the labor force: many female exslaves simply chose to stay at home (Fogel and Engerman, 1974).

So is slavery an economic phenomenon? Yes, but only because slave societies fail to account for the incalculable costs borne by the slaves themselves.

Note

1.Somerset v. Stewart, Loftt 1–18; 11 Herg. State Trials 339; 20 Howell’s State Trials 1, 79–82; 98 Eng Rep 499–510 (King’s Bench, 22 June 1772).

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