Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, recently
declared
that “capitalism in the United States was shaped largely by chattel slavery.”
The
1619 Project
, published three and a half years ago, argued that 1619, the year the first slave ship is widely believed to have arrived in what is now the U.S., was as foundational to America as the year 1776 and that the legacy of chattel slavery still shapes our society.
But is American capitalism really based on slavery? Slavery is, after all, much older than capitalism.
The economist Thomas Sowell writes that “14 million African slaves were taken across the Sahara Desert or shipped through the Persian Gulf and other waterways to the nations of North Africa and the Middle East,” compared with some 11 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic. The slave trade existed mainly in Africa: Africans hunted other Africans, and it was Arabs who organized the slave trade.
Of the approximately 11 million slaves taken to the “New World” between the 15th and 19th centuries, 5.53 million were shipped to Brazil, 1.2 million Africans were sold to Jamaica, 911,000 to Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), 890,000 to Cuba, and 608,000 to Barbados. Far fewer Africans were trafficked to the U.S. as slaves — about 472,000.
Even the left-wing anti-capitalist Ulrike Herrmann concedes in her book The End of Capitalism: “Paradoxical as it may sound, exploitation does not make you rich. This was the experience of all colonies that relied on slave labor. Brazil remained just as backward as Jamaica or the U.S. state of Mississippi. Individual plantation owners became very wealthy, but overall the national economy did not advance. … It is no coincidence that only the north of the USA industrialized, where there were hardly any slaves.”
She adds: “So the slave trade was more of a marginal economic phenomenon, as cynical as that sounds, and cannot explain why capitalism emerged.”
Benjamin Franklin wrote that importing foreign slaves could only weaken a state and its economy. David Hume and Adam Smith arrived at similar conclusions in their major works. The masterminds of capitalism had criticized slavery not only with moral but also with economic arguments.
Adam Smith wrote in opposition to slavery in his major work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. His attacks on slavery are framed in economic, not moral, terms. He reckoned that it would be extremely difficult for slaveholders ever to be able to exercise sympathy with their slaves since doing so would force a recognition of their own wickedness.
Instead, he focused his efforts on arguing that slavery was an economically unfeasible system, far more expensive than using free labor. Although slave labor appears to be the cheapest form of labor because it involves only the basic maintenance of the slave’s physical existence, it is, in fact, the most expensive form of production, argued Smith, probably the best-known mastermind of capitalism. For, the slave must necessarily be interested in eating as much as possible and working as little as possible. Free workers, who are paid a wage, are in fact much more productive than slaves.
Another popular thesis among anti-capitalists today is that capitalism is primarily rooted in colonialism. Colonial wars are blamed on capitalism, even though capitalism has been most successful in the very countries that were least active in terms of colonial expansion. North America or the United States were, to use the language of the anti-capitalist critics of colonialism, not “perpetrators”; they were themselves initially among the victims of colonialism. Its own colonial activities played a completely subordinate role in the U.S. and its economic development.
So capitalism and the success of the United States do not have their roots in slavery. The opposite is true: Slavery, which had existed for 5,000 years, came to an end with the emergence of capitalism about 200 years ago. The success of capitalism in the United States is not based on slavery, but on the abolition of it.
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Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and author of the book
In Defense of Capitalism
.
