,
27 tweets,
22 min read
Read on Twitter
Gavin Wright (@Stanford) delivers the @EcHistSoc Tawney Lecture on Part 2 of the Williams Thesis: did industrial sectors destroy (or have no need for) slavery by the C19? #ehs2019 #econhist 
Wright: Indentured servitude could not have supplied enough labor for the Caribbean sugar economy #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Large shares of exports from the NE thirteen colonies went to the West Indies #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: abolition as a “collective learning process” rather than a one-off shift #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Rise in sugar prices was limited and brief so British consumers did not feel a substantial cost to abolition (of the slave trade) #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: big changes to the global economy 1775-1815, esp. industrial revolution technology, meant that slavery became less necessary #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
There was also a proliferation of new export markets, for both coarse and fine textiles, so slave markets became less significant #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: “Cotton was not sugar”, different work conditions, less fixed capital needed, lower efficient scale of production, “cotton would have expanded without slavery” #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: Marx was right about colonial trade in the C18, wrong about cotton in the C19 #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
High cotton prices, not Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, were the incentive to expand cotton cultivation in the early US in the late C18 #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: small farmers could have been as efficient as farms with many slaves (in TFP) for cotton production if they didn’t need to diversify their planting into e.g. food crops #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: Enslavement secured a labor supply for the two peaks of labor demand in cotton cultivation and forced women into field work, and little difference between male and female picking rates #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: Fogel & Engerman’s labor weighting for TFP calculations was wrong #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: there could have been a wheat-based slave economy in the North if the politics had been different #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Did slavery advance the geographical frontier of cotton production? Wright says slavery retarded developments in, for example, transport infrastructure that would have further extended production #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: US cotton production did not support broader development in America #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: South had poorly developed capital markets and bad infrastructure. Slave south also didn’t recruit free settlers who could have extended cotton production over and above that produced by slavery #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
South had a falling share of national income, making it a less important market for growing manufacturing sector #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: “second slavery” was not necessary for Anglo-American capitalism, partly due to adaptation to abolition as well as other factors. Slavery was a *drag* on economic development #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright disputes the claim that enslaved laborers were more productive than free labor #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: Forms of post-abolition labor were either relatively economically small (convict labor) or meaningful different from slavery (sharecropping) #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Wright: while it was not “the cause”, long-distance trade was an important contribution to British industrialization #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
Contribution from emeritus @StAntsCollege fellow Knick Harley that the northeastern colonies would have found other sources of long-distance trade absent West Indian slavery #ehstawney #ehs2019 #econhist
