"Slavery was and is a pathology of economics." niesr.ac.uk/blog/economics…
"Slavery is regarded as arising for reasons which have nothing to do with economics; it is seen as a social or historical phenomenon. Our standard take therefore is that the practice is 'utterly unthinkable now; what more is there to say? No need for a guilt trip.'
"But people-traders and people-owners were in it for profit. And profit-seeking is very much our core business.
"At the very least, if we want to convey a fully-rounded assessment of profit-seeking to students, there is something of a professional lapse here in our ordinary treatment of slavery. The lapse is all the more striking when one considers the duration and scale of the phenomenon.
"The simple numbers—some 12 million people were transported by all 'Enlightenment' nations to the New World over 3 centuries—do not really yield a visceral intuitive sense of scale.
"Instead, reset the numeraire. Broadly, an African man in his prime was sold at auction in the American Colonies and the United States for prices equivalent to what was paid for a median white middle class house there at the time of his sale. Those were standard terms of trade.
"Thus, with such a house as numeraire, some 12 million 'houses' were imported into the New World by the Atlantic Trade in People.
"That is almost half the number of houses in the UK today and likely considerably more than the number of houses in the UK at the time—when it was the emergent and actual global hegemon and a key global orchestrator and beneficiary of the Atlantic Trade in People.
"And that daunting number excludes the vastly greater number of 'houses' subsequently born into lives in slavery in the New World.
"To get a sense of that scale, in total, of the 12 million 'houses' imported into the New World over 3 centuries, only some 400,000 were imported into the American Colonies and the United States prior to 1860.
"But in 1860 at outbreak of Civil War, 4 million 'houses' (people) were enslaved there. Now ponder what all those parameters imply for the number of “houses” elsewhere in the New World.
Slavery was a gigantic business relative to the size of the global economy.
Slavery was a gigantic business relative to the size of the global economy.
"So, slavery wasn’t 'something bad that happened for social or historical reasons which had economic consequences'; it was 'something bad (and huge) that happened for economic reasons.'
"So, it is quite something for us to say virtually nothing to regular economics students about such an enormous and long-enduring profit-seeking activity."
