Tippu Tip - One of the most Prolific Slave Traders in Human History
- Thread starter Phenomenally Frantastic
- Start date
See?!?!?!? They did it, TOO!!!! That makes it OK!!!!!
Who didnāt know this anyway? Itās not new information.
OP doing OP stuff.
Iām sure there must be some trans person in the news he can mock today.
Iām sure there must be some trans person in the news he can mock today.
Of the over twelve million Africans forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, only four percent ā roughly 470,000 men, women, and children ā were sent to North America.
Kind of weird that central and South America got 25x as many slaves as the US, but theyāre dirt poor in comparison.
Itās almost as if something besides slavery built the wealth in this country.
Slaves were the most valuable commodity - of any kind - in the country by the mid 19th century. The investment in slavery outstripped the American investment in manufacturing. It outstripped the American investment in livestock. It outstripped the American investment in farm machinery. It outstripped the American investment in banks. Slavery, as a commodity, was more valuable than all of those combined. In the entire country. Slaves built public roads and buildings and railroads and canals across the South - meaning the North benefitted through the more efficient transport of goods and a savings in taxes used to construct that infrastructure in a united country prior to the Civil War.
Your observation that the US did this better than other countries...I'm not sure what point you think you're making. I doubt you really know, either.
OP was just informed apparently.
I will bet good money that he learned of this from an Eloon retweet.
At its height, 1860, something like 6% of all Americans owned slaves. Again, at its height, roughly 20% of southerns owned slaves.
Its a great talking point though.
Its a great talking point though.
Gee, you'd think with all those slaves they'd have been a lot more productive than the North.
I think arguing the market cap of slaves versus nascent manufacturing and banking from the hard money era sort of misses the point.
Why, with 25x the number of valuable slaves did Central and South America not build the wealth we see here?
Slavery isn't responsible for our wealth, capitalism is.
That's not the point.
The point is that it wasn't limited to a certain race or geographic location of person. It was a blight on most of humanity.
The problem is that it isn't always taught that way. But it should be.
I have no idea what you think that means. They were highly productive. They were producing an extremely high value crop and paying - literally - slave wages. Hard to get more productive than that. Had Egypt not embraced cotton just a few decades earlier, the value of that Southern crop would have very possibly brought England into the war on the side of the South.
If the South genuinely had the vast majority of capital why was the South so much poorer, and less productive than the North?
Until machinery.
Slavery actually retarded the economic development of the South.
Nearly every sector of the Union economy witnessed increased production. Mechanization of farming allowed a single farmer growing crops such as corn or wheat to plant, harvest, and process much more than was possible when hand and animal power were the only available tools. (By 1860, a threshing machine could thresh 12 times as much grain per hour as could six men. [ed. note - thatās a funny way to say the machine could do 72x as much]) This mechanization became even more important as many farmers left home to enlist in the Union military. Those remaining behind could continue to manage the farm through the use of labor-saving devices like reapers and horse-drawn planters.
The value of the slaves was headed down.
Mechanization, specifically the cotton gin, is what made slavery economically profitable - HIGHLY profitable. King Cotton didnāt exist until Eli Whitney made processing it easy. Before the cotton gin, cotton was just another crop grown in the South. There was no practical machine for actually picking cotton for 50 years after the end of the Civil War. It wasnāt slavery that prevented that development, it was the practical problems that were inherent in the job.
It was the development of high quality Egyptian cotton that wiped out the Southās cotton industry and it was the Civil War that led to the exponential growth in Egyptian cotton output.
You are correct - slavery did retard the growth of competing industries in the South but thatās because there was nothing they could do that would make the money that growing cotton made.
