How Slaves Built American Capitalism

[Judi Lynn]

December 18, 2015
How Slaves Built American Capitalism

by Garikai Chengu

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in America and contrary to popular belief, slavery is not a product of Western capitalism; Western capitalism is a product of slavery. The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American Independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

Historian Edward Baptist illustrates how in the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Through torture and punishment slave owners extracted greater efficiencies from slaves which allowed the United States to seize control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and become a prosperous and powerful nation.

Cotton was to the early 19th century, what oil was to the 20th century: the commodity that determined the wealth of nations. Cotton accounted for a staggering 50 percent of US exports and ignited the economic boom that America experienced. America owes its very existence as a first world nation to slavery.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/18/how-slaves-built-american-capitalism/

[JonathanRackham]

1. Have the British ever been held accountable?

Didn't they introduce slaves to the New World initially?

[applegrove]

2. The slaves were the oil of early America. Unlimited energy at a very low price. Also all those big

houses in Britain and France were the result of a Caribbean sugar plantation or the like. All in all, generations of wealth was stolen from those people.

[fasttense]

3. To think a once beautiful and lush country was turned into vast concentration camps

Where millions were tortured, sexually abused, raped and horribly beaten so that a handful of greedy men could live like kings. It amazes me that the ancestors of those greedy men dare speak let alone complain about the ancestors of the abused people who made them so much money.