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  4. Spring 2022
  5. Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy

Journal of Economic Perspectives

ISSN 0895-3309 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7965 (Online)

Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy

  • Gavin Wright
Journal of Economic Perspectives
vol. 36, no. 2, Spring 2022
(pp. 123–48)
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Abstract

The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave South discouraged immigration, underinvested in transportation infrastructure, and failed to educate the majority of its population. It is not even clear that the region produced more cotton than it would have under a counterfactual alternative settlement by free family farmers, on the free-state pattern. The grain of truth in recently popular narratives is that many northerners and business interests were complicit in the crime of slavery: routinely engaging in transactions with slaveholders, even promoting activities that facilitated slavery and the domestic slave trade. Complicity complicates simple historical moralism, but it is quite different from the notion that the prosperity of the nation as a whole derived from slavery in any fundamental way.

Citation

Wright, Gavin. 2022. "Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 36 (2): 123–48. DOI: 10.1257/jep.36.2.123

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
  • N11 Economic History: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
  • N31 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
  • N41 Economic History: Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
  • N51 Economic History: Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
  • N91 Regional and Urban History: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
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