And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.

Contrary to what most people seem to think about the past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago, he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead of working forward from first principles and he did in other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did accurately predict the end of slavery:

"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.

Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.

[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt

> It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.

Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for example, are undeniably important forces in moving the history of many regions.

>These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.

These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.

If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).

This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.

>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?

That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).

>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.

It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.

Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.