>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.