alt Hacker News> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
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The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)
Mississippi declaration of secession.
"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
Georgia
"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”
Technology developed after Smith's writing changed the calculus. The cotton gin made wide-scale cotton cultivation far more lucrative, and drove American slavery: https://historyincharts.com/the-impact-of-the-cotton-gin-on-...
Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US
Everything you’ve described sounds economic, not cultural. Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic. And the data shows this: if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.