No one knows when slavery started, but it seems to have been a part of human civilization from the start. There is evidence of slavery in the earliest civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley in India, and China's Yangtze River Valley. This suggests slavery was integral to the establishment of large-scale settlements.
Slavery was the norm in the world until European Protestants decided it was immoral and began to ban it. Until the Protestant nations of Europe rose to power, slavery was tolerated by Christians. The Catholic Church opposed the treatment of African slaves in the New World but was not opposed to slavery. It was the Protestants who went the next step and demanded the end of slavery.
Of course, slavery was not what modern people imagine. Slaves often had rights and there were rules for how slaves must be treated. The very first law codes were created to deal with the treatment of slaves. This makes sense since if there are a lot of slaves, there is the risk of a slave revolt, so keeping the slave classes happy was always going to be a primary consideration for society.
This was true in the American South. Contrary to the nonsense version of history taught in schools and popularized through movies and television, the African slaves in North America were treated well. They were valuable property, one of the most lucrative investments in the New World, so slave owners took care of them. A happy slave was a productive and profitable slave.
In fact, slaves were much more productive than the freemen. Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the plantation owners cared more about their slaves than the white workers on the plantation. One reason for that is slavery as a form of labor was much more productive than paid labor. The slave owner was more likely to have a hired man whipped than to whip one of his slaves.
That is the show this week. It is about the economic reality of slavery in the South leading up to the Civil War. The source for this information is an old book titled, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a great work of revisionist history, a skill that we will need to hone, given that our official history is mostly nonsense.
This Week's Show
Contents
Intro
Cartoon Version of Slavery
Time On The Cross
Ten Points About Slavery
Final Thoughts
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