Freedom, Not Slavery, Is the Root Cause of Economic Growth -

Robert E. Wright, the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana University and the Treasurer of Historians Against Slavery, is currently seeking a publisher for his eighteenth book, The Poverty of Slavery: How Enslavers Victimize Us All. The views expressed herein are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the above mentioned institutions.


A slurry of recent books purports to show that slavery drove the development of “capitalism” (whatever that is) and hence created the material comforts enjoyed today by most people in the world’s wealthiest countries. Historian Joshua Rothman briefly surveys the new subfield in “The New History of Slavery and Capitalism” Count me among those who, in Rothman’s words, “question whether the authors of these works have an understanding of economics deep and thorough enough to sustain their claims.” In fact, I think the new studies have the story backwards: freedom, not slavery, is the root cause of our wealth.

Most mainstream historians (those who teach non-economic courses out of history departments) have yet to fully understand the fundamental or root causes of modern economic growth, which is generally defined as sustained increases in real per capita aggregate output. Although for millennia various civilizations experienced so-called golden ages, all were essentially the centers of tributary states that expropriated resources from vast hinterlands. Rome flourished, for example, mainly by stealing from captive populations, not by increasing average output per person. Only in the past few hundred years have some economies significantly increased average output on a per capita basis, i.e., by increasing productivity rather than by expropriating wealth from others.

In lieu of a theory of modern economic growth, most historians rely on narratives that stress the growth of specific salient industries or that describe sector “revolutions.” While such narratives are not necessarily untrue, they ignore the crucial fact that in the United States growth began in 1790 and continued, reversed only temporarily by recessions, until the present. The same phenomenon has occurred in some two score countries, starting with the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and continuing through the rise of the sundry “tigers” and “dragons” of the post-World War II period.

The ostensible drivers of growth differed in each of those cases. Some appeared to have been led by agricultural advances or natural resource endowments, others by manufacturing inventions, and still others by business process innovations. Moreover, reputed growth drivers changed over time. America’s growth, for example, was apparently led at times by “revolutions” in agriculture, finance, transportation, manufacturing, management, and information. If one were to catalog every plausible driver of growth in every developed economy over time, one would conclude that everything, or perhaps anything, can spur growth. The list of drivers would include enslaving others but it would also include virtually ever other economic activity imaginable, from fishing (Iceland) to corporate offshoring (Ireland) to pharmaceuticals (Israel).

Of course the notion that any economic activity can induce sustained increases in real per capita aggregate output suggests that more fundamental forces are involved, i.e., that specific economic activities are the effects of economic growth or that reputed growth drivers are merely links in long chains of causation. In the last few decades, economic historians have traced those chains of causation back to their common origin, incentives to work harder and smarter.

The incentive to work harder and smarter is rooted in what today are commonly called human rights, the right to life, liberty, and property that featured so prominently in the public policy debates that led to the formation of republican government in the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States, and the other so-called Western Offshoots. In poor countries, most people fear expropriation of their lives, liberty, and property by neighbors, foreign foes, and/or their own governments. The nations that were able to make credible commitments to protect their denizens’ human rights, by contrast, grew rich because individuals could reasonably expect to reap the fruits of hard work, innovation, and invention.

Evidence that modern economic growth is ultimately spurred by the protection of human rights abounds. The correlation between various indices of economic freedom and per capita income levels is very high. (See, for example, the Fraser Institute’s work.) Correlation is only the first step in determining causation but numerous so-called natural experiments only increase confidence in the hypothesis. North Korea, for example, is abysmally poor while South Korea flourishes. Can it be coincidence that the former has for decades been led by a series of capricious dictators while the latter is controlled by a government that, while imperfect, provides most of its citizens with what Adam Smith once called a tolerable administration of justice? East and West Germany; China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; black and white South Africa; the United States and its Indian Reservations; and numerous other natural experiments strongly suggest that what ultimately causes growth is the cultivation of human rights and not climate, culture, geography, natural resource endowments, religion, or slavery.

Once protection of basic rights unleashes human creativity, new businesses, processes, and markets spring up. Most new ideas and ventures fail but those that meet needs at a low enough cost thrive and are emulated by competitors. Sometimes that means that major resources go into cutting down forests or draining wetlands. Sometimes it means building factories or programming smartphone apps. Sometimes, the way to wealth for individuals entails acquiring, transporting, selling, or managing slaves. That doesn’t mean that slavery causes economic growth in any fundamental sense, only that slaving is sometimes a profitable enterprise. Were slaving somehow to suddenly end, enslavers would not sit on their hands doing nothing. Rather, they would find other ways to try to earn profits, just as former slavemasters did both North and South of the Mason-Dixon line.

The notion that freedom, not slavery, drives economic growth is of more than historiographical importance. Today, millions of people throughout the world toil in conditions barely discernible from those of the chattel slaves of mid-nineteenth century Mississippi, Cuba, or Brazil. Efforts to free as many of them as much and as quickly as possible are hurt by claims that slavery made America, Britain, and so forth rich. The best that can be said of slavery is that it did not prevent modern economic growth in countries that adequately protected the human rights of its non-slaves. To go any further, however, is to conflate cause and effect, or primary with at best tertiary causes.

Finally, none of the contributors to the new subfield identified by Rothman have adequately considered negative externalities, or costs imposed on the overall economy rather than the participants in specific economic activities. Like pollution, enslaving others imposes large costs on third parties, including servile insurrection, fugitive slave and other legal codes, and the opportunity costs of lives wasted performing drudge work for the benefit of others, to name just a few. With negative externalities accounted for, slavery is reduced to a brutal form of exploitation that enriches a few enslavers at the expense of the enslaved (a lot) and everyone else (a little).


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Not convinced but interested to see what others think

Sixteen hundred years ago Europe descended into the shadows. Waves of migration from Asia had brought the Roman Empire to its knees by the start of the 5th century AD. Large numbers of refugees had fled from the terror of the Huns – “an exceedingly savage” people, who dressed in the skins of field mice and bound the heads of their children so tightly that the frontal and occipital bones were flattened, distorting the shape of the skull. As waves of tribes flooded across the Danube, into what is now Germany, France and Spain, the empire collapsed. Rome itself, once capital of a mighty empire, was sacked, as Europe was delivered a death knell.

The period that followed used to be called the Dark Ages, a reference to the scale of the profound collapse that followed, though scholars these days prefer to talk about continuities between the period before the fall of Rome and the centuries that followed. Nevertheless, the decline was dramatic. Literacy levels plummeted, while building in stone all but disappeared, a clear sign of collapse of wealth and ambition; long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; there was a major contraction too in smelting work, as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times.

In fact, gloom did not envelope all of Europe, for much of the eastern half of the Roman Empire managed to escape intact – first, hanging on for dear life, before stabilizing and then flourishing. Centered on the great city of Constantinople, modern Istanbul, the Eastern Roman Empire – that nowadays we call the Byzantine Empire – included territories stretching from the Balkans through Asia Minor and the Middle East, as well as Egypt. These were rich lands that were home to major cities whose tax revenues paid for the construction of astonishing buildings like the great church of Haghia Sophia on the banks of the Bosphoros, where Europe meets Asia.

As bastions of Christianity, the Byzantine world took a keen interest in its eastern frontier, regularly fighting against the Persian Empire that dominated the heart of the world in the region linking East with West. It also controlled enviable trade routes that brought spices, silks and textiles from India, China and South Asia to customers spread out across the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean. By the early 7th century, rivalries flared up and led to a war that lasted two decades, with both sides fighting each other to a standstill – and to a state of exhaustion.

As both teetered, armies inspired by the messages of the Prophet Muhammad swarmed north through the Arabian peninsula and delivered knockout blows that felled Persia and brought the Byzantines to a point of catastrophe almost as great as that experienced by Rome two hundred years earlier. Although the Byzantines hung on, regrouped and rebuilt an imperial state that survived for another eight centuries, a new world was born.

The Arab armies took control of a region that spanned from Spain and the Pyrenees across North Africa through Egypt, Palestine and Syria deep into Central Asia as far as the border with China. Cities began to spring up, paid for by vast incomes brought from all corners of this new empire to the center. Damascus boomed, as did cities like Mosul and Samarra in what is now Iraq, and Merv, in modern Turkmenistan. A new capital was founded that was bigger and brighter than all. Known at the time to all as the City of Peace, it is today more famous by another name: Baghdad.

The wealth that flowed into the heart of the Islamic world was breathtaking. As new elites found themselves with vast new fortunes, they set about spending them on the best that money could buy. Texts were written that set out where the best place was to buy tasty figs or the finest saddles – exactly the sort of thing that today’s hedge fund managers might turn to when it comes to finding out where to buy the best cigars and the best speedboats. Guide books were written about how to entertain dinner party guests: hosts and hostesses of the time were no less eager than Martha Stewart to make sure the right sort of drinks were served on arrival (water, served with a conserve of rose was bound to go down well, one writer observed), and that portion sizes should be generous – no one likes to leave a feast still hungry, the same author advised.

Those in Europe were left behind by this dazzling world that was not just about the fine things in life. The wealthy were great patrons of the arts and of scholarship, with the result that the best minds in the world were drawn to cities like Bukhara, Balkh, Samarkand and Baghdad. Nor was religion a barrier or an advantage to success: many of the great scholars of the time prospered despite the fact that they were Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu. This was a Muslim empire that was self-confident, tolerant and generous.

Europe had little to offer in return, and continued to founder while philosophers in the east debated about Aristotle, mathematicians pushed forward the frontiers of algebra, and astronomers calculated the phases of the moon – and the circumference of the earth – ever more accurately. With no mineral resources to speak of, traders from Western Europe had little more to sell than amber, falcons and fine swords.

There was, however, one commodity that Europe had in abundance that proved to be greatly in demand in the center of Asia: men – but above all, women and children.

When we think about slavery today, we think of the horrific treatment of Africans brought across the Atlantic to work in the Americas and in the Caribbean in the most terrible conditions. But the European experience with slavery was much more extensive than the centuries that followed Columbus’s crossing west across the ocean.

As I explain in my new book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, it is not just the numbers of those who were trafficked from all parts of Europe that are shocking; so too was the impact that this had on the emergence of the western half of the continent from the darkness. Silver began to flow back into the Mediterranean and above all through Scandinavia in quantities that are scarcely believable – but evidenced by finds of silver coins that are mind-boggling in scale, suggesting that not millions or tens of millions of coins flowed out of the Islamic world, but hundreds of millions.

It was this wall of cash that prompted the rise of some of the great cities in Europe – including Prague, Utrecht, Mainz and the jewel of the Adriatic: Venice. The legacy of the slave trade will shock and surprise. But the fact that the rise of the West into the medieval period owed much to the willingness of Europeans to sell their fellow men (and women) into bondage is significant; so too is the fact that Western Europe owed its rise from the shadows to world that it was soon to come into bitter conflict with.


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The above as seen argues differently so to give contrast and also how there is a dark side to western history that fueled Islamic slavery