Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy

Gavin Wright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2022, vol. 36, issue 2, 123-48

Abstract: The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave South discouraged immigration, underinvested in transportation infrastructure, and failed to educate the majority of its population. It is not even clear that the region produced more cotton than it would have under a counterfactual alternative settlement by free family farmers, on the free-state pattern. The grain of truth in recently popular narratives is that many northerners and business interests were complicit in the crime of slavery: routinely engaging in transactions with slaveholders, even promoting activities that facilitated slavery and the domestic slave trade. Complicity complicates simple historical moralism, but it is quite different from the notion that the prosperity of the nation as a whole derived from slavery in any fundamental way.

JEL-codes: J15 N11 N31 N41 N51 N91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1257/jep.36.2.123

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