Causes of Modern Slavery
On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail for North America and set the stage for modern day slavery. Slavery has been a huge cause for problem and success in the creation of the global economy. Even though slavery is thought to be outdated and irrelevant these days, that is not the case. Slavery is still very alive in 2017 and is a very substantial part of economies in developing nations. Some of the major causes as to why slavery is still around is because of what has happened in the past 500 years. This nation that we live in today was founded on the economic success of slavery. Technological advancements, farming efficiency and manufacturing were all areas that benefitted from slavery. Looking past the benefits there were also many hardships that were involved with slave trade. Many people lost their lives, were tortured, and forced to do hard manual labor and weren’t given a choice whether to do so or not. All of this was because of the drive for money. The main goal for some people is to make money and where there is money to be made, there will be people doing whatever it takes to earn it. Slavery is not just a small part of the past; it is one of the biggest reasons for the creation of the global economy. The past success of slavery is a driving factor for the continuation of slave trade in modern times and how the global economy has developed.
Comparing modern slavery to past slavery is essential in understanding the differences and likeness of the two topics. According to the International Labour Organization, around 21 million people are victims of forced labor on our planet generating $150 billion in profits annually. To put that dollar amount in to perspective, if slavery was a company, it would the 18th most profitable company in the world. Now there is a very distinct difference between what we call modern slavery versus old plantation slavery. The most noticeable difference would be the legality of the practice. These days, slavery is outlawed everywhere because of human rights issues. However, this does not stop people from using whatever means possible to conceal the fact that they are trafficking people. The modern slave trade is mostly an “underground market” or black market that usually stays off the radar from government agencies. Slavery in the United States and around the rest of the world used to be a completely legal practice and was a very common thing to witness if you lived in those times. Slaves used to be purchased, traded, and forced to work hard labor under horrible conditions but it was still technically legal to do all of this under the law. Despite having moral and ethical issues around the practice of slavery, there was nothing to stop them. Law enforcement in the early plantation slavery days were in support of the practice of slavery and policed not only the salves but the slave owners as well. Slave owners had the duty of taking care of their slaves for their entire lifetime. They were required to provide them food, clothes and shelter while they were in possession of the slaves. According to a study by Humboldt University, owning a slave was quite expensive in the plantation days. The average cost of owning a slave in 1850 was on average between $1,000 and $1,800 which in today’s prices would be somewhere between $40,000 to $80,000. This was a huge obligation to uphold and was a quite a burden on the slave owners. In more recent times it has been found that owning slaves is much cheaper these days because the laws are completely disregarded. The average cost of owning a slave now is somewhere between $100-$500. The cost is so cheap because they aren’t obligated to take care of them like in the plantation days. They are treated as disposable after they become useless to the owners and are thrown away in the trash. Slaves are so cheap and readily available that it is not economically reasonable to take care and maintain their slaves whenever they get sick or injured. When another slave can be bought for little to no money, it becomes irresistible to a slave owner thinking about maximizing profits to get rid of the old and bring in a new body to replace the old.
Slavery originates from a time where there were no real measurements of gross domestic product or any modern forms of economic measurements. Most economic measurements were created during the WWII and great depression era as a means to determine the health and growth of the economy. These measurements were needed to create economic policies after the economy collapsed during the great depression. What we can find, is how much the products that slave labor produced impacted the finances and trade of the United States in the 1800s. The staple slogan from the 1830’s was, “Cotton Is King”. This was because it was the biggest export and driver in the US economy. Most of the success in the cotton industry was credited to cotton plantations that used slaves to produce the product. The amount of cotton that was produced was so great that it eventually led to the United States to be the largest supplier of cotton to the European world. This is where slavery directly influenced the global economy due to the fact that 80% of all of the raw cotton that was used in manufacturing in Britain was imported from America. Almost all of the cotton that was exported from America to Britain was the direct product of slave labor in cotton fields. Without these slaves, America would not have a large enough labor force to supply European countries with the raw materials that they needed to fuel their manufacturing plants. Britain also benefitted from slaves in America through the high demand for domestic labor. Britain needed people to work in their manufacturing facilities so what they were able to do was hire many of their citizens to satisfy the demand for labor in their country. More production and efficiency in British textile factories was a great factor and driver in the British Industrial Revolution. Having such deep ties with America and the cotton/slave industry caused Britain to rely on slavery to keep their production of textiles booming.
Karl Marx, famous historian and philanthropist, makes a point on how Britain relied on slavery during the 1800s:
Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
To put this into context, Karl Marx thought that slavery and the cotton industry was a very essential part of how the world economy was created. Without it, America would most definitely would not be where it is today in terms of the global economy. It helped put America on the map for the rest of the world to see. Slave produced cotton also started something that was poisonous to the Industrial Revolution as well. It was a major factor in starting the American Civil War along with other human rights factors. With the Civil War looming it caused great concern for the countries involved in global trade with America. If the slaves were to be freed the availability to acquire cotton and other goods from the America would be much more difficult.
Technological advancement is a topic that is heavily debated when it comes to slavery because some historians believe that it hindered the growth of new technologies while others believe that it acted as a catalyst in the technology industry. We see in today’s economy that technological advancement creates more efficiency and production and allows economies to thrive and grow to a larger potential. From the plantation era all the way to the modern slave era there are different points of view that suggest that technological growth was hindered by the availability of slaves and that technology was advanced because of slavery. A strong argument as to why the advancement in technology was slowed because of slave trade was because of the convenience of using humans as labor. Instead of investing time and resources into the development of new technologies, slave owners figured that they already had a tool to get the job done and that tool was the slave. A common thought amongst humans is that if there is nothing to be fixed then why fix it at all? When a slave owner saw their field being worked by slaves there would be no need for creating technology to make it easier and more efficient. If you have a slave to do your dishes already then what is the point of making a mechanical dish washer? The need for innovation and new technologies is derived from the need for making something more efficient or for solving a problem. Not trying to create new technologies or inventions was, in a way, wasting time and valuable intellectual power of humans, by forcing them to do manual labor instead. Another argument for why slavery actually hindered technological improvements was from a financial standpoint. If the slaves were replaced by a machine that would do the job faster and more efficient, there would be a sharp decline in the worth of each slave had, causing the plantation owner to lose the money that had already been invested into his slave labor force. With the fear of not being able to sell and trade slaves for what they were worth would be a reason why slave owners would not want to innovate new machinery and devalue the property that they already had. Selling off slaves to bring in new technology also would have meant that the slave owner would be losing his labor force’s political power. The 3/5 compromise allowed slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a white person when it comes to issues about population and voting. Slave owners could have been more inclined to keep their slaves for reasons having to do with power in democracy. More slaves meant more power politically for slave owners. The other side of the argument is believing that slavery created more technological advancements. The creation of the cotton gin is a huge example. With the amount of cotton that was being farmed there had to be a way to quickly refine the cotton into a more usable form.