Following Rothbard’s view of regulation, I wondered how can I apply this to slavery?
I’ve guessed, that maybe blacks were in favor of slavery and lobbied for it and this is why:
Christians wanted to enslave blacks because blacks were pagans.
enslavement acts as a subsidy to labor, favoring it above other labor.
So blacks that converted to christianity (of which there were some in colonial times) must’ve liked slavery because it helped their interests as laborers against the free pagan blacks.
Also, blacks were sometimes property owners in old viriginia, so as property owners slavery could also be considered in their interests.
But is my economic analysis off, I mean is slavery a type of subsidy? I tend to find it impossible to understand it as otherwise than a right-ward shift in supply.
The primordial labor union. Your analysis is fair, but there is something else to be accounted for. Slavery also made for much lower livelihoods than wages. So, what must be seen, is that if the individual productivity of slaves was so low that even a slave’s remuneration would be higher (considering the ‘cartelization’ of the market you speak of, that is not impossible) it would indeed have paid to be a slave.
In such case it would be the slave-owner who would be paying a very high price indeed for their religious preferences.
It is an interesting idea, if one can account for some economic interest form the slave-owners.
As consumers, slave owners were really looking for labor that was cheaper than free or indentured labor and plus they were looking for virtually any labor since in the context of early, very early slavery, the future slave-owners were desperately trying to survive and make a profit off of tobacco -slavery was generally cheaper than indentured labor. So clearly slave-owners and indeed others were probably going to profit from slavery. And as the slave occupation became more cartelized, it would become more and more focused on southern agrarianism.
As a side note, my hypothesis probably doesn’t work for carolina (to a great extent) because in early carolina history (1660s) slave codes outlawed the baptism=freedom equation.
Well, you assume that slavery was a cartelized industry, as in designed to increase the remuneration that a slave could earn if employed as a wage-earner. But if this is so, than slave-owners where actually paying slaves more (in the form of providing their livelihood) than they would have had to pay am normal wage earner: so it was either the slaves or the slave-owners who where profiting. It cannot be both, and so one must account for the reason the losing party had to go along with it.
So, just to understand what you’re saying, let me repeat what I think your theory is:
Your proposal is that black slaves in America were the ones benefiting from slavery in general based on Rothbard’s thoughts concerning regulation. Not only that, but black slaves were lobbying for slavery during that time. I believe this last statement is your own conclusion from what you’ve read and studied?
If I understand all this correctly (pardon me for being redundant for asking clarification), I would just have to ask what information you have read or discovered for the basis that blacks were arguing in favor of slavery. It seems like a leap to go from applying Rothbard’s thoughts on regulation to slavery (which I think has merit) to arriving at the thought that blacks were opening petitioning for the continuation of slavery. I haven’t read anything asserting that point is true or has happened, but I’m definitely not saying it’s untrue either. Was there something you read that professed this? If so, I’d love to read it.
It was about skin color, and the ideas of racial superiority (resulting more from the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution than from the Christian faith) that drove the enslavement of blacks by whites. Also note that it was Christian evangelicals like Willaim Wilberforce in Britain and William Lloyd Garrison in the United States that helped drive the abolitionist movements in those two places.
Both versions of the slavery story are probably true. I know from some lectures given on U.S. Economic History and from the Oxford Companion to American History that slavery was indeed enacted against pagans vis-a-vis the fact that they were pagans. Indeed, you could be freed from slavery if you were a christian. Later on, towards the late 17th century in colonial america, laws were passed to end this route to freedom.
My native ancestors were also pagans but we never were used as slaves. Your theory is broken. It’s about skin color (and physical differences maybe also).
And yet slavery has been around for thousands of years and has existed in every combination of “race” as both the enslaver and the enslaved. Was the enslavement of Christian whites by Arabs driven by “ideas of racial superiority”? What about the enslavement of Slavs by Latins? What about the enslavement of Semites by Egyptians? What about the enslavement of Helots by Lacedaemonians? What about the enslavement of American Natives by Incas? What about the enslavement of Nigerians by other Nigerians? What about the enslavement of Koreans by the Japanese? What about the enslavement of the Cantonese by the Han Chinese? What about the enslavement of Goths by Vikings?
It seems to me that slaves were taken from wherever they could be taken from without too high of a cost. The hypothesis of " ideas of racial superiority" seem, at most, to have been a post hoc rationalization, not a driving force. The enslavement of blacks by whites doesn’t seem to be so special once you consider the rest of the history of slavery. What is bizarre is that the very people who made slavery into a moral issue and tried to erradicate it are considered especially evil because they engaged in the institution of slavery. This seems to me, backwards.
Where are your ancestors from? I highly doubt they (as a racial group) have never been used as slaves.
Native ancestors? If and only if you’re referring to Indians then that is not so impossible since statistically, Indian slaves were always less in number compared to Black slaves.
But virginia actually had what seemed like a majority of slaves who were indians during the early 17th century.
For the record too, I’ve always conceived of slavery as being the regulation of several markets, 1) the marriage market (as seen in laws regulating who a slave could marry), 2) the housing market (as seen in laws regulating how and where a slave was to set up quarters, 3) general social arrangements (as seen in laws stating where a slave could worship), 4) the labor market (since slavery is a regulation of labor supply) and 5) specificallly a labor subsidy (the supply of labor is increased while the wage is decreased due to coercion).
I admit that other posters, and a study of history has started to poke some holes in #5 but I also admit that I’ve seen more evidence in favor of the hypothesis than against.
I submit to you, some of that evidence:
the existence of white slavery, taken as an analogue to black slavery, was embodied in english laws stating that idle labor was to be forcibly employed in the american colonies.
black people who achieved freedom legally were later subject to “partum-inspired” laws (a break in common law traditions) which is exactly the outcome one would expect if slavery was a giant labor subsidy -a free slave woman would probably represent a new unit of supply whom’s wages could be potentially bid up beyond the wage of slaves. If this occurred, then slaves would essentially be outcompeted, so of course it would be in their best interests to outlaw freedom -even if the slave were chrisitan.
there is some VERY indirect evidence the slaves were living in normal-to-very-high material conditions. They had the same clothes and food as northern laborers in the 1770s for instance, according to Fogel. Also early black slavery was essentially no different from indentured servitude according to paul johnson. Secondly some of the arguments for slavery (though recorded decades after the fact by) emphasized the slaves being unprotected in the wilderness of america -could this be interpreted as a call for subsidies in the face of a lower market value due to the very fact that slaves were “infant industries”?
But there are reasons against my hypothesis:
black slaves were actually paid higher at first, than white slaves or white indentured servants. They even supposedly cast scorn on whites for being so poor. This seems to show that black slaves were in high demand -a subsidy would actually hurt their interests by lowering their wages.
there were white and indian slaves, what made them different from black slaves and why would(n’t) the same analysis work for them if it works for blacks? Basically it is an analytic blind spot.
This research will be continued later but I just wanted to share this with everyone.
And it is clear from the historical evidence mentioned in my post, that “ideas of ratial supuperioty” were a post hoc rationalization, not a driving force of slavery. Simply because some used those ideas as justifications doesn’t mean they were the actual cause.