If one encounters the topic of reparations associated
with slavery today, one will naturally assume that it is the descendants of
slaves who are due any reparations that might be paid. Believe it or not, that is an indication that
significant progress has been made in race relations. At the time when slavery was ended by the
various countries that participated in the practice, the term reparations was
only discussed as a means of compensating slave owners for the loss of their
property. The economics of slavery and
its end are discussed by Thomas Piketty in his wide-ranging book Capital and Ideology.
The international slave trade ended over the period 1808
to 1815. This should not be viewed as an
indication of human progress. Instead of
working slaves until they died and buying a replacement, slave-owners
discovered that it was more efficient to allow slaves to breed their own
replacements.
Slavery would be ended by the English in 1833 (with a
ten-year transition period), by France in 1848, by the United States in 1865,
and by Brazil in 1888. Again, these
transitions were based on economic concerns not moral issues. The British and French had large slave
populations on islands in the Americas where the slaves constituted up to 90%
of the population. Slavery ended when it
no longer became possible to control the slaves with a handful of expats. The threat of slave revolts was constant, and
a Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) revolt resulted in abolition in 1794. Slavery lasted longer in Brazil, but
eventually it became uneconomic for the same reason. The United States was a
special case where the practices of slave domination were stable and only war
could force an end.
When slavery ended in France and England, the concern was
that slaveowners be compensated for their loss of property. The abolition of slavery also had to lead to
conditions in which former slaveowners retained access to low-waged workers so
thar further financial harm would not befall them. Why was it that the notion that slaves should
be compensated for their centuries of involuntary servitude never received
serious consideration?
Much of the abolitionist activity leading to the ending
of slavery was provided by Christians arguing that their religious beliefs
demanded that end. Unfortunately, just
as many Christians were using their religious doctrines to justify
slavery. Slavery was common in the era
when the Hebrew sacred documents were being produced, so it is not surprising
that slavery would be viewed as acceptable by the Old Testament God of that
era.
“In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, numerous Christian abolitionists tried to explain that
Christian doctrine itself demanded an immediate end to slavery and that it was
the advent of Christianity that had made ending ancient slavery possible. Unfortunately, this argument was
incorrect. Any number of Christian
bishoprics in Christian Europe owned slaves until at least the sixth or seventh
century, and this hastened conversions and abetted Islam’s penetration into
Spain in the eighth century. Not until
the year 1000 did slavery end in Western Europe, and it took several more
centuries for serfdom to disappear, while in Orthodox Russia it lingered until
the end of the nineteenth century.”
Christian abolitionist might have been fervent in their
beliefs, but that did not mean that they viewed slaves of African descent as
sufficiently human to justify integration into their white societies. In the United States, even Lincoln favored sending freed slaves off to some place where they could live alone with their
own kind. This was not much of an issue
for the English and the French because their slaves mostly lived far away from
their homelands. When Africans became
numerous in their societies it would be people immigrating from their colonial
holdings, not former slaves. Rather than
an upswelling of sympathy for the plight of the slaves, the ideology of the era,
what Piketty refers to as proprietarian or that of an ownership society,
focused on the presumed plight of the slaveowners.
“Ownership Society: A social
order based on quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non
of social and political stability.
Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
There were also secular arguments in favor of slavery, viewing
the institution as a prerequisite for the advancement of civilization.
“In these debates, many
historians and scholars of the antiquity, noticeably in the German school,
opposed the argument of Christian abolitionists on the ground that it was
slavery that allowed the other classes of society to engage in the higher
artistic and political pursuits that made ancient civilizations, especially
Greece and Rome, great. To oppose
slavery then was tantamount to opposing civilization and settling for
egalitarian mediocrity.”
This argument was waged in the context of the current era
as well. There was also the irresolvable
argument as to whether wage labor could ever compete with slavery in terms of economic
efficiency. The tenacity with which
slaveowners fought for not only property compensation but also legislation
which would ensure that former slaves would continue to be required to provide
low, below-market-wage labor suggests where their expectations resided.
Abolition passed in England in 1833.
“Parliament passed the Slavery
Abolition Act in 1833, and between then and 1843 it was gradually put into
effect, with complete indemnification of slaveowners. No funds were appropriated to compensate
slaves for the damages they or their ancestors had suffered, whether serious
physical harm or mere loss of wages for centuries of unpaid labor. Indeed, slaves were never compensated, not
under this abolition law or any other.
To the contrary, as we will discover, former slaves, once emancipated,
were obliged to sign relatively rigid and undercompensated long-term labor
contracts, which left most of them in semi-forced labor for long periods after
their official liberation.”
“Concretely, the British
government agreed to pay slaveholders an indemnity roughly equal to the market
value of their stock of slaves….Some 20 million pounds sterling, or 5 percent
of the UK’s national income at the time, was paid to some 4,000 slaveowners. If the British government had decided in 2018
to spend a similar portion of national income, it would have had to disburse 120
billion euros….The expenditure was financed by a corresponding increase of
public debt, which was repaid by British taxpayers; in practice this meant
mostly modest or average families, in view of the highly regressive tax system
in force at the time…”
The French would arrive at a similar decision when they
finally abolished slavery in 1848. They
also ignored any consideration of slaves as being owed compensation; rather
they considered explicit compensation schemes in which the slaves, as
beneficiaries of abolition, should provide undercompensated labor to pay for
all or part of the reparations for the slaveowners. Ultimately, the final bill resulted in
compensation paid by taxpayers, but with the establishment of a regime of
semi-forced labor as in the British case.
Slavery in the United States produced a much more complex
situation. While other countries had
slave colonies that were profitable additions to their larger national
economies, slavery and the cotton that could be produced by it were fundamental
to the health of the US economy. By the advent of the Civil War, the US was producing 75% of the world’s cotton, and 75%
of the material that fueled the textile factories of Europe.
“As Sven Beckert has recently
shown, it was this ‘empire of cotton,’ intimately associated with slave
plantations, that was the heart of the industrial revolution and more generally
of the economic domination of Europe and the United States. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
the British and French were still uncertain about what they might sell to the
rest of the world…”
Economic domination of a nation requires extraction from
that nation of a resource that can be used to produce a value-added product
that can be sold back to that nation at a profit. Britain had a balance of payments issue with
China because Chinese products such as tea were highly valued while little of
English manufacture was considered of value by the Chinese. Britain’s solution was to become a nation of
drug dealers. They would go to war with
China to force it to allow the import of opium produced in its colonies. Such was free trade in the British empire. Cotton would finally allow them to produce
something worth buying—or in some cases, a product they could force people to
buy.
“…but the transcontinental
organization of the empire of cotton enabled them to establish their control
over global textile production, radically increasing its scale and ultimately
flooding the planet’s textile markets during the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Cotton consisted of 60% of US exports. Cotton was so profitable in the deep south
that its cultivation superseded any attempt to have a more diverse
economy. In cotton country almost all
goods had to be imported from somewhere.
The high tariffs the nation maintained on imported goods from abroad
meant that the cotton profits went to supporting agricultural development in
the US heartlands and financial and manufacturing prowess in New England. Slave-produced cotton exports subsidized the
development of the US into a broad-based economic power.
Lincoln began his presidency hoping to contain slavery in
the current slave states and begin an extended process of emancipation with
compensation paid to slaveowners.
Slavery in the South was a stable, moneymaking operation. The ratio of slaves to whites in those states
was large, as much as 50-60% in some cases, but not near the 80-90% that led to
threatening slave revolts in the West Indies.
The system could go on indefinitely.
And if compensation was to be paid to owners at market value, the costs
would have been prohibitive, much larger than those incurred by England and
France.
“Recent research has shown that
in 1860, the market value of slaves exceeded 250 percent of the annual income
of the southern states, and came close to 100 percent of the annual income of
all the states.”
“In the South, the market value
of all slaves exceeded the value of all other private property (land,
buildings, and equipment).”
Piketty views it as highly unlikely that either side
would ever have agreed to emancipation with compensation. To put the costs in perspective, he compares
the cost of compensation with the costs of waging five years of bloody warfare.
“Note…that the debt contracted
during the Civil War—the first major federal debt in US history, stemming from
the mobilization, upkeep, and arming of more than 2 million Union soldiers for
five years—amounted to $2.3 billion in 1865, or roughly 30 percent of US
national income, which at the time seemed a gigantic amount…It would have taken
three or four times the cost of the war itself to compensate former slaveowners
at market prices.”
One should note that a combination of legal and cultural
discrimination has tended to relegate the descendants of those slaves to lower
wage areas of our economy to this day—similar to the British and French schemes
but lasting much longer.
Abolition by war left avoided the issue of reparations
for slaveowners and, ultimately, nothing would be provided for the slaves as
well.
“Early in 1865, Union military
authorities had hinted to emancipated slaves that they would receive ‘forty acres
and a mule’ when the war was over; had this program been adopted nationwide, it
would have amounted to a large-scale agrarian redistribution. No law to compensate slaves was adopted by
Congress, and the ‘forty acres and a mule’ slogan became a symbol of Yankee
deception and hypocrisy.”
One might think, given the contributions of the slaves to
the economic development of their country, that some kind of financial thank
you could be provided. Piketty points
out that Japanese Americans were ultimately provided a cash payment and offered
an apology for their incarceration during World War II. But the Japanese did not experience the
residual racial bias that Mexicans and Blacks endure. Between one and two million Hispanics, many
of them US citizens, were illegally deported (mainly from California) during
the depression in what Piketty describes as “anti-foreigner pogroms.” This racial bias is unlikely to disappear any
time soon.
Neither descendants of slaves nor Hispanics are likely to
ever receive any direct compensation from the US. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is
that they, and everyone else, never again have to labor away at poverty-level
wages. It is time for the social
contract in the US to include a redistribution plan that allows everyone a life
of dignity. Increasing economic inequality
slows economic activity; decreasing inequality increases economic activity.
It can be done.
And it should be done.
