Guest post: We like to believe in the just world
Originally a comment by guest on Over in seconds.
Chipping in late, as I was away :)
The issue of slavery as a generator of wealth (which provides the ability to take advantage of ‘innovation’) has been considered at least since the 1960s.
Research is still ongoing – the initial findings of the Legacies of British Slavery project give the subject a surprisingly superficial treatment.
But I and others beg to differ – there is a lot more to say about the magnitude and direction of the ‘giant pool of money’ from slavery ‘compensation’ funds suddenly available for private investment in the 1830s. I believe a young man named David Turner is currently working on this.
With respect to the United States, a series of books was published in the last couple of decades overturning the ‘progressive industrial North vs backwards rural South’ story we learned in history class; in my opinion this is the best of these.
We, particularly the English, like to believe in the just world – that we’re more successful on the global stage because we’re just innately smarter, more imaginative, more hard-working and more willing to take high-stakes risks than the rest. But to me it seems pretty clear that we’re more successful because we’re uniquely unethical. I personally believe that has to do with Protestantism, but I’m certainly open to other explanations.
That would be British-government money, derived from taxation or borrowing, being transfered to well-off British people that they then invested in projects such as railways. Since that amounts to moving money around in the UK, I’m not sure how you can make the case based on that.
“Uniquely unethical” is a rather strong claim, given the history of depravity of humans across time. Can you give examples of ways in which the English have been “unethical” that don’t have oodles of equivalents elsewhere?
And go ahead and make the case that this “unique” lack of ethics was the primary factor in the UK industrialising and becoming wealthy. I don’t see how that is “pretty clear”.
[PS I don’t believe in a “just world”, and I’m certainly not going to claim that they were more ethical than others.]
“Uniquely unethical” smacks of the typical performative self-loathing that masquerades as virtue among the woke. We are sinners, and we must repent that we may one day enter the Kingdom of Heaven!
List of unevidenced statements in one short paragraph:
1. ‘We … like to believe in the just world’
2. ‘the English [particularly] like to believe in the just world’
3. ‘we [the English] are more successful on the global stage’
4. ‘[because] we’re uniquely unethical’
5. ‘that has to do with Protestantism’ – presented as a personal theory, not an absolute, but once again unevidenced
Side note regarding the mention of ‘Protestantism’: that is a very broad movement. At one extreme there are the biblical literalists, who believe that every word in the Bible is the actual Word of God and literally true. At another extreme there is the post-modernist Christianity of Don Cupitt. Along the way there is a very wide range of beliefs, practices and social teachings. (And no, I am not a Christian.)
I think *lots* of coal to provide energy via steam engines had something to do with the rise of Britain economically.
Better way to think of it: “We Brits think we are so noble enlightened compared to the savages (and those inbreds in the colonies), but really how much better are we?”
There’s numerous examples of Europeans coming upon locals wandering around in the ruins of great civilizations and they think “definitely must’ve been the Egyptians or Atlanteans, these barbarians couldn’t have built it” when their ancestors thought the ruins of the Roman retreat were built by giants. It was of course true that the savages they encountered couldn’t have built the great ruins, but their ancestors usually had, which is a lesson in itself.
A certain level of humility is required…
There is a review of two books concerning slavery in the Financial Times (13/06/2020):
htt@s://www.ft.com/content/945c6136-ob92-41bf-bd80-a80d94bb0b8?sharetype=blocked
Or simply Google: ‘UK economic history:slavery’, Financial Times, 13/06/2020
Here’s one sentence from it:
‘Slavery’s value to Britain is still debated, but analysts’ estimates suggest 12 per cent of contemporaneous gross domestic product — the same share today would amount to £260bn — illustrating why the courts and others hesitated to criticise an institution that determined much of the Atlantic economy.’
In one of the books, the earnings derived from slavery are assessed, and the names of the banks, universities and industries that benefited directly from slavery are given.
I recommend reading the whole thing, as well as another Financial Times article (Jonathan Guthrie, ‘Lex-in-depth: Examining the slave trade — “Britain has a debt to repay”‘, Financial Times, 26/06/2020. (Simply Google – it’s easier that typing out ‘https,’ etc.
Klaus Ronnback, a professor of economic history at Gothenburg University, is quoted. He calculated that by 1800 ‘the triangular trade alone generated 5.7 per cent of UK gross domestic product. That figure rose to 7.9 per cent when plantation receipts were added. The value of all slave-related industries amounted to 11.1 per cent of output. This was significant when the UK economy was still dominated by domestic agriculture.’
I am not surprised (I wish I was) by the immediate and reductive recourse to tropes like ‘performative self-loathing’ and the what-aboutery of ‘other people were just as bad’ – why are those who have recourse to such tropes so thin-skinned about the issue of slavery and colonialism? They mirror exactly in their attitudes the ‘woke’ attitudes they claim to despise – the two sides feed off each other. It is curious to me that those who clamour most about their respect for truth in many cases show themselves unable to accept it.
Tim,
Feel free to tell me to fuck off if this is too personal a question, but I’ve long wondered: why don’t you provide links?
From Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’ – Edmund asks Fanny about her conversation with Sir Thomas Bertram, who has ‘business interests’ in Antigua (Edmund speaks first):
(E) “Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. – You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.”
(F) “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?”
(E)“I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
(F)“And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence! ….”
It seems that many people want to perpetuate this silence even now.
But I have provided a link to the first article. In this case, it is simpler to directly Google the article rather than type out a lengthy link and ensure that you get it right, and so I refrained in the case of the second article. So in this case, it is laziness; in other cases, it is due to my general incompetence. So I won’t tell you to ‘fuck off’! You had every right to ask the question!
Just in case you’d like to know how to do it easily (i.e. without typing), the way to do it is right-click the mouse on the link and then select copy from the dropdown menu.
Then ctrl & v to copy it into your comment.
Thanks for the explanation. It’s really not hard—you don’t even need to know any html to follow Ophelia’s instructions.
And once you learn, it’s incredibly liberating! (Ok, a bit of hyperbole there.)
Thank you! The trouble is that I don’t have one of those mice that you can right-click or left-click. I shall try to work it out!
That is to say, my mouse is what is called in Mac-lingo, a trackpad.
And to with the quotation, here’s another from ‘The Satanic Verses’ by Salman Rushdie (the speaker is Whisky Sisodia:
‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’
And quite a few of them don’t want to know – except in the case of vague rumours of glory: the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, for example, remembered in story & film largely, I suspect, in order to forget the rarely mentioned and almost simultaneous destruction of a British army by Zulu warriors at the Battle of Isandlwana.
The history of the British Empire was largely missing from the history we were taught at school (and it is largely missing now, it seems). Instead, the Civil Wars, the Tudors, various wars with France, nothing about Wales or Ireland, and little about Scotland, etc.
Re: the European slave trade. There were also kingdoms involved in SELLING the slaves to the Brits. Can’t remember the source, but he pointed out one reason for late 19th century successful conquest of Africa is that British abolition of the slave trade caused the economies of places like the Kingdom of Dahomey to collapse, so dependent were they on the slave trade.Not sure if this was a contrarian take on history, the author did not seem otherwise “right wing” but….
Tim, you can use control & c to copy, just like the control & v to paste. I have a mouse, but I prefer keyboarding. It’s more reliable, at least for me.
Thank you, iknklast! I can of course copy & paste, but often it is hard to find the link to copy – at least for someone like myself.
Blood Knight #5. I do recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on the Kingdom of Benin in West Africa. Or the history of Spanish activities in South America.
All of these comments are making me realise what an excellent course this would make – a history of the causes of the Industrial Revolution/justification for current global economic inequality, from the canonical roll-call of clever Englishmen (and Scotsmen) through naturalistic, cultural and institutional explanations to the story emerging today based on new research methods, connections among disciplines and information sources. I cannot possibly be the first person to think of this (though you never know, I’ve been surprised before) – over winter break I’ll ask around and see if I can find people who have done this/are doing this, and if I do come across any good course outlines or reading lists I’ll share.
One of these new research methods is prosopography, the study of social networks – up until about 20 years ago prosopographical tools were used almost exclusively by classical and ecclesiastical historians, but since then a lot more people have become aware of the usefulness of mapping social networks in understanding knowledge transfer and the workings of power. They also help set the ‘great men’ of technology into their social context, helping us see them not as ‘lone geniuses’ but more as foci for the contributions required for innovation to happen. A great example of this is one historian’s lockdown project of linking all the named people involved in creating the SS Great Britain:
https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/brunels-network/
I’m not sure what anyone’s actually used this for yet, but it’s a unique – I think? – visualisation of the personal connections required for innovation to happen. I’d love to see more of these (but I can appreciate that they are a hell of a lot of work, and I wouldn’t wish for another lockdown just so more historians get bored enough to do this).
Thank you, guest.
A recent book I strongly recommend to everybody is ‘Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain’, by Sathnam Sanghera. It is a very fair-minded (by no means either ‘woke’, to use a term of abuse favoured by some, or an apology for imperialism), intelligent, and beautifully written.
Thanks Tim – I’ve heard this author speak, but haven’t read any of his stuff yet.
First, on the topic of Googling, useful searches could include:
How to right click on a Mac trackpad, and:
How to copy/paste on a Mac trackpad.
(Feel free to also Google “how to make an html link”.)
Second, on slavery, the issue is not really whether slavery would have featured in GDP at the time. Yes it would have. GDP is a measure of money circulating around, some fraction of Britain’s economic activity was entwined with slavery; some fraction of the GDP would indeed have been entwined with slavery.
The more pertinent question, as regards policy today, is whether that now affects GDP today, nearly 200 years downstream.
My thesis is that, in the long run, the increase in a country’s GDP comes from technological innovation (not from passed-on surpluses from labour).
Exploiting slaves does not drive technological innovation, since if one can have a cushy lifestyle exploiting cheap labour, then one has no incentive to innovate, and can just live cushily on the produce of ones slaves.
For example, if we look around the world today, the countries with large and available pools of cheap, low-skilled labour are not the rich countries (though individuals in those countries, explloiting the labour, might be rich), and they are not where the technological innovation is coming from.
Rather, the countries and indeed companies doing the technological innovation generally are paying a high-skilled workforce high wages.
I’m open to people presenting a counter-argument on this …
Thank you very much, Coel. That was very kind. I shall try those methods out.
As for the rest of what you say, I can only suggest reading, say, E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ or a history of the Industrial Revolution that deals with the treatment of workers; or look at the factory scene in Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’; or ask the average worker at Amazon how much they enjoy their work, and why Amazon and other high-tech companies try at once to break any attempt to form a labour union. Or you could read this from Encyclopaedia Britannica, on Henry Ford’s assembly line:
‘As the assembly line spread through American industry, it brought dramatic productivity gains but also caused skilled workers to be replaced with low-cost unskilled labour. The pace of the assembly line was dictated by machines, meaning that plant owners were tempted to accelerate the machines, forcing the workers to keep up. Such speedups became a serious point of contention between labour and management. Furthermore, the dull, repetitive nature of many assembly-line jobs bored employees, reducing their output.’
Unlike you, I suspect, I have actually worked – oh, hundreds of years ago – in a factory, as well on what amounted to a large factory farm, specialising in vegetables for the London market, and I can assure you that there is no necessary connexion between technological innovation and skilled work. Rather the opposite, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article suggests. And, as the Britannica article points out, such work is mind-numbingly boring and consequently exhausting. Why not do a stint at Amazon and find out for yourself what it is like?
And, Coel, you might look into the invention of the cotton gin and its effects. I know you dislike Wikipedia, but I see no reason to dismiss everything because of its provenance – in this case, you can find plenty of other sources that point out the same effects; so here is Wikipedia on Eli Whitney:
‘Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
‘Whitney’s invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States and prolonged the institution.’
About slavery and the economy – if I’m remembering the history correctly slavery was notoriously a drag on the economy and pretty much everything else besides. It made plantation owners very rich but left everything else impoverished and underdeveloped. The sons of plantations went north to Princeton or Harvard; there were no equivalents in the South. In other words, what Coel said @ 23.
[…] a comment by guest on We like to live in the just […]
@26 – have a look at River of Dark Dreams – it was incredibly eye-opening. The Southern plantation economy was in the forefront of capitalist innovation, developing many of the accounting and management practices we still use today. And of course Princeton and Harvard were beneficiaries of slavery as well:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ebony-and-ivy-9781608193837/
It could be argued that slavery ‘made plantation owners very rich but left everything else impoverished and underdeveloped’, but doesn’t neoliberal capitalism essentially do the same?
@Tim:
Quite often Tim, I simply don’t see why you think that your points argue against me, even though you often introduce them in sarcastic tones that suggest that, to you, it is obvious that they do.
Take your mention of Eli Whitney. From the wiki page you point us to, here we have someone from the Northern state of Massachussetts (where by then slavery had died out). He came from a farming family (that never owned slaves), and he worked in his father’s workshop from age 14, also taking jobs as a farm laborer and school teacher, gained a good education (Yale), was at times “short of funds”, and then to “seek his fortune” invented the cotton gin and other devices.
Why does that argue against anything I said? A better argument would be if you had pointed to the scion of a southern slave owner, who could have had a cushy life being waited on by slaves, but instead put his efforts into engineering innovations. Even if you had pointed to such a person, my argument is about broad themes and trend across nations, so there’s obviously going to be examples of individuals who don’t fit the pattern.
If, instead, you are pointing to the fact that the cotton gin “allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable”, then note which way round this goes: the viability of slavery depended on technological innovation; not technological innovation depended on slavery. That is, people would have been trying to mechanise agriculture whatever, indeed there would have been even greater need without slaves.
For example, why did no-one around the time invent a cotton picking machine? Maybe because they didn’t need to, because they had slaves to do it.
Ophelia:
You see similar observations in contemporary accounts from visitors to the South. The reported scarcity of basic things like butter paints a picture much different from that which we typically imagine.
Another non-answer, Coel, that refuses to address the points raised in the preceding comment. Eli Whitney, by the way, certainly did not make a fortune by inventing the cotton gin – any profit to him seems to have been consumed by lawsuits over patents.
Again from Wikipedia:
‘But with the invention of the gin, growing cotton with slave labor became highly profitable – the chief source of wealth in the American South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. “King Cotton” became a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern society.’
@Tim:
Perhaps why I used the phrase “seek” his forture, rather than “make” his fortune.
Actually, I addressed that head on. Here it is again, quoted from just above:
“If, instead, you are pointing to the fact that the cotton gin “allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable”, then note which way round this goes: the viability of slavery depended on technological innovation; not technological innovation depended on slavery. That is, people would have been trying to mechanise agriculture whatever, indeed there would have been even greater need without slaves.”
Since you seem to have missed it, Coel, the clear point I was making in both those comments is that technical innovation does not necessarily result, and historically has not necessarily resulted, in companies or farmers or plantation owners or whoever ‘paying a high-skilled workforce high wages’ (your words, unadulterated). Your response is, I am afraid, irrelevant. I’m afraid I am going to leave it that. You may have the last word, if you so wish, as probably you will.
@Tim:
That that was your point was not clear to me. Perhaps that’s because I had not claimed that technical innovation necessarily results in all wages being higher. (It helps to make points explicitly; I’m not psychic.)
What I had claimed is that: (1) in the long run (“long run” is important there), societies as a whole get richer owing to technical innovation, and (2) that technical innovation is not driven by the availability of pools of cheap, low-skilled labour.
And my “unadulterated” words were not that innovation leads to a high-skill, high-wage workforce (though that may well be true in the longer term), but that innovation tends to derive from high-skill, high-wage people.
Since you pretty much reversed what I said, I can be excused for not understanding your intent.
The more basic point underlying all of this is the counterfactual question, had there been no Atlantic slave trade, would Britain and the US be poorer today? My answer is “no”, they’d be just as rich.
You’re not even attempting to rebut that suggestion.