Slavery was neither central to America’s founding nor the primary source of the country’s subsequent prosperity. Yet both ideas have gained currency in recent years, making it likely that the nation’s slaveholding past will figure prominently in commemorations of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Scholarly studies offering a more accurate and balanced history of slavery in the United States are not impossible to find, but they are far outnumbered by ideologically driven treatments that downplay the institution’s ubiquity across the world and throughout history. Often the aim is less to illuminate a complex subject than to emphasize the sins of the West. As a result, what should be understood as a global evil is reduced to a single narrative: Europeans and their descendants enslaving Africans—in the Western Hemisphere generally, and in the southern United States especially. End of story.
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The reality is that slavery has existed since time immemorial. It has taken many forms—field hand, domestic servant, soldier, artisan, concubine—and has been practiced on every continent. “There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution,” Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson writes in the preface to Slavery and Social Death, his landmark study. “Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.” Ancient Greece and Rome were slaveholding societies, as were medieval Europe, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, the Islamic kingdoms, the Caribbean islands, and pre-Columbian America.
Nor were the magnitude and savagery of slavery in the New World unprecedented, despite recent efforts to slant the historical narrative in that direction.
In 2019, the New York Times published the 1619 Project, a series of essays that sought to “reframe” American history in a way that makes slave labor its defining characteristic. At the time of the American Revolution, slaves in the 13 colonies made up about one-fifth of the population. According to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s lead author, those black people “struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” Slaves, she adds, “were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.”
The problem with Hannah-Jones’s analysis—adapted for a television documentary produced by Oprah Winfrey and now taught in schools nationwide—is not its accuracy regarding the treatment of black slaves in America but its intellectual dishonesty about slavery in other times and places. It is well documented that the attributes she presents as unique to colonial slavery applied to slave societies across the world long before America’s founding. Legal codes dating to ancient Babylon refer to “contracts of sale into slavery for debt,” and punishments for rebellious slaves included “blinding” and “branding.” Children born to slave mothers, whether due to relations with another slave or with the slaveholder, were considered property of the slaveholder.
Aristotle defended what he called “natural slavery,” arguing that some people were naturally suited to rule and others to serve. In ancient Greek city-states such as Athens and Sparta, slaves were denied citizenship, slavery was hereditary, and an estimated one in four residents lived in bondage. Being enslaved by the Romans was no picnic, either. Reviewing the scholarship on slavery in antiquity, political scientist Wilfred Reilly notes that even the “Caribbean of the 1700s was probably nowhere near as brutal as slavery of the pre-Christian Roman era,” which allowed open torture and gladiatorial combat against lions and tigers. Claims like those made by Hannah-Jones and the New York Times, Reilly adds, “are only possible if we focus on Western history to the exclusion of the vast swath of non-Western brutality.”
In parts of Africa, including Egypt and Sudan, large-scale plantation slavery of the sort found in America’s Deep South was not uncommon. By the early 1700s, North African sultans had already been engaged in the trade of white slaves from Europe “for more than a century,” according to, among other sources, Giles Milton’s White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves. Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli hosted “thriving slave auctions,” where white captives “were put through their paces before being sold to the highest bidder.” They were “flogged by black slave-drivers and held in filthy slave pens.” Male slaves “were said to have toiled for fifteen hours a day and were often forced to work at night as well. The female captives were even more miserable. Dragged to the harem and forcibly converted to Islam, they had the dubious honor of indulging the sultan’s sexual whims.”
Slavery in China dates back thousands of years and was an accepted institution in Southeast Asia long before the Europeans arrived. Research shows that early modern cities in the region, including Batavia (now known as Jakarta), “had populations the majority of whom were slaves.” Scholars have described Thailand as “25 to 50 percent slave in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” and speculate that, in the 1800s, there were more slaves in India alone “than in all of the Americas,” as Martin A. Klein writes in Breaking the Chains.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire likewise predated slavery in America and endured for more than 500 years. Historian Robert C. Davis writes in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters that, between 1530 and 1780, “there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” These estimates, he adds, “make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were taken forcibly to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labor on plantations in the Americas.” A treaty between the United Kingdom and Egypt finally banned the sale of white slaves in 1885, more than two decades after Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Though the transatlantic slave trade operated by Europeans receives greater attention, the trans-Saharan slave trade—run largely by Arab traders and sending captives from sub-Saharan Africa to the southern Mediterranean, Egypt, and other parts of the Islamic world—involved an even larger volume of slaves and persisted for much longer. The transatlantic trade lasted about 400 years, while slave trading across the Sahara endured for nearly 13 centuries and was no less deadly than the Middle Passage. “It has been estimated that, for every slave to reach Cairo alive, ten died on the way,” writes Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, citing a definitive study of the subject. “Nor was Cairo exceptional. Missionary explorer David Livingstone, among others, estimated that several slaves were captured for every one that reached the Mediterranean alive.”
The historical omnipresence of slavery suggests that its existence in America 250 years ago, however abhorrent by today’s standards, was hardly remarkable. What would have been remarkable is if it had not existed.
The global prevalence of slavery also allows us to scrutinize more carefully recent claims that America’s wealth derives from the past exploitation of black labor and that financial compensation is therefore owed to the descendants of slaves living in the United States today.
The celebrated writer Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that America has an obligation to “take responsibility for our history” in the form of monetary restitution for slavery and the decades of segregation that followed. Hannah-Jones has stated explicitly that the 1619 Project was intended to spur Congress to approve reparations legislation. “My ultimate goal is that there will be a reparations bill passed,” she told interviewers. “If you read the whole project, I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations.”
Debates over the profitability of slave economies go back more than two centuries. Classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill argued that slavery was ultimately inefficient and unproductive. Writing about American society in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “generally, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populated and more prosperous than those in which slavery was vigorous.”
Most scholars agree that slavery was profitable for individual slaveholders, but opinions diverge over the extent to which the slave system benefited the South as a region and the American economy as a whole. Plantation slavery could enrich planters, while still exerting a negative effect on broader economic growth, capital formation, and society more generally.
A large enslaved population, for example, meant fewer consumers for the services of lawyers and mechanics or for manufacturers’ goods. And to the extent that the slave system devalued labor and led the white population to spurn physical work, it encouraged idleness. “The American of the South loves greatness, luxury, glory, noise, pleasures, [and] above all idleness,” Tocqueville maintained. Sailing down the Ohio River between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio, he observed that work on the Kentucky side was a “degraded” activity among the white population, while, on the Ohio side, it suggested “well-being and progress.”
Coates, Hannah-Jones, the Times, and others arguing that plantation slavery powered the U.S. economy in the antebellum era have turned to recent academic works claiming that slave labor played a major role in the rise of nineteenth-century capitalism and the industrialization of the West. These include Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013). All three volumes echo Karl Marx’s sentiment that “without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton, you have no modern industry.”
In written congressional testimony in 2019, Coates cited Baptist’s findings to argue for reparations. “As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement ‘shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics’ of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves,” Coates said. “By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America. Three billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.”
Baptist and Beckert—who wrote that “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism”—are cited favorably in the 1619 Project, for which Johnson served as an academic consultant. Their high-profile books were well received in the mainstream media, but reviews by fellow scholars were scathing, citing numerous fundamental errors. The statistic from Baptist that Coates cites, claiming that nearly half of U.S. economic activity in 1836 derived from slavery, is “demonstrably wrong,” historian Wilfred McClay wrote. It is “based on elementary accounting errors, incorrect double- and triple-counting of intermediate transaction costs in a way that greatly inflates the final figure. It should have been closer to 5 percent than 50.”
The economist Deirdre McCloskey also challenged the authors’ claim that capitalism in the West is an outgrowth of slavery. Yes, raw cotton produced by slave labor was an important commodity in the South, but the “enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles,” McCloskey wrote. “Cotton mills, true, were pioneers in some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.” Plantation slavery “made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally.” And, contra Marx, slave labor wasn’t essential to cotton production, noted McCloskey. “By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860.”
A review of the Baptist, Beckert, and Johnson books by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, took no issue with the authors’ broad claims about slavery’s legacy of social inequality and frayed race relations. “However, to agree that slavery was important and evil does not mean that it was economically essential for the Industrial Revolution, for American prosperity, or even to produce cotton in the United States.” They add that the three authors’ “new history of capitalism” makes “spectacular but unsupported claims, relies on faulty reasoning, and introduces many factual inaccuracies.”
Another way to gauge claims about slavery’s role in America’s economic rise is to compare regions within the United States and with other slave societies. Slavery was concentrated in the South, the poorest part of the country for both blacks and whites during slavery and long after. Within the South, the poorest region was the Deep South, where plantation slavery was most entrenched. That reality sits uneasily with the claim that slave labor enriched not only individual slaveholders but society as a whole. The United States has also remained highly prosperous more than 150 years after slavery’s abolition, raising further doubts about how essential it ever was to the nation’s economic success.
Comparisons abroad tell a similar story. Slavery in the Middle East lasted centuries longer than it did in the United States and involved far more people; yet the region never approached America’s level of prosperity. To the extent that parts of the Arab world have grown wealthy, it was largely because of vast oil reserves, not an abundance of slave labor. Europe offers another contrast: slavery and serfdom persisted far longer in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe; yet Western Europe has long been richer. Even today, the per-capita income gap between Eastern and Western Europeans exceeds the black–white income gap in the United States.
Brazil is yet another example of the weak link historically between forced servitude, productivity, and economic growth. The South American nation imported far more slaves than the U.S. and for a longer period. As it was in the U.S., slavery was concentrated in Brazil’s poorest region. A 2020 comparative study by economist Nuno Palma and three coauthors concluded that “the case of Brazil, where the slave economy was more intensive and more central than in the United States, shows that the institution of slavery was neither necessary nor sufficient for promoting economic development.” The study provides quantitative evidence that “slavery slowed the transition to an advanced industrial economy.” In a stinging rebuttal of Baptist, Beckert, and Johnson’s “new history” claims, the authors added:
Brazilian slavery had all the characteristics highlighted by the new history of capitalism as being indispensable for modern economic growth. These consisted of transatlantic trade links between merchants and slave traders, the use of slaves in the production of commodities such as cotton, and apparent connections between the slave economy and industrialization. Yet, in Brazil—as in the United States—the parts of the country where slavery was less pervasive performed better economically. There is no evidence that this difference was due to profits originating from the areas where slavery was more intensive.
Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to end slavery, and when it did, it was still an economically underdeveloped nation.
Slavery was a profound moral evil, but it was also a global one that touched nearly every known civilization. Singling out the United States as uniquely evil because of its centuries of forced servitude is misguided. Claims that America’s slave system was the source of its later industrial strength and present wealth are not only unsupported but contradicted by the evidence. What makes the United States distinctive—and what deserves more attention as the nation marks 250 years of independence—is the successful effort to abolish chattel slavery at a time when few outside the West questioned the institution. In America, “there was not only slavery but also an anti-slavery movement” that existed “almost from the beginning,” said the esteemed Civil War historian James McPherson. “Opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.”
