Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 13
Economic Growth and
Slavery, Then and Now
By Robert E. Wright
As the third decade of the Third Mil-
lennium ad approaches, about 40 million
people worldwide are enslaved. Slavery
is not meant metaphorically here; it does
not refer to people voluntarily work-
ing long hours for low wages. It refers
to individuals who are de facto owned
by other people (or businesses), human
beings who have no say about the work
they do. Most receive no remuneration
other than enough water, food, clothes
and sleep to keep them on task. They don’t
control where they live, what happens
to their children (or parents) or even, in
many cases, their own names. Many are
worse off than chattel slaves (like Toby/
Kunta Kinte from Roots) because they cost
so little, much less — in nominal terms
even — than African slaves in the New
World in the 19th century. They are, as
antislavery scholar Kevin Bales has called
them, disposable people.
The good news is that 40 million slaves
out of a total global population of 7.5
billion is perhaps the lowest percentage
figure in human history, literally. The first
writings almost all mention slavery as a
well-developed institution, so it must have
evolved during pre-history. Slavery’s roots,
in fact, probably extend all the way back
to the domestication of animals because
many of the same technologies used to
tame wild beasts were used to physically
control humans as well. Of course, in
many instances human beings can be con-
trolled psychologically far more easily and
cheaply than they can be controlled physi-
cally. A horse, cow or dog cannot be made
Illustration of a slave auction in Virginia, 1861.
to understand that if they run away their
offspring, siblings, friends or parents will
be killed, but a human will immediately
get the picture, either through language or
example.
The bad news is that 40 million people is
a lot of people, probably the most people,
in absolute terms, ever enslaved at one time
throughout world history. (It was only in
1927, after all, that the global population
reached even two billion.) But the worst
news of all is that the world supposedly
ended slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries,
when the largest slave societies — including
Britain, the United States and Brazil — out-
lawed the institution.
Of course, it was more than a little naive
to believe that mere laws abolishing such
a hoary and ubiquitous institution would
actually obliterate it. Why would slavery
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