The New York Public Library
Prisoners in New Hanover County , North Carolina , preparing road materials , 1927 .
be any different from the manufacture and sale of drugs or guns or the making of usurious loans ? Outlawing lucrative practices does not stop them ; it merely drives them underground .
After emancipation in the United States , slavery manifested itself anew in two ways . One , the so-called “ White Slavery ” scare of the late 19th and early 20th centuries , was , in retrospect , the foundation for today ’ s “ sex trafficking ” networks . The other took advantage of the loophole created by the 13th Amendment , which outlawed slavery “ except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted ,” and led to the enslavement of millions of African Americans , American Indians , Hispanics and poor whites in various prison work systems throughout the nation .
Enslaved criminals appeared in popular culture — in movies like Cool Hand Luke ; O Brother , Where Art Thou ? ( chain gangs ) and Shawshank Redemption ( convict-lease system ), and in dramatic series like Orange Is the New Black ( in-prison factory system ) and Boardwalk Empire ( chain gangs ) — but convicts never quite registered as modern slaves because of the presumption of guilt and the seeming justice of the 13th Amendment ’ s loophole .
Doug Blackmon , Dennis Childs , Talitha LeFlouria , David Oshinsky and other scholars , however , have shown that many of those caught up in America ’ s prison system complex were convicted wrongly , subjected to trumped-up charges or convicted of “ crimes ,” like loitering , deliberately enacted to ensnare young black males and other “ undesirables ” who lacked the money or education to resist .
In the world ’ s poorer corners , like Africa , Latin America and South Asia , the abolition of slavery often did not even create substantive changes in the structure of bondage , only changes in nomenclature . Slaves became indentured or bonded laborers and the ultimate owners hid behind layers of contractors , some of them enslaved themselves . As Siddarth Kara , the Director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard University ’ s Kennedy School of Government has shown , apathy and bribes keep millions of Indians in open slavery , rolling bidis ( filter-less cigarettes ), breaking boulders for construction , baking bricks , weaving carpets and so forth . Millions more , mostly children , find themselves working as forced beggars or prostitutes in Mumbai or other South Asian megacities .
Americans are just beginning to awaken to the realities of modern slavery as sordid stories of sex trafficking , especially underage prostitution , repeat themselves throughout the country . Even in God-fearing places like South Dakota , sex trafficking runs amok every year during the state ’ s huge Sturgis motorcycle rally and its muchvaunted pheasant hunting season . Non-sex slavery also occasionally makes the news , usually when illegal domestic helpers are kept under lock and key for years but sometimes when agricultural workers are discovered to have been enslaved in open sight , as in Florida ’ s tomato fields .
Most Americans are rightly upset to hear stories like those related in gripping detail in The Slave Next Door : Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today , by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter . The United States eventually abolished slavery , they learned in school , because it was beyond immoral ; it was an abomination unto the Lord and / or natural rights . How dare anyone ( except the government ) enslave anybody ( not duly convicted of a crime )!
Meanwhile , in the Ivory Towers of the Ivy League , some historians have been hard at work re-writing US economic history to make it appear that slaves were the root cause of US economic growth and development . Led by Cornell University ’ s Ed Baptist , those historians are trying to establish a case for reparations for the descendants of 19th-century chattel slaves . In other words , they want the US government ( and hence ultimately taxpayers ) to give African Americans money to compensate for the enslavement of their ancestors . Reparations have hitherto faltered politically because they seem patently unfair to taxpayers , few of whom are descended from enslavers . ( In fact , a higher percentage of African Americans are descended from slave masters than the population at large because many slave masters regularly raped one or more of their female slaves .) If the new scholarship is correct , however , all Americans are materially better off due to slavery because it induced the Industrial Revolution and so forth , so taxpayers should have no problem paying a gratuity to the descendants of slaves .
Economic historians have been quick to criticize the work of Baptist and those who followed the main gist of his 2014 book , The Half Has Never Been Told : Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism . The whole genre , they have shown , makes numerous claims that cannot be substantiated empirically , much less econometrically . Only one critique , however , has gone to the root of the matter , my own The Poverty of Slavery : How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy ( 2017 ), which shows that slavery has never , anywhere , been a net benefit to an economy because the institution invariably creates massive negative externalities , or costs borne by non-slaveholders . Slavery , in other words , is akin to a huge smokestack or a large sewage pipe . While the factory owners ( enslavers ) benefit from the production of pollution ( the negative externalities
12 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2017 | www . MoAF . org