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 www.MoAF.org  |  Summer 2017  |  FINANCIAL HISTORY  11