Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: James Oakes on the 1619 Project (5) - Economics of slavery and claims of originality

James Oakes has been looking for a while at the complications question of the economics of slavery and its relation to the larger capitalist economy in the US and the world at that time. He wrote a fascinating 2003 essay on the argument made by classical economists that slavery was inefficient, noting that anti-slavery critics including the Republican Party made the argument that slavery was holding back the development of the US economy.4

And he addressed a thorny question: “But there was a problem. If slave labor was so inefficient, why did the slave economy grow so dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century?” In fact, slavery continued to be massively profitable to the slaveowners.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/confederate-heritage-month-april-1ea