I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.

This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.

I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)

(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)

  • blight [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    My guess: even before abolition, the north and south had developed into economies with different structure. They were linked and dependent on each other, but slavery was largely concentrated in the south. You can't press the capitalism button more than you can press the communism button, and for various historical reasons the north had a more developed capitalist economy ready to smoothly step in and replace slavery. Slavers would lose in the short term by switching to free labor.

    Then again, slavers were compensated lavishly for their lost property, and slave labor morphed into prison labor, so the picture is a bit muddy, idk.