https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/papers/SBIR_Paper.pdf
The paper explores the contribution of slave wealth to Britain’s growth prior to 1835. The authors compare areas of Britain with high and low exposure to the colonial plantation economy using data on wealth from compensation records. They find that by the 1830s, slavery wealth is strongly correlated with economic development – slave-holding areas are less agricultural, closer to cotton mills and have higher property wealth. The focus is not so much on slave trading, but slave owning, which was a far more profitable endeavour - the wealth generated by plantation labour was orders of magnitude larger than the trade of that labour itself. Slaves could also be used by owners as collateral, and indeed they were ideal in this role compared to other investments, creating a key source of financing for domestic capital accumulation.
To establish causality between slave ownership and regional development in Britain, the authors used an instrument for slavery wealth that exploits exogenous variation in slave mortality during the middle passage from Africa to the Americas. They found that where poor weather conditions led to longer voyages, there were fewer survivors. By linking slaveowners to the locations of their ancestors, they showed that higher mortality on voyages resulted in lower slavery wealth in 1833. The authors then demonstrate that slavery wealth and economic development are strongly correlated - areas with higher slavery wealth experienced more structural change, developed more mills and factories and adopted more steam engines.
The authors find that as a whole, Britain experienced a 3.5% increase in national income as a result of slavery, and the areas with the most wealth generated by slavery saw an increase in total incomes of 40%. Overall, they conclude that "Britain would have been substantially poorer and more agricultural in the absence of overseas slave wealth."
Sure, in the sense that it brought capital to england. All these plantations made many millionaires in england
i have literally no idea what those graphs are purporting to show
This isn't a surprise. Do you know what else accelerated the industrial revolution? Removing the largest textile manufacturer in the world from the equation entirely.
QRD?
Indian nationalist conspiracy theory that India was on the cusp of the industrial revolution and steam powered cotton mills before Britain arrived.
I expected they had artisanal production based on 1 billion workers and that it got suppressed. I was savoring that tale with anticipation
>Indian nationalist conspiracy theory
Deindustrialization wasn't a conspiracy.
>The initial concept of Indian de-industrialisation was introduced by Sir William Bentinck who acted as the Governor-General of India between 1833 and 1835.
>India was on the cusp of the industrial revolution and steam powered cotton mills before Britain arrived.
The British themselves were worried that India was going to consolidate their economic power into port cities. to begin with, the British struggled to compete with India in the areas of textiles, shipbuilding, metal export, and of course luxury goods. they also struggled immensely with Chinese presence which caused a shortage in silver across Eurasia.
the concept itself is simple. Halt all manufactured output, and pivot towards raw material and resource export. These raw materials would be manufactured in Europe instead of India, and then sold back to Indians at a cost which could undercut locals. In practice, this was a very complicated matter that ended up destroying urban centers and pushing millions of Indians into the rural countryside to work as subsistence farmers. Even today India struggles with a massive farmer population
Indians think that they were an industrial powerhouse before the British came along and killed all their industries. Their evidence is that India supposedly produced 25% of the world's GDP, as if that were remarkable for 25% of the world population. They think the only explanation for their falling percentage of world GPD is that their literally GDP was stolen by the British.
Holy cope lol
>25% of the world's population has 25% of the world's wealth
>Indians: WE WUZ TYCOONS N SHIT SIR
Those early numbers are such obvious bullshit. Can't even roughly estimate India's population in ancient times but apparently we know its GDP.
I dont believe this can be measured. Year 1000? Plz
t. thieving britisher
I love this, it makes the British conquest of India more impressive concidering how weak the British started off.
>Removing the largest textile manufacturer in the world from the equation entirely.
Which part of India? Because ""'India"" on the eve of British conquest was similar to Europe with squabbling states and the declining Mughal empire.
But people who could afford to own several slaves were already very wealthy, so this is just showing wealth correlates with wealth.
Flawed study. Their first error is taking the profits of a "slavery investment" as a whole rather than adjusting for the profit added by the use of slave labor instead of free labor, an error made by other studies which inspired this one. A second error is assuming correlation means causation, here
>Whereas previous research has largely focused on these aggregate effects, our work emphasizes the uneven impact of access to slavery investments on the geography of the industrial revolution. Locations with the greatest levels of participation in slavery investment experience increases in total income of more than 40 percent, with capitalists’ income increasing by more than 100 percent, and landlords’ income declining by around 7 percent.
Industry and wealth people in general tended to gravitate towards parishes that were at the center of the industrial and technological revolution taking place. In other words they shared a cause, as opposed to all the wealth being generated by "participation in slavery investment experience".
They end with this curious statement.
>Domestic workers’ welfare increases by around 3 percent from the enslavement and exploitation of black Africans in colonial plantations.
In the past, on a purely statistical basis, this paper would have never made it through peer review, but because of the subject matter it gets a pass.
For us on LULZ it is obvious the purpose of this study is to justify the notion posited by Frantz Fanon that Europeans are inherently and permanently tainted by slavery and colonialism, even decades after colonialism ended, even if they are poor, even if they are from a country that did not engage in colonialism, that there ought to be preferential treatment for "diversity" (people of color) to correct racial disparities presumed to be entirely due to "systemic racism".
>A second error is assuming correlation means causation
Nice grade school level platitude. Do you have any criticism for their instrument that controls for those variables?