The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes

  Every day’s sail cost lives—no slave ship without its escort of sharks. So slavers preferred to land and sell their cargo in the eastern islands—the sooner the better—and charged a premium in the Greater Antilles. Slave ships announced themselves for miles downwind by their stench, which never left them, even after the slaves were unloaded, even after the ship had left the trade. Survivors arrived so sick, weak, terrified, and disheartened (“fixed melancholy”)—the blacks were convinced that the white man wanted to eat them—that many succumbed shortly after in the course of the “seasoning” process.

  Only commercial interest protected the slaves: the trader did not want to lose valuable stock. The crew, whose own mortality rates were about as high as the slaves’, had every reason, olfactory to begin with, to keep the vessel shipshape and clean. We hear of some vessels that made the trip without losing anyone, so it could be done. We are also told that some countries shipped better than others. The Dutch were said to be the best, with specially built vessels that had more spacious quarters below deck and even cowls to draw in air for ventilation. Some slavers packed tight, knowing that more would die but figuring to maximize the number delivered. Others packed loose (less tight), on the theory that it paid to buy fewer slaves but bring more of them to port. But it was hard to deal kindly, if only because a slave ship’s atmosphere reeked of fear and hate.

  Once on land, the slave was sold and, after a period of “seasoning,” set to labor. The seasoning, a selection process, weeded out the weak and tamed the rebellious. Flogging did for persistent offenders, expendable as labor and useful as bad examples. Those who ran away were often pursued and returned by their fellows, who otherwise had to make up for labor lost and stood to gain by collaboration. Like other such oppressive systems, slavery rested in part on cooperation from the victims.

  The work itself, toilsome and tiresome, was designed for some efficiency (coordinated gang labor), but also for monotony and stultification. The aim was to not stimulate the mind and hand, but rather to keep these creatures dull and docile. When speed mattered, as at harvest time, the slaves were whipped to the task. Master and overseers thought the blacks no better than brutes, and used stick and lash freely, sometimes so freely as to maim and kill. For good material reasons, pregnant women were exempted from beating until after delivery; the mother was then expected to work in the field with the baby on her back. The law stipulated fines for killing a slave, greater of course for someone else’s slave than one’s own, but since correction was always legitimate, a brutal master had little difficulty escaping penalty.

  And so on and on in a ceaseless round of torment and humiliation. The occasional humanitarian masters were far outnumbered by others who saw them as a danger to society and wealth. Nor did good masters last forever: death, departure, a change of manager, and the bearable could become unbearable. Slave societies could not afford to encourage kindness and leniency. On Barbados, Quakers were fined heavily for bringing blacks into their churches, thereby according them a measure of humanity and an unwarranted sense of sabbath. Rest? Rest was for people who did not have to work.

  The demographic data tell the story. Caribbean slaves died faster than they reproduced.

  The significance of sugar cultivation for the development of an Atlantic (intercontinental) economy and the industrialization of Europe has long been debated. At the simplest level, some have argued—most prominently Eric Williams—that slave trade profits and the exploitation of slave labor watered the garden of a nascent capitalism, or, to use another metaphor, “fertilized the entire productive system of the country.”12 On a more complex level, the reasoning is Adam Smithian: “The slave-based Atlantic system provided England with opportunities for the division of labor and for the transformation of economic and social structures….”13

  The Williams thesis has drawn fire and praise, for good and bad reasons. Initial response was largely negative, as might have been expected; but this “almost monolithic opposition has been challenged in recent years by new research, analysis, and interpretation.” Some of this reaction reflects “the intellectual and moral ferment generated by the revolt against colonialism and the rise of new nations and the civil rights crusade, together with the bitter memory of the slave trade and slavery.”14 The aim, as for Williams himself, is to remind complacent, empire-proud Britons of their debt to Africa. If Britain made of itself the “first industrial nation,” it did so on the whiplashed backs of its black slaves.15

  Critics of Eric Williams have been put off by his materialist (Marxist) premises: he reduces everything, they say, to economic motives and interests.16 True enough; but after all, the planters were in it for the money. More cogent have been the empirical attacks on Williams: historians have tried to calculate the gains from slaving and find it far from a bonanza. Some voyages did prove extremely profitable; others were a dead loss, including the ship. One estimate gives the rate of return as comparable to that in other trades, averaging less than 10 percent. Variance (risk) was greater, but this was presumably encouragement as well as discouragement.17 Not everyone would agree. One critic finds this 10 percent figure low because it counts too few slaves transported and prices them down by more than a quarter.18 Even so, these gains were simply not big enough in total, let alone that part that went back into trade and industry, to alter the path of British development. As the same critic recognizes.

  But the slave trade was only part of a larger complex—what used to be known as the triangular trade(s) and is now called the Atlantic system. Slave labor made high-intensity sugar cultivation and refining possible. The sugar (and such derivatives as rum and molasses) generated in turn its own profits, nourishing both planters and the merchants who sold the sugar and financed the plantations, while providing tea and coffee drinkers and other caffeine addicts with the illusion of nourishment.19 The planters in turn bought food for themselves and their slaves (because they were unwilling to sacrifice to food cropland that could be used for cane). Some of this food came from Europe; an increasing proportion from the settler colonies of North America. They also bought manufactures: cheap cotton textiles and high-fashion silks; copper vessels for boiling shed and still; iron, nails, guns; and machines and parts for the mill. Meanwhile British producers were turning out trade goods to exchange for slaves in Africa. All of this was a whole, and slavery a crucial part. The effect was to stimulate both agriculture and industry, increase wages and incomes in Britain, promote the division of labor, and encourage the invention of labor-saving devices.20

  From this holistic perspective one does not have to rest the argument (for the importance of slavery to industrialization) on the profits (not nearly so great as popularly believed) and spending of those who bought, sold, and used slaves. To be sure, much of this money did accrue to Britain, and some of it found its way indirectly into manufacturing. Yet it constituted a minor addition to industrial capital. Absentee planters tended to put their fortunes into land, status, and country living. (Their incomes also suffered badly by their absence from production and management.) Merchants were another matter, and some of them did invest in industry; but they were the exception among merchants and more so among industrialists.

  On the other hand, the increase in the size of the market made a difference. (We are not talking profit here but volume.) Africans and Americans wanted products made by repetitious techniques that lent themselves to mechanization. Take cotton. An infant industry at the beginning of the eighteenth century, British cotton was inadvertently protected by the so-called calico arts, directed against Indian goods; and although it was still far behind wool in the middle of the century when inventors first tried to mechanize spinning, it was much bigger than before and rising fast, in part on the strength of sales to the plantations. So, when wool proved difficult, the inventors tried cotton; and they succeeded.

  The question still remains whether the Atlantic system played a decisive role in stimulating this revolutionary change; or to put it in the contr
afactual terms currently popular among economic historians, whether the Industrial Revolution would have taken place without it. The answer, I think, is clearly, yes, it would have. The crucial changes in energy (coal and the steam engine) and metallurgy (coke-smelted iron) were largely independent of the Atlantic system; so was the attempt initially to mechanize wool spinning.

  But without slavery, industry would have developed more slowly. That in itself is not a strong statement. One could say that of any increment of demand: more is better than less. The operative question is, how much more slowly? Here one has to look at industrial exports as a component of demand and Atlantic exports as part of all. Viewed statically, that is, as a series of still photos, the export market was substantially smaller than the home market; and sales to America, an even smaller part of home market plus the traditional export markets in Continental Europe. Viewed dynamically, however, like a motion picture, exports were growing faster than home demand, and Atlantic exports much faster than those to European buyers. They mattered. In the words of Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman: “It would be hard to claim that [widening of the market owing to plantation profits was] either necessary or sufficient for an Industrial Revolution, and equally hard to deny that [it] affected its magnitude and timing…. Had all emigration to the Western Hemisphere been voluntary and none coerced, the British economy and its North American colonies would have developed more slowly.”21

  The question remains, then, how much more slowly? But that’s about it.

  (Of course, that will not be the end of the story, because other ideological positions are riding on this kind of historical debate. Third World countries and their sympathizers want to enhance the bill of charges against the rich, imperialist countries, the better to justify not only recriminations but claims for indemnity. For the rich, imperialist countries, honor and self-esteem demand denial. This argument about the effects of slavery will go on indefinitely, because it is not susceptible of factual settlement and is a proxy for other issues.)

  The Sugar Plantation as Hacienda22

  The Spanish were never important players in the sugar trade. They had quicker ways to get rich, and when they did turn to sugar, they saw it essentially as a material basis of status and lifestyle. They never understood, as the English planters did, the advantages of specialization and division of labor, of the integration of sugar plantations as production units into a larger economic system.

  Sugar cane came early to New Spain. Already in 1524, just a few years after the capture of Tenochtitlan and overthrow of the Aztecs, Hernan Cortés was growing cane and building a mill (ingenio) near Vera Cruz. (In that sultry sea-level plain, wheat and maize grew poorly, and the Spanish were quick to see the potential for semitropical crops.) Others followed suit, and soon Indians were growing cane to sell to the mills. In 1550, the Spanish crown recognized the possibilities and ordered the viceroy of New Spain to grant land to would-be sugar cultivators and mill operators. By 1600, there were over forty mills in the country, representing a substantial industrial as well as agricultural investment. These mills were small units (trapiches), using animal power and even manpower (trapichillos a mano); or larger, water-driven ingenios, which accounted for by far the greater part of output. One of the largest of the mills, Santisima Trinidad in Jalapa, had seven boilers and two purging houses. It employed more than two hundred African slaves, was valued at 700,000 pesos, and netted 40,000 gold pesos a year.

  In the beginning, the sugar estates tried to use Indian labor, and the fact that some Indians voluntarily cultivated cane on their own lands would indicate that they had no distaste for this crop; on the contrary. But there is cultivation and cultivation, and the whole point of the plantation economy was to extract a maximum of output by the imposition of long hours and infernal rhythms, driving labor to the point of exhaustion. For a time Indians and blacks were used indifferently in field work and the mill, but the African proved far more productive because more resistant. Trade wisdom had it that one black equaled four Indians. Many Indians simply collapsed and died, so many that the Spanish crown issued decrees in 1596 and 1599 prohibiting the use of Indians in the mills. This created problems at harvest time, and planters petitioned for emergency exemptions to press indios de socorro into service, but in November 1601 Philip III prohibited the use of Indians in any plantation activity. From then on, Mexican sugar was a slave industry.

  The brutalities perpetrated by these plantations and ingenios can only be explained by the assumption that blacks were seen as no better than inanimate pieces of equipment, to be used up and replaced as needed, or as fuel to be consumed in the fires. Work during the grinding season ran around the clock. Overseers and drivers imposed near-continuous toil; adult males worked twenty hours a day. Food was typically provided by the master, but some masters felt no obligation to feed their hands. Some gave the slaves a free day on Sunday to work their plots and gather food for the week; others simply left their slaves to fend for themselves. In general the masters had more care for their animals than for their slaves, resting them as needed—not presumably because of love for animals, but because these dumb creatures would simply stop where a slave, who had the mind and imagination to fear worse, would work on.

  It goes without saying that such mistreatment aroused resistance, both passive (suicide, abortions, and infanticide) and active (sabotage, murder, flight to a life of brigandage). Suicide took a variety of forms, but one of the more common was eating dirt instead of food. The whites took most sabotage for accident; they thought the black too dull to imagine such tricks. This did not deter masters from making slaves pay for mistakes, or others pay, in flesh and blood. How else teach these brutes to be careful? In the meantime, fugitives (cimarrones) were as ferocious and cruel as their masters had taught them and as reasonable expectations of white punishment led them to apprehend, to the dismay of the white population. Not good for industry.

  The largest Spanish sugar plantations were self-sufficient domains, very much like medieval manors. They grew food, kept herds, built chapels for the cultivation of piety and pursuit of salvation, sometimes even wove their own clothing for slaves and tenants. The master and family lived a life of flamboyant luxury, as though to shut out the pain and misery around them with a silk and lace curtain. Contrast the single-minded specialization of the English sugar islands, which left so little land for food production that it had to come from the North American mainland or even Europe. Textile manufacture would have been out of the question. And by the eighteenth century, the last thing most British planters wanted was to spend their days on the plantation. That was for attorneys and stewards. One lived and enjoyed life in England. Call it division of labor, of an inefficient kind.

  Meanwhile the attorneys and stewards got rich, but they lived shorter lives.

  9

  Empire in the East

  Portugal is a small country of moderate fertility. In the fifteenth century its population numbered about 1 million and its chief products and exports consisted of wine (port and, increasingly, madeira—rich, head-turning beverages) and, rising fast, cane sugar. Had the Portuguese of that era been able to anticipate the now classical analysis of comparative advantage by David Ricardo, they would have continued on this sensible path, minding their own business and trading their natural produce for the manufactures of other lands. Instead, they jumped the traces of rationality and turned their land into a platform for empire. Portugal’s far-flung network of dominion would come to stretch three quarters of the way around the world, from Brazil in the west to the Spice Islands and Japan in the Far East.

  Such a leap beyond sense and sensibility is not unknown in history. We shall see several examples later on; and indeed it is precisely this kind of unreasonable initiative that endows history with uncertainty and defeats prediction. But the Portuguese expansion is particularly surprising, for Portugal had neither people nor means. Its population was too small to send large numbers abroad; indeed one reason why Portugal was
so quick and eager to import slaves from Africa was to make up for labor scarcity at home. Its material resources, specifically its ability to build and arm oceangoing vessels, were limited. This was a lightweight going up against heavies.

  The Portuguese achievement testifies to their enterprise and toughness; to their religious faith and enthusiasm; to their ability to mobilize and exploit the latest knowledge and techniques. No silly chauvinism; pragmatism first. They drew in outsiders for their money, know-how, and labor; used slaves as workers and occasionally as fighters; married women of every race and more than one at a time. They had no room for Portuguese women on these long voyages, although sometimes they sent out a few orphans, who could not say no. Like the men, these few white women did not do well in pestilential climes: childbirth, for example, was typically a death sentence for both mother and babe. Miscegenation worked better: the men bought and enjoyed female slaves of color by the dozen—as though to beget a new nation from their loins.

  Their one emotional outlay was piety. The Portuguese took priests and friars with them on every vessel, for their own safety and salvation (the power of prayer and sacrament); for the propagation of the faith among infidels and pagans; and as salve to their own conscience. These men of God legitimated and sanctified greed.