“It’s not okay to be white” is more effective messaging than “It’s okay to be white”.

Heh. Let’s do it.

You’re correct that looks matter most. In the tinder era, it’s all that matters.

You made a very interesting point but the Slavic underclass was not biologically subhuman. The American negro is biologically inferior to other races. His ‘underperformance’ is due to lower IQ and behavioral differences with the rest of mankind.

Thanks for replying! I’ve also been thinking on this matter on and off for a while now.

The average Albanian has the average IQ of a US Negro (different figures are available, but it’s always around 80+). https://secret.travel/blogpics/2016.05-AL-Tirana/LR2016.05-AL-Tirana-31.jpg

BTW excellent dispatches right now being written from there by Mr. Dinh.
https://www.unz.com/author/linh-dinh/

Likewise Montenegro, charming little Slavic Orthodox place on the Adriatic, has the same average IQ.
Bosnia.

Iran and Pakistan are also there. Sri Lanka has an average IQ of 79, and is an absolutely splendid little place.

It is perhaps impossible to contribute anything serious to modern civilization with an average IQ around 80, but it’s more than possible to maintain a normal basic level of civilization circa 1970.

This is IQ-wise. Now let’s see behavior-wise.

If we look at the homicide data for sub-Saharan Africa, then in places in which there’s no actual war or famine, which today thankfully means the majority of the continent, we’ll see that the only African blacks who behave like US blacks are the South African blacks.

They too are surrounded by the crumbling remains of the best infrastructure on their continent, they too try to convince themselves “I built this”, and they too are constantly encouraged to spend their lives not taking responsibility, lashing out, and blaming the remaining 10% whites for everything.

And getting back to Russia, here is their eruption into South Africa/Guatemala levels of homicide, between the collapse of the USSR and Putin’s system retaking control.
It doesn’t even matter if the more peaceable levels are the “natural state” and the explosion of violence was an “aberration”, or if the violence is the “natural state”, and the peaceable levels are “suppression”. What matter is that either way it is possible to control it, when there is political will. And when this happens, it takes about a single generation to fix things.

So we’ve got:
1) US black IQ level countries doing OK
2) Most African blacks being less violent (in peacetime) than South African and US blacks
3) The post-Soviet example of the reality of halting and reversing the slide into Mad Max

The thug subclass of the US Negro is no doubt “subhuman” in the sense of dimwit sadistic scum, but white English Chavs, Slavic gopniks, and almost every society has a class of subhuman sadistic dimwits. Sometime this class overlaps with a specific ethnicity (just like in some place specific professions also overlap with specific ethnicities–taxi drivers, shopkeepers, bankers etc), and sometimes it goes across ethnic lines and is truly a “socioeconomic class” phenomenon.

Thus, the US Negro may have severe hardwired limitations concerning cognition and processing speed, but these limitations are also present in South East Europe and a bunch of other countries which are either doing fine, or on the verge of doing fine. Especially if, like Cuba and Iran, certain world powers give them a break.

So from the IQ point of view, having a US Negro chunk of the population is equal to having a South Slavic or Persian or Cuban chunk of the population.

From the impulsivity and violence point of view, this is more a question of the environment. In the “normal black African” places, they’ve got a functioning cultural substrata (family, neighborhood, village, church) community social structures, which in the west have been dismantled, and replaced either with made up “identity groups” or with prison gang culture.

This organic substrata is one half of what keeps sadistic dimwits in check. The other half is an external structure of law and order enforced by state institutions.

Additionally you’ve got the informational media context: does TV and other media encourage subhuman behavior in the relevant demographic group, or does it discourage it?

Upon the collapse of the USSR, you had the perfect storm:
1) the organic social substrata had been dismantled by the Soviet state, which took upon itself these functions, but then collapsed, leaving a barren landscape
2) the external institutional enforcement of law and order became for a while almost non-existent due to general demoralization, disorganization, and corruption
3) the media environment focused on building up the image of the heroic gangsta

It took Putin some time to be able to quietly reverse all three: to plan the seeds of new organic substrata; to reorganize the law and order enforcement; and to get the media to stop celebrating antisocial behavior.

Also, concerning blacks, in England, for example, there is still no concentrated push that expecting blacks to do well in school is “racist”, thus they do way better than US blacks.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/a-to-c-in-english-and-maths-gcse-attainment-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest

Right now, globohomo maintains US blacks in an artificially amplified copy of the 1990s Russia situation: encouraging them to have no organic social structures aside from gang such; discouraging law and order to control them; celebrating everything antisocial and immoral.

The moment this starts getting reversed, the US blacks will begin gradually piping down, and ten years later will be just boring assholes. But until this happens, they will be a lethal tool for their handlers.

I admit Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the Russian criminal class perplexed me when I read his books but now I see the same thing happening with America’s own ‘WHITE’ underclass as their futures are mortgaged to sustain an artificial negro middleclass.

Oh absolutely. Globohomo will gladly turn all “badwhites” into demoralized degenerates, and are already hard at work. Again, as Russia’s history shows, both collapse and rebuilding depends on who is in control of society.

You made a very interesting point but the Slavic underclass was not biologically subhuman. The American negro is biologically inferior to other races. His ‘underperformance’ is due to lower IQ and behavioral differences with the rest of mankind.

I admit Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the Russian criminal class perplexed me when I read his books but now I see the same thing happening with America’s own ‘WHITE’ underclass as their futures are mortgaged to sustain an artificial negro middleclass.

How about a T-shirt that says Jewish Lives Matter?

Jewish Lives Matter More

or

Only Jewish Lives Matter to God

Why is it “economic nonsense” to you?

Because I did not follow your link before reacting last time.

Following the link, I retract my comment.

“… is written in fairly competent American English style, but makes economic nonsense as far as I can tell. Many words, little reason.”

Exactly what do you disagree with. You are making assertion with little to back it up. Why is it “economic nonsense” to you?

His death only mattered because it exposed the worthlessness of negro lives. Without purpose or meaning. They exist, die and accomplish nothing during their time on earth. Only their gravestones mark their place.
This bitter reality is what makes the cry Black Lives Matter! a mockery of the truth that black lives are utterly irrelevant to the story of mankind.

This was true for the vast majority of Russians (serfs, illiterate animal cunning free peasants, and city underclass).

To this day the Russian gangsta culture is equal to, if not more massive and ingrained into society, than the Negro and Latino prison culture.https://krot.info/uploads/posts/2021-03/1615567582_39-p-tatu-ot-zvonka-do-zvonka-41.jpg

Not to forget that Slavs were the original slave class for everyone else, before they learned the hard way that no you don’t just mind your own business and expect everyone else to mind theirs.

originally “Slav” (see Slav); so used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.
The oldest written history of the Slavs can be shortly summarised–myriads of slave hunts and the enthralment of entire peoples. The Slav was the most prized of human goods. With increased strength outside his marshy land of origin, hardened to the utmost against all privation, industrious, content with little, good-humoured, and cheerful, he filled the slave markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It must be remembered that for every Slavonic slave who reached his destination, at least ten succumbed to inhuman treatment during transport and to the heat of the climate. Indeed Ibrāhīm (tenth century), himself in all probability a slave dealer, says: “And the Slavs cannot travel to Lombardy on account of the heat which is fatal to them.” Hence their high price.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave
https://www.rulez-t.info/uploads/posts/2010-08/1280751268_gop-11.jpg
It is completely possible to create a more or less normal nation out of such initial biomass. You just need to constantly, relentlessly, maintain a barrier of law and order against the ones that choose the gangsta side, and to promote constant patriotic military education for youths.

As opposed to aggressively encouraging a culture of grievance and dependency and not being responsible for your actions and choices.

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/yi/yi16.pdf

Take a look at constant 1993 dollars figures for blacks. They more than double from 1950 to 1970. Then the plateau hits for blacks, but not whites. Median Blacks in 1993 earned less than 1970. Median whites earned 3% more in 1990 than 1970 in constant dollars.

None of those are war years. Black economic progress ceased in 1970. The reasons include your cited problems, and economic competition from Latino and Asian immigrants, who started showing up in big numbers with a lag after 1965.

Your source’s last paragraph, beginning with …

The income generated by this “export sector” was a major impetus for growth not only in the South, but in the rest of the economy as well….

… is written in fairly competent American English style, but makes economic nonsense as far as I can tell. Many words, little reason.

It looks as though the writer were trying to marshal concepts from various sources he had skimmed but did not understand.

The highest period of black prosperity was during both World Wars. Large numbers of whites were conscripted, and blacks that were drafted overwhelmingly served in non-combat roles. This is what caused “The Great Migration”.

When European and Asian economies returned to producing, the US edge in industrial production declined precipitously before 1965. The decline in black social capital was already noticable before mass immigration, which was based on a foundation of unionized heavy industry.

“And, in terms of developing the US economy, the protective tariff was the key factor, not cotton”

For aspiring Northern businesses, import duties played an integral role. But Cotton assuredly was a driving force, a symbiotic relationship that bound North and South.

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war

No one seriously doubts that the enormous economic stake the South had in its slave labor force was a major factor in the sectional disputes that erupted in the middle of the nineteenth century. Figure 1 plots the total value of all slaves in the United States from 1805 to 1860. In 1805 there were just over one million slaves worth about $300 million; fifty-five years later there were four million slaves worth close to $3 billion. In the 11 states that eventually formed the Confederacy, four out of ten people were slaves in 1860, and these people accounted for more than half the agricultural labor in those states. In the cotton regions the importance of slave labor was even greater. The value of capital invested in slaves roughly equaled the total value of all farmland and farm buildings in the South. Though the value of slaves fluctuated from year to year, there was no prolonged period during which the value of the slaves owned in the United States did not increase markedly. Looking at Figure 1, it is hardly surprising that Southern slaveowners in 1860 were optimistic about the economic future of their region. They were, after all, in the midst of an unparalleled rise in the value of their slave assets.

…

The income generated by this “export sector” was a major impetus for growth not only in the South, but in the rest of the economy as well. Douglass North, in his pioneering study of the antebellum U.S. economy, examined the flows of trade within the United States to demonstrate how all regions benefited from the South’s concentration on cotton production (North 1961). Northern merchants gained from Southern demands for shipping cotton to markets abroad, and from the demand by Southerners for Northern and imported consumption goods. The low price of raw cotton produced by slave labor in the American South enabled textile manufacturers — both in the United States and in Britain — to expand production and provide benefits to consumers through a declining cost of textile products. As manufacturing of all kinds expanded at home and abroad, the need for food in cities created markets for foodstuffs that could be produced in the areas north of the Ohio River. And the primary force at work was the economic stimulus from the export of Southern Cotton. When James Hammond exclaimed in 1859 that “Cotton is King!” no one rose to dispute the point.

It’s interesting how the manosphere went from frustrated guys using tools to pick up and fuck as many sluts as possible, to white nationalists using those same tools to fight BLM.

There were two groups of guys out in the manosphere. One group just wanted to have sex with as many women as possible. They wanted to use “game’” to do that. There’s always been some guys like that and I wouldn’t consider them admirable in any way. The second group would like to have been married under normal conditions but decided that normal conditions no longer exist. The three options were being a PUA type, engaging in political action to try to return to the era when a good marriage for the average guy was readily available, or lead a female free slacker lifestyle. I had some sympathy for the second group.

Many of the PUA bloggers over promised what their theories could accomplish. I looked at a website for strippers one time. The strippers posting there had all kinds of theories on how to sell lap dances by manipulating males. If you have ever been to an actual strip club, though, it is usually just the most attractive ones who make the most money so all the elaborate theories don’t work that well. I pretty much see the same thing with guys. Looks matter most. I left a comment at Heartiste’s blog comparing most average looking guys trying PUA tactics and failing to unsuccessful strippers. He took my comment and did a whole blog post attacking it. When I tried to respond in the comment section I found I had been blocked. I don’t think my comment there was all that offensive. I’ve never been blocked anywhere else and was disappointed with him.

I think I was correct, though, that “game” wasn’t the miracle cure for a bad sex life. Most average guys who tried it found it didn’t work very well. When that became common knowledge, the promoters of it decided they needed to find another schtick. Roosh decided all was not lost and promoting traditional marriage was still worthwhile. Heartiste decided politics was the means for change. The powers that be didn’t care when he was blogging about picking up women but felt threatened by his often effective political analysis and successfully neutralized the threat. I always considered “game” the worst strategy and either political action, trying to find a good woman to marry (there are still a few around), or focusing on other enjoyable parts of life to be a better road to follow.

How about a T-shirt that says Jewish Lives Matter?

Or Asian Lives Matter.

The Immigration reform act of 1965, which cut the economic legs out from under the black working class by importing a new underclass, probably caused more damage than all the things you list.

“ONLY Black Lives Matter.” Make the woke retreat to the verboten “All Lives…” heresy.)
Damn, that’s good.
A man (I’m assuming your preferred pronouns are “he/him/his”) after my own heart.
You could also try: “Hey, don’t forget that Jewish lives matter also.” Would any liberal dare to deny that?

What ever happened to that guy?

Which one?

He used to have a blog on WordPress, got bounced for truth-telling.

Doubt it was for “truth telling” given the number of years it existed. Towards the end, there were any number of things that could justify complaints to WP, including the increasingly brain-dead Boomer gomers monopolizing the comments section. Whatever the complaint, it was sufficient for WordPress to nuke the Chateau.

Heartiste has a wife and kids,

How do you know that / believe that?

dunno if he much was Rooshian, meaning RooshV, a different character altogether.

What?

I’ll just give you the figures again:

1. Cotton was the largest export from the U.S., but exports were only about 9 % of GDP. Similarly, cotton accounted for about 23 % of income in the South, but the South accounted for only 26% of U.S. income. See D. A. Irwin, “The Optimal Tax on Antebellum U.S. Cotton Exports,” Journal of International Economics 60(2003):287) Ultimately, the value of cotton production was equal to about 6% of GDP.

https://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html

Cotton was 6% of US GDP.

When the South tried the “King Cotton Strategy” in 1861-65, it didn’t work. Cotton was purchased elsewhere (India, Egypt).

And, in terms of developing the US economy, the protective tariff was the key factor, not cotton:

True,
cotton textiles were important for U.S. industrialization, and New England mills used the same
slave-grown raw material as their competitors in Lancashire. But location within national
boundaries had little economic significance for this industry. As a bulky but lightweight
commodity, raw cotton travels easily, and transportation costs play little if any role in textiles
geography. The protective tariff – strongly opposed by the slave South – was of far greater
importance for the competitiveness of the antebellum industry (Harley 1992, 2001).

–Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wright

Heartiste is single with no kids. Roosh V “found” religion, but still sells his Game books.

Truth telling? LOL. They both had capitalized on the notion that modern women were essentially scoundrels and therefore today’s “men” had carte blanche to take advantage of their alleged fall from grace. Hey, it’s NOT their fault women are s—– receptacles, so PUA’s had no obligation to, for a lack of a better term, “save” them. What “advice” do they offer? Pump and dump. Marriage is for suckers.

As the Z-man blog once opined…

“This is where the men’s rights crowd and the pickup artists got it all wrong. The answer to the degeneracy of feminism is not sullen indifference or craven opportunism. The solution to feminism is for men to get back to policing their own ranks, by enforcing codes of conduct that leave women no choice but to fulfill their natural roles. If white people are going to survive, it will be in a world in which guys like Riley Reynolds are found dead in a ditch. It’s a world where Roosh V lives in fear of men, not in fear of women. That was always the insidiousness of feminism. It was never really about women. It was always about undermining Western societies by emasculating the men. A society where the men are unwilling to protect their daughters from pornographers, too timid to fight back against Pakistani rape gangs, is a defeated society. Men who wait for someone else to protect their women will never find the courage to fight against their masters. When men on our side get that and begin to enforce a moral code on other men, the revolution begins.”

No doubt here that the manosphere have been, and will continue to be, enemies to Western Civilization.

An interesting experiment would be to use precise language for the positive sentiment, so that it applied only to American blacks with slave ancestry, but not to African immigrants. Though I guess doing so is difficult and would require a clunky phrase that would not fit into an easy slogan.

I suspect that AE may be having some fun with us. Almost nothing surprises anyone any longer, but the depicted t-shirt probably does not exist.

Last year, flyers and leaflets reading, “It’s okay to be white,” provoked hundreds of complaints to police and, on a college campus in Vermont, an FBI investigation. One year later, to drop “Black lives matter, white lives don’t,” flyers and leaflets in the same spots might be amusing.

The targets of the prank wouldn’t get the joke, though. On the other hand, the targets tend not to be the sort that picks up litter, so the prank might remain visible on site for some time.

“King of all nads” on gab.

Hey, Whitey … give ‘til it hurts!

We once had elements of the solution which you suggest. In the mid-1950s The situation of Negros in the USA had been gradually but steadily improving for decades and this trend seemed likely to continue into the indefinite future. Prog policies like the expansion of AFDC to bastard children, affirmative action, criminal justice “reform”, et al. derailed Negro progress and ensured the abysmal failure of most Negros while promoting the success of a relatively small Negro middle and upper class and a slice of the Negro urban underclass who won the lottery as thuggish entertainment and sports stars.

Charles Murray documents the tragedy in his book, “Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980” https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-1980/dp/0465065880/ref=sr_1_1?crid=26OQ8X7X3BLG7&dchild=1&keywords=losing+ground&qid=1621713326&sprefix=Losing+Ground%2Caps%2C216&sr=8-1.

No Lives Matter! CHTHULU for President in 2024!

Black Lives Matter. So What.

if we really wanted to, which I suppose is true, but our method might not be what have in mind.

It’s probably doable, if you take welfare/police/prison/court costs as a money pot and look for alternative ways to spend it, with a general disregard for liberalist values.

One interesting possibility would be a social credit system for blacks. You give them free Black netflix, free game-streaming, free internet, but cancel it if they do anything criminal. As I’ve said before, I think it would be easy to produce a lot of black prolefeed on the cheap (relatively speaking), if it was price-optimized and if companies could get tax deductions for donating material to reskin for blacks. For example, video game patches. Perhaps, using deepfake to reskin characters in movies, or else recycling the costumes, props, and scripts and reshooting movies in Nigeria.

Another possibility would be partial segregation. You permanently segregate violent black criminals out of general society, without paying the cost of prison. Most would probably prefer to be in open air areas. Perhaps, a prison colony could be developed somewhere. Maybe, on an island like Puerto Rico.

Of course, neither approach solves dysgenic trends among blacks.

Look at Heartiste’s transformation.

What ever happened to that guy? He used to have a blog on WordPress, got bounced for truth-telling. Heartiste has a wife and kids, dunno if he much was Rooshian, meaning RooshV, a different character altogether.

It’s pretty damned hard to reconcile 13/55 with Black Lives Matter. Blacks must think Whites are such Gods that we could fix Black criminality if we really wanted to, which I suppose is true, but our method might not be what have in mind.

☮

Try “End Racism: abort white babies.”

Its not okay to be white. Thus white must be eradicated. Allowing whiteness to continue and then punishing those whites for existing is sadistic. The humane thing to do is cleanse whiteness before it has a chance to blossom into its full racisms.

Since racism is whiteness. And ending racism is the most important cause ever. Whiteness must be prevented.

Or we can separate whiteness from all pox. But that would be racist because access to whites is a human right. There is only one way forward I guess.

“Only Black lives matter”

It’s interesting how the manosphere went from frustrated guys using tools to pick up and fuck as many sluts as possible, to white nationalists using those same tools to fight BLM.

Look at Heartiste’s transformation.

Did George Floyd’s life matter? He would have died in the gutter a penniless, ignorant, middle aged negro with or without Chauvin’s knee. His death only mattered because it exposed the worthlessness of negro lives. Without purpose or meaning. They exist, die and accomplish nothing during their time on earth. Only their gravestones mark their place.

This bitter reality is what makes the cry Black Lives Matter! a mockery of the truth that black lives are utterly irrelevant to the story of mankind. A pig or a cow’s life is more important to humanity because they provide the food that allows people to work, build and create.

Of the hundreds of millions of negroes who have lived in America only a tiny handful had meaningful lives and they were almost exclusively musicians who left an enduring body of music behind. Nat King Cole, Chuck Berry etc meet this criterion but no others.

Pro athletes come and go and whites keep statistics to try and rank them but one athlete is not significantly different from another and all together their contribution to mankind is irrelevant. Only rich societies even have the luxury of paying men to play boy’s games.

Outside of music and sports negroes only other avenue to ‘matter’ is politics and while represented they have not excelled. They preside over a collection of failed cities and promote bankrupt policy remedies that have not and cannot work because they promote BLM when they don’t.

Although aggravating in the short term, in the long term the mania for black supremacy will backfire as the patience of non-blacks wears more and more thin while the in-your-face dysfunction gets harder to ignore. At that point, a critical mass of whites (we are probably close to this with Latinos and Asians already) will be unafraid to say a) we don’t care what blacks want if it comes at our expense and b) will act and vote accordingly.

From the opposite end of the slogan, silvio, I’ve come up with “ONLY Black Lives Matter.”

Make the woke temporize on that (which is tantamount to retreating to the verboten “All Lives…” heresy), or embrace it (which would alienate all but liberal college-“educated” Whites).

Print up some “Only” stickers, slap them on neighborhood BLM signs, and watch the fun of amplification begin. (If there was a way to pay a black kid to go around doing it, so much the better.)

I think Black Lives Matter More is a better agree & amplify, if only for being briefer. (Although neither are good examples of classic agree & amplify.)

On the other hand…

http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860

By 1860, Great Britain, the world’s most powerful country, had become the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and a significant part of that nation’s industry was cotton textiles. Nearly 4,000,000 of Britain’s total population of 21,000,000 were dependent on cotton textile manufacturing. Nearly forty percent of Britain’s exports were cotton textiles. Seventy-five percent of the cotton that supplied Britain’s cotton mills came from the American South, and the labor that produced that cotton came from slaves.

Because of British demand, cotton was vital to the American economy. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglass C. North, stated that cotton “was the most important proximate cause of expansion” in the 19th century American economy. Cotton accounted for over half of all American exports during the first half of the 19th century. The cotton market supported America’s ability to borrow money from abroad. It also fostered an enormous domestic trade in agricultural products from the West and manufactured goods from the East. In short, cotton helped tie the country together.

…

New York City, not just Southern cities, was essential to the cotton world. By 1860, New York had become the capital of the South because of its dominant role in the cotton trade. New York rose to its preeminent position as the commercial and financial center of America because of cotton. It has been estimated that New York received forty percent of all cotton revenues since the city supplied insurance, shipping, and financing services and New York merchants sold goods to Southern planters. The trade with the South, which has been estimated at $200,000,000 annually, was an impressive sum at the time.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king

Let’s start with the value of the slave population. Steven Deyle shows that in 1860, the value of the slaves was “roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in banks,” and it was “equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government that year.” As mentioned here in a previous column, the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the productivity of cotton harvesting by slaves. This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which in turn led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves, in a savage, brutal and vicious cycle.

Now, the value of cotton: Slave-produced cotton “brought commercial ascendancy to New York City, was the driving force for territorial expansion in the Old Southwest and fostered trade between Europe and the United States,” according to Gene Dattel. In fact, cotton productivity, no doubt due to the sharecropping system that replaced slavery, remained central to the American economy for a very long time: “Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to 1937.

What did cotton production and slavery have to do with Great Britain? The figures are astonishing. As Dattel explains: “Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80 per cent of its essential industrial raw material. English textile mills accounted for 40 percent of Britain’s exports. One-fifth of Britain’s twenty-two million people were directly or indirectly involved with cotton textiles.”

And, finally, New England? As Ronald Bailey shows, cotton fed the textile revolution in the United States. “In 1860, for example, New England had 52 percent of the manufacturing establishments and 75 percent of the 5.14 million spindles in operation,” he explains. The same goes for looms. In fact, Massachusetts “alone had 30 percent of all spindles, and Rhode Island another 18 percent.” Most impressively of all, “New England mills consumed 283.7 million pounds of cotton, or 67 percent of the 422.6 million pounds of cotton used by U.S. mills in 1860.” In other words, on the eve of the Civil War, New England’s economy, so fundamentally dependent upon the textile industry, was inextricably intertwined, as Bailey puts it, “to the labor of black people working as slaves in the U.S. South.”

“No I don’t.”

Of course you do. Assumptions are not facts.

“Your capacity to make imaginary connections between remote events is not a null hypothesis.”

More doubling down on your part, as well as projection to boot.

This is true, but let’s be real: the lie they’re telling is that they know what the heck they’re talking about. The people making these arguments are never serious students of economic history. This isn’t enough to prove them wrong, only to say that if they were right, it could only be by accident; their opinions and statements shouldn’t be factored into our sober evaluation of the truth one way or the other.

Really, the whole “Cotton built America” thesis is wrongheaded:

1. Cotton was the largest export from the U.S., but exports were only about 9 % of GDP. Similarly, cotton accounted for about 23 % of income in the South, but the South accounted for only 26% of U.S. income. See D. A. Irwin, “The Optimal Tax on Antebellum U.S. Cotton Exports,” Journal of International Economics 60(2003):287) Ultimately, the value of cotton production was equal to about 6% of GDP.

https://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html

Slave owners, for their part, were riding high in 1860, perhaps captives of their own King Cotton rhetoric, which held that the South “can defy the world – for the civilized world depends
on the cotton of the South” (Wright 1978, p. 146). Evidently, they conflated elite financial
success with southern economic strength. Slavery was unquestionably the basis for the former,
but the opposite held true for the latter.

-–Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wright

But this does not stop Baptist from adding a few more half-baked morsels to his mélange. Among many candidates, most irksome to this reviewer is this one: “The three million white people in the cotton states were per capita the richest people in the United States, and probably the richest group of people of that size in the world” (p. 36). A footnote cites James Huston’s Calculating the Value of the Union (the whole book) and p. 87 of Robert Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract. The statement gets the population wrong, conflates wealth with income, ignores the widening gap between slave owners and non-owners, and aggregates real and slave property. To be sure, the value of slave property was very real to the owners. The essential point is that the South was the wealthiest region in the nation when slave values are included, but the poorest when they are not. (See Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, p. 60.) This deficiency, coupled with the failure to invest in education and infrastructure — not the purported decline in plantation productivity (p. 43) — explains the emergence of southern economic backwardness when slavery was abolished.

https://eh.net/book_reviews/slaverys-capitalism-a-new-history-of-american-economic-development/

Yep. I say that we abolished slavery because slavery does not pay. Free employees are much more profitable.

Up next: the welfare state.

It’s not just crime and dysfunction, it also distorted and distorts politics and the economy—and in the US—led to a literal civil war and may yet lead to another one.

Steve wrote a good summary of this in Takimag a couple of years ago as an antidote to the NYT‘s ahistorical “1619 Project”.

Basic points:

The comparative advantage that the US had in exports to Europe was in tobacco and cotton. (Sugar was too tropical and too destructive of the African workers—which were more expensive to import as far as the US vs. Brazil or the Caribbean. Wheat and potatoes could already be grown in Europe, so imports from America were not competitive except where Europe exceeded Malthusian limits.)

Tobacco was grown in the cooler and more white-acclimated uplands, so lowland cotton was really the only crop for which importing African labor made economic sense, and yet the lucrative early-mid 19th century cotton market turned out to be a bubble as cotton could also be grown in Egypt and India without the expense of importing African labor.

Yet this bubble economy gave undue political weight to the lowland secessionist plantation owners at the expense of the upland yeoman farmers and tobacco growers whose interests in internal improvements (mills, roads, canals) corresponded more closely with their Northern brethren. So, no slavery, no Civil War. Also, no slavery, more internal improvements in the south: water power, railroads, land grant universities, and as a result a more dynamic, self-reliant and industrious culture.

So on every conceivable metric, other than short-term profits for a few plantation owners, America without slavery is a vast improvement. And yes, this maps very well onto the present immigration debate, if for “plantation owners” you substitute “low-skill service industry gulags” and “Democrat welfare plantations”.

https://www.takimag.com/article/alternative-america/

This is certainly the case if you’re discussing the economic benefits (or costs) of slavery or of European colonialism.

People are looking for a doorway into the West. The rational thing is not to concede it.

Blacks who are already here are looking to extract wealth. It would be irrational to give it to them, unless it bought something for us. And it will not – they quake in terror, when repatriation or separation is ever brought up.

Certain of them may just want higher status, by making Euros look worse, but it is related to the doorway problem (and the gibs problem), and in their single-minded, superficial search for status – “I am higher if I am the victim, lower if you dismiss my victimhood and point to the gifts you gave me” – they cannot appreciate the existential problem that Euros face today.

Diversity is a ravenous beast that is never satiated.

I do not know whether the US ever got net economic benefits from slavery. However, I do know that the people who tell us that the US got net economic benefits from slavery are the same people who have lied to us about everything else: Russian collusion; white supremacist terrorism; white privilege; microaggressions; that diversity is our strength; George Floyd; George Zimmerman; Michael Brown the Gentle Giant; Brett Kavanaugh; ballot-box stuffing; mostly peaceful riots; Twitter/Facebook terms-of-service violations; etc.

I cannot think of the slightest reason to hearken to their mendacious nonsense yet again.

That’s a valid point.

There are also certain subjects on which no rational discussion is possible because the partisans on both sides have already decided what the answer to the question should be before they ask the question. This is certainly the case if you’re discussing the economic benefits (or costs) of slavery or of European colonialism. Before the discussion even starts and before looking at any evidence both sides have decided on the answer, and both sides have decided on the answer based on ideological and moral grounds. Once they have decided what the correct answer should be they proceed to torture the data until it gives them the evidence they want.

Evidence that seems to support their case is emphasised while evidence that casts doubt on their case is fudged or ignored.

There are many issues today that fall into the “no rational argument is possible” category – immigration, affirmative action, climate change, HBD, etc.

“ You have to demonstrate how and why the two
citations are not closely related to the issue at hand.”

No I don’t. Your capacity to make imaginary connections between remote events is not a null hypothesis.

That’s a nice trick referring to the nondescript cotton South. It would have been preferable to compare that percent of the cotton South that was comprised of cotton plantations to the percent that was, in fact, developed through family farming. The scale of the latter would confound claims of this sort.

Capitalism is debt slavery.
Communism is state slavery.
Both are pushed by Jewish Supremacists.

Slavery may be inefficient, but the lazy Jew loves it.
A host in chains is easy peasy to exploit by parasites.
Globalism is Global Slavery.

)))They((( want it all.
Even one shekel of value not in their grubby paws is too much.
)))They((( must be destroyed.

There will be no peace while )))they((( exist.
)))They((( cannot live on their own.
)))They((( must suck the life out of hosts.

Marx was an idiot. Slavery did a lot of economic and cultural damage to the USA:

The South had lower average incomes than the North; and per capita income was growing more slowly in the South even before the Civil War. See Unequal Gains by Lindert and Williamson Chapter 5.

The more important slavery was in a country or state the lower the level of income was in the future. Nathan Nunn “Slavery, Inequality and Economic Development in the Americas: An Examination of the Engerman-Sokoloff Argument (October 2007).

Slave states had lower levels of educational attainement and less innovation (measured by patents) than states without slavery. This was true even in the areas that were most like the North in geography and economic activity. See John Majewski “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Developemnt and Education in the Limestone South” Chapter 14 in Slavery’s Capitalsm.

https://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html

True,
cotton textiles were important for U.S. industrialization, and New England mills used the same
slave-grown raw material as their competitors in Lancashire. But location within national
boundaries had little economic significance for this industry. As a bulky but lightweight
commodity, raw cotton travels easily, and transportation costs play little if any role in textiles
geography. The protective tariff – strongly opposed by the slave South – was of far greater
importance for the competitiveness of the antebellum industry (Harley 1992, 2001).

The preceding section suggests that if slavery had been abolished nationally at the time of the Constitution, the Cotton South would have developed through family-scale farms like the rest of the country, delivering as much or perhaps more cotton to the eager textile mills of Lancashire, and building a more diverse and prosperous regional economy in the process.

–Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wright

“Corvinus, citing contemporary social science and history articles makes about as much sense as me citing 19th century articles on astrophysics. In both cases the the writers are constrained by ignorance and time.”

That is a false equivalence. In the case of modern day social science, there is the benefit of hindsight. Historians are able to account the prevailing attitudes of the time and demonstrate how that line of thinking changed, which leads to “taboos” being exposed as illogical and outdated. In the case of 19th century articles on astrophysics, writers at that time wrote on what they understood at that time. A person who cites their work today is offering the context as to how a particular field evolved.

“I’m old enough to remember how negros lived in the South pre LBJ’s Great Society. They lived in shacks with some string beans and few other poorly tended crops planted around their yards.”

You are basing YOUR experience with blacks with what you know or think you know. Jim Crow laws assuredly had a devastating impact on the political, economic, and social aspirations of African Americans. You realize that Southern governments had not honored the Plessy tenet of “separate but equal”, right”. Of course, other people during that time frame assuredly had different perspectives compared to your own recollections.

“This was all they had achieved 100 year since their emancipation.”

Employing such terms as “all” or “never” or “always” does you no favors. It only boxes you in intellectually.

“The amazing thing is you are just dumb enough to think the above has any close connection, much less an answer, to the question ‘whose actions precipitated the war?’“

Using ad hominem is not an argument. You have to demonstrate how and why the two
citations are not closely related to the issue at hand. The authors paint a clear picture of how “King Cotton” was one of several factors for the Civil War, with the machinations of southern elites being front and center.

“The answer is straightforward, the party who wouldn’t leave the other party alone to go in peace”.

Indeed, the answer is to the point, as my sources indicate and you conveniently ignore. Remember,
there were southerners who opposed secession. They certainly did not believe the formation of the Confederation was legitimate.

https://www.americanheritage.com/souths-inner-civil-war-0

Again, southern elites as the “other party” were hell-bent on leaving the Union in support of an unjust and immoral institution. The goal by Lincoln and his northern and southern ilk, which was noble and just, was to preserve the Union, which was well within their constitutional purview.

“You are an established and consistent enough presence on this site for us to take judicial notice of the fact that reasoning is not your strong suit. But, do you have to keep reminding us?”

A false conclusion on your part I get it, though. In this manner, it is thus easier for you to not cogently address the substance of my points.

So did the West colonize places because it was in an expansionistic and flourishing cultural mode, or was its flourishing enabled by colonization?

I think colonialism is one variable to keep in mind, but far from the only one in explaining Western achievement over the previous 500 years. I wrote a comment a few months ago that I thought the main causal factors in explaining Western success were: (a) outbreeding patterns, (b) freedom of thought and action, (c) increasing wealth and (d) increasing urbanization. (https://www.unz.com/anepigone/ranking-of-countries-by-neighborly-nationalism/#comment-4252508)

The main source for this is Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. There are all sorts of quantitative charts and explanations in his book if anyone would like an in-depth explanation for the 4 factors described above. But since the topic here is about colonization, the only relevant variable is “increasing wealth”, which colonial profits augmented. As Murray showed in his book, wealth (measured in absolute and relative GDP per capita) is clearly and significantly correlated with the production of significant figures in the arts of sciences.

That’s because, on a direct level, wealth is needed to support the arts through expenditures on concert tickets, books, theatres and paintings; and the sciences through spending on universities and other research institutions. And on an indirect level, economic vitality also has spillover effects on cultural vitality. Finally I should note that the increases in wealth need to precede the flourishing in the arts and sciences, and once the flourishing occurs a positive feedback loop begins where progress begets wealth which begets more progress.

On the question of colonialism and its impact on wealth and progress, as you mentioned it’s a bit difficult to untangle cause and effect. I think a modest answer would be that the economic, technological and military progress needed to begin before colonies were established oversees (i.e The Renaissance in Florence), but once colonialism kicked off, profits from colonial possessions augmented wealth on a direct level and gave the conquering countries an indirect vitality of sorts that is helpful for flourishing. The Dutch Golden Age and the British Industrial Revolution are two examples of flourishing taking place after colonies were established abroad.

But overall, I think colonialism is only one of many variables in explaining Western achievement, and likely an insignificant one compared to the others – though it’s difficult to quantify the relative contributions to causality.

Disagree. Most people do care a great deal. Those who do not are psychopaths. Unfortunately, psychopaths rule the world.

I say:

They’re pathologizing us, so we might as well pathologize them. The path we’re on leads to jurisdictional power severance and separation and secession. Young European Christians will secede from the private debt and the government debt and that will get the implosionary ball rolling towards ruling class decapitation.

I think Barack Obama and Joe Biden and George W Bush and Bill Clinton and most of the rest of the puppet politicians are psychopaths who want to attack and destroy national sovereignty in order to advance plutocrat plundering, but as larger political jurisdictions break down the plutocrats will find it harder to make their will writ large across the fracturing frontiers and boundaries and legal systems and the military structures will split as well.

I like evil as a rhetorical word for enemy because people are familiar with it and it is easier to spell than psychopath.

Tocqueville certainly had strong opinions on the subject:

The more progress was made, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master.

I could definitely see the US maybe selling Florida to the rump confederacy, maybe in return for an abandonment of all claims west of the Mississippi. The South has always been more belligerent and eager to go to war than the rest of the country, so it would have been in the North’s best interest to placate them. The South’s ambitions probably would have turned to conquering Cuba.

The fact is slaves were owned by colonists and later by United States citizens and are therefore responsible for the black problem today.

Now that you mention it, a “Planters´Republic” with capital Havanna was briefly aired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Circle_(proposed_country)

Of course it is moot and would have meant the same problems of agrarian vs. industrial capitalist societies, but inhowfar was United Fruit and Manifest Monroe extending to Uranus (with pun unabashedly intended) so much better?
(I hold the Jesuit states were the most satifactory – interim – solution but they were killed by extractive slaveholder interests; the topic is way too broad … )

As they say – slavery wasn’t abolished, it was expanded to include everyone. And yes – it sucks.

Whatever economic benefits the US ever got from slavery….

I do not know whether the US ever got net economic benefits from slavery. However, I do know that the people who tell us that the US got net economic benefits from slavery are the same people who have lied to us about everything else: Russian collusion; white supremacist terrorism; white privilege; microaggressions; that diversity is our strength; George Floyd; George Zimmerman; Michael Brown the Gentle Giant; Brett Kavanaugh; ballot-box stuffing; mostly peaceful riots; Twitter/Facebook terms-of-service violations; etc.

I cannot think of the slightest reason to hearken to their mendacious nonsense yet again.

The credibility of those people is so weak that I will literally believe a Nation of Islam sermon and an Amway sales pitch before I believe a word those people say.

The idea that anyone cares about what happens after their death to the world wide is
pure out fantasy…..

Disagree. Most people do care a great deal. Those who do not are psychopaths. Unfortunately, psychopaths rule the world.

Corvinus, citing contemporary social science and history articles makes about as much sense as me citing 19th century articles on astrophysics. In both cases the the writers are constrained by ignorance and time. In the case of the latter contemporary academic writers are limited by modern taboos to not give offense to modern negroes and the length of time that has passed since then.

I’m old enough to remember how negros lived in the South pre LBJ’s Great Society. They lived in shacks with some string beans and few other poorly tended crops planted around their yards. This was all they had achieved 100 year since their emancipation. In Northern cities negro areas were not much better though their homes had once been decent brick structures but were now shabby slums alongside garbage strewn streets. Without outside intervention negroes just can’t manage anything on their own not even basketball!

The amazing thing is you are just dumb enough to think the above has any close connection, much less an answer, to the question ‘whose actions precipitated the war?’ The answer is straightforward, the party who wouldn’t leave the other party alone to go in peace. Are you somehow struggling under the delusion that but for Lincoln’s desire for a peaceful separation the South would have waged war regardless? There was one overriding action paramount to all others that brought war; Lincoln’s willingness to use war against the organized and legitimate (by popular acclimation) governments of the southern states.

You are an established and consistent enough presence on this site for us to take judicial notice of the fact that reasoning is not your strong suit. But, do you have to keep reminding us?

Within Africa, I think there’s a lot of room for more prosperous governance.

Within Africa, the best off country might be Botswana. It’s not as well off as a prosperous white country but is much better off than a poorly run African country like Zimbabwe. It might be about the best you can hope for with a country filled with blacks.

Rather than nationalizing white businesses, the government appears to have accepted the fact that whites could run them better than blacks. It then taxes them and uses the money to improve the lives of its black population.

Other African countries could do the same thing but most can’t resist the temptation to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They eliminate property rights and rule of law, which drives out any whites living there and keeps any whites outside the country from investing or moving there. African kleptocrats use the government to enrich themselves, families and friends. In addition to driving out whites, this discourages the more entrepreneurial blacks within those countries .

Masturbatory hindsight. The whites of Civil War times never expected their descendants to surrender their race and civilization merely to ease a false sense of guilt. Collectively we are no better and probably worse because we (whites) treat ourselves worse now than they (whites) treated negroes back then.

“So what? Bloodshed was Lincoln’s decision.”

Southern elites were decidedly to blame here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-of-cotton/383660

By the time shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, cotton was the core ingredient of the world’s most important manufacturing industry. The manufacture of cotton yarn and cloth had grown into “the greatest industry that ever had or could by possibility have ever existed in any age or country,” according to the self-congratulatory but essentially accurate account of British cotton merchant John Benjamin Smith. By multiple measures—the sheer numbers employed, the value of output, profitability—the cotton empire had no parallel.

One author boldly estimated that in 1862, fully 20 million people worldwide—one out of every 65 people alive—were involved in the cultivation of cotton or the production of cotton cloth. In England alone, which still counted two-thirds of the world’s mechanical spindles in its factories, the livelihood of between one-fifth and one-fourth of the population was based on the industry; one-tenth of all British capital was invested in it, and close to one-half of all exports consisted of cotton yarn and cloth. Whole regions of Europe and the United States had come to depend on a predictable supply of cheap cotton. Except for wheat, no “raw product,” so the Journal of the Statistical Society of London declared, had “so complete a hold upon the wants of the race.”…

Slavery stood at the center of the most dynamic and far-reaching production complex in human history. Too often, we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism. Nineteenth-century observers, in contrast, were cognizant of cotton’s role in reshaping the world. Herman Merivale, British colonial bureaucrat, noted that Manchester’s and Liverpool’s “opulence is as really owing to the toil and suffering of the negro, as if his hands had excavated their docks and fabricated their steam-engines.” Capital accumulation in peripheral commodity production, according to Merivale, was necessary for metropolitan economic expansion, and access to labor, if necessary by coercion, was a precondition for turning abundant lands into productive suppliers of raw materials.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/civil-war-cotton-capitalism-114776

That cotton came almost exclusively from the slave plantations of the Americas—first from the West Indies and Brazil, then from the United States. When American cotton growers began to enter global markets in the 1790s after the revolution on Saint Domingue—once the world’s most important cotton-growing island—they quickly came to play an important, in fact dominant, role. Already in 1800, 25 percent of cotton landed in Liverpool (the world’s most important cotton port) originated from the American South. Twenty years later that number had increased to 59 percent, and in 1850 a full 72 percent of cotton imported to Britain was grown in the United States. U.S. cotton also accounted for 90 percent of total imports into France, 60 percent of those into the German lands and 92 percent of those shipped to Russia. American cotton captured world markets in a way that few raw material producers had before—or have since…

When war broke out in April of 1861, this global economic relationship collapsed. At first, the Confederacy hoped to force recognition from European powers by restricting the export of cotton. Once the South understood that this policy was bound to fail because European recognition of the Confederacy was not forthcoming, the Union blockaded southern trade for nearly four years. The “cotton famine,” as it came to be known, was the equivalent of Middle Eastern oil being removed from global markets in the 1970s. It was industrial capitalism’s first global raw materials crisis.

The effects were dramatic: In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers lost employment, and social misery and social unrest spread through the textile cities of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia. In Alsace, posters went up proclaiming: Du pain ou la mort. Bread or death. Since very little cotton had entered world markets from non-enslaved producers in the first 80 years after the Industrial Revolution, many observers were all but certain that the crisis of slavery, and with it of war capitalism, would lead to a fundamental and long-lasting crisis of industrial capitalism as well. Indeed, when Union Gen. John C. Frémont emancipated the first slaves in Missouri in the fall of 1861, the British journal The Economist worried that such a “fearful measure” might spread to other slaveholding states, “inflict[ing] utter ruin and universal desolation on those fertile territories” and also on the merchants of Boston and New York, “whose prosperity … has always been derived” to a large extent from slave labor.

“Negroes posed a peculiar problem as a majority of them were incapable of sustaining themselves and would revert to their savage primordial existence if not supervised.”

You have no idea what you are talking about.

http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_41.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-ancient-practice-transformed-by-the-arrival-of-europeans-11568993153

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/west_africa.htm

Whatever economic benefits the US ever got from slavery, they’ve been long offset by the system being forced to support 40 million descendants of obsolete farm hands.

“One demanded the other uphold its system while having no say over it, the other increasingly viewed the other’s system for the backward piece of shit that it was.”

So what? Bloodshed was Lincoln’s decision.

No… I think it was coming after the Missouri Compromise. There were two American systems developing. One demanded the other uphold its system while having no say over it, the other increasingly viewed the other’s system for the backward piece of shit that it was.

Tokugawa Japan didn’t have to fight a real war until the Boshin War. Didn’t happen that way in America. If the the CSA had won, they would have never disowned what they fought over for the sake of pragmatic survival.

“ Colonists provided a market for slaves…many owned them.”

Almost none total much less owned my non-nobles before 1713. Not even a majority (slave portion much less colonist portion of that) of the plantation portion of the agricultural economy until the middle of the 18th century. Only 60% of the labor for the plantation economy over the course of the 18th century. Never the majority of the agricultural economy as a whole (that honor goes to yeoman farmers).

Within Africa, I think there’s a lot of room for more prosperous governance. Unfortunately, none of models I can think of are very politically correct. For example, a social credit system, crypto, cities with immigration controls and the right to deport people from within their borders. Electronic contracts. Courts run by foreigners. Maybe, 99-year leases, for foreigners to set up neighborhoods in special delineated areas that would have some local benefit.

Once, you had such an area, it might still be worse than the West in many ways (lower income) and people might still want to leave the area and immigrate to the West, but I think it would be very damaging to the narrative that they have to leave to take advantage of our institutions.

Your scenario assumes as it’s starting point the necessity of “a massive, blood-filled ideological struggle over the issue.” That ideological struggle was not necessary except for northern crazies.

I don’t know about less slaves, but as for more: Bahia is what that would be been like, with all the corruption and poverty and misery involved. Some economic superpower.

You wish to destroy everything Confederate in an age where there is increasingly reluctance to make your own stand on things, to not obey nagging schoolmarms who wish to dictate what history *is*, you don’t have a heart. You actually think the Confederacy was a good idea with over 150 years of hindsight, you don’t have a brain.

I don’t think repatriation was very feasible by the 19th Century, as Liberia showed.

Before steam. (and significant state resources were never put into the project.) The 19th Century was possibly the greatest single period of technological change in all of history. I’m not saying it would have been easy. I agree integrating American blacks with the natives would have posed a massive problem. The biggest essential obstacle being coloration – if people look different, it is easy to notice and resent a foreign elite. But a lot of the other problems were bridgeable, with effort. At worst, we could have done a population swap with Brazil and/or Carribean islands.

I don’t think the colonists brought the slaves. They competed with them to benefit the lords.

Colonists provided a market for slaves…many owned them.

I’d rather live in a slightly poorer place with much less crime and dysfunction than the opposite.

Slovakia’s calling, Old Sport. Don’t let the exile door hit ya’ where the Good Lord split ya’.

In the UK of my 1970s youth, sandwich-board men were things you read about in 1930s novels or saw in comics. They’ve been back for 25 years easily in cities.

Tons of sign twirlers out here in Las Vegas. Low-tech, cheap advertising.

I don’t think repatriation was very feasible by the 19th Century, as Liberia showed. Already American blacks had developed their own, unique Americanized identity, socially and probably biologically. (Hence my dim opinions on retarded commentators here who seriously propose it in the 21st.) Partitioning would raise the question of where people whose skills, as such, were mostly as the new serfs in an agrarian economy would go.

There were Southern leaders-IIRC, Lee and Longstreet I recall being among them-who did realize before Fort Sumter that the system was untenable with the advent of an industrial age and favored some process of gradual dismantlement. However, even these “moderate” types (a small minority) demanded complete Southern control over that process. This was something the North was increasingly reluctant to give by the 1850s. Northern taxpayers were increasingly forced to shove over money to keep a deliberately archaic system benefiting rural oligarchs afloat: the Fugitive Slave Act is a great example of the kind of resentment this could engender, moralism aside. Again, I don’t see that as sustainable in the long haul. As always, radicalization engendered counter-radicalization. Fire-eaters and Radical Republicans fed off each other.

Some sort of showdown was probably already in the mix by the 1830s. That’s just my opinion: this is hardly my historical strong spot. But I have a very hard time seeing how there wouldn’t have been some kind of reckoning over the issue when it became clear that two Americas were developing.

You also have to remember that as abolitionist ideas developed, slaves inevitably picked up on that, making the likelihood of uprisings all the more likely… and explaining a lot of the propaganda insistence that slavery was a moral good because Africans were akin to children. Note that the notion of slave status being based on race-as opposed to a purely economic and social condition-is a relatively new one, even in American history.

>Brazil, similarly, should have at least tried to consolidate its blacks into one area, perhaps, using a mulatto state as a buffer. Doing so and then partitioning the country would have probably been a better plan.

Brazil dealt with different demographics. Because of the way sugar plantations worked, rural areas were often completely dominated by blacks in a way that never happened in the US: the closest we got was South Carolina’s roughly 1:1 ratio. Which loops back into the whole “Why Thinking Slavery Makes Economic Superpowers Is Ahistorical Crap” thing…

One thing that I really don’t think is emphasized enough is how much the Haitian Revolution changed things: it cannot be emphasized enough how much (understandable) paranoia that caused in the South around the turn of the century. Reading Thomas Jefferson’s progression from the 1780s to the 1800s is a depressing but insightful experience here. However, Haiti dealt with *very* different demographics than the US did, showing that blind eyes are not limited to our age.

There was no thought to the future disposition of the sub-Saharan Africans after slavery had run its course.

The thought, from the start of time,
“The future is not my problem, I won’t be here”……..

The idea that anyone cares about what happens after their death to the world wide is
pure out fantasy…..

Marx obviously had no first hand knowledge of early America and ‘exports’ were a rarity until the industrial revolution. The US had a first class shipbuilding industry ( you can still see our early warships which stood broadside to broadside with the Royal Navy’s) and powered our whaling industry. By the Civil War our domestic armaments industry was the equal of any in Europe and had surpassed them by war’s end. We were building our own railroads simultaneously with the UK and by 1869 they were transcontinental. US made steam boats turned the Mississippi into a major highway by 1he 1850’s.

As the US industrialized in the 2nd half of the 19th century there was almost nothing to import that we weren’t making here other than skilled artisans to build the palaces of our nouveau riche!

Seems those men north of the Mason-Dixon Line didn’t all get their rights recognized before those in the South Did.

I say:

A good chunk of New Jersey is below the Mason Dixon Line, and, until recently, the Watchung Mountains kept the Third Worlders out of the European Christian parts of NJ.

Asian Indians are now swarming all over New Jersey and the Republican Party and Trump are aiding and abetting the Asian Indian invasion of New Jersey.

Swedes and Dutch colonists shared the future New Jersey space diagonally and the very polite English people made the Swedes and the Dutch a delightful offer that they couldn’t refuse.

The English are so well-mannered!

For most of human history, slavery was looked at as the worst of any number of “mean” conditions,

Descendants of Slaves have no clue, their entire existence is because of Slavery…
Throughout history, defeated societies were Genocided….
Africans found an outlet for captured foes/families,
other than selling them to others, their option was to kill them….

As bad slavery has been, it has always been more favorable to the slaves than
what could have happened to them…..

Slavery brings up sub-Saharan African Blacks and the African Population Explosion.

The sub-Saharan African Blacks Must be Quarantined.

Sub-Saharan African Blacks Must Not Be Allowed To Overflow Out Of Africa.

I wrote this in June of 2017 about the African Population Explosion:

ISOLATE THE SUB-SAHARAN AFRICANS — EXTRACT AFRICAN RESOURCES

Leave the gun, take the cannoli:

The American Empire can come to some understanding with the Russians, Chinese and other global powers to isolate the population of sub-Saharan Africans. The northern portion of the American Empire has already pocketized the sub-Saharan Africans in places like Detroit, Newark and Chicago. This simple concept must be made an informal agreement among the global powers.

Attention all State Department slobs: I just called Russia and China global powers; Do you bastards have a direct response to that? The idea that the American Empire, alone, has the authority to subject the entirety of the globe to its will — including the oceans and the upper atmosphere — is an idea that should be discarded.

Part of being an American is to be an honorary Englishman, whether you have any English blood or not. Slavery was worse than immoral, it was stupid. There was no thought to the future disposition of the sub-Saharan Africans after slavery had run its course. That is dumb as hell. Just like the current mass immigration invasion underway in the United States is dumb as hell.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/will-sub-saharan-africas-population-hit-10-billion-15-billion/#comment-1917077

Slavery as an accelerant to westward Anglo-Saxon expansion.

Anglo-Saxon expansionism swirling out of the continent and heading for the island 1500 years or so ago and the Normans getting to the island about a thousand years ago or so and they kept heading west to who knows where and they stopped briefly in Japan and now they are expanding the concept of a political jurisdiction to planetary levels and they attack anyone who likes to think of their nation as a particular place with a particular people and they are expanding the debt and expanding the financialization to such a degree that the severity of the expansionary halt shall produce an implosion that smashes the hell out of global ruling classes.

BRING ON THE NIGHT ON GLOBALIZATION

Apologies to David Byrne and Gordon Sumner.

Pretentiousness is next to godliness for the political imagination.

I hope most of the Black Pewitts — or the dozens of ways of spelling that surname — are decent Black Church People. Plenty of White Pewitts are knocking over booze stores in the South and Texas and thereabouts.

“some sort of territorial consolidation (less ideal, if within US borders, because of shared borders and possible future mass migration)”

History repeats, as mass migration to a nearby functional society would plague red/blue separation today. William Buckley, reviewing Camp of the Saints, put it this way: “Would you shoot them? Would you starve them?” Of course not. So it’s the “stay put” problem. I suppose territorial consolidation would have worked if lavishly subsidized, to achieve “stay put.” Where was Kamala when we needed her, to design the “stay put” plan?

Without cotton exports they could not pay for imports of machines from abroad, and so would have remained an agricultural backwater.

Foreign investment would have followed human capital, IMO. And there was a lot of investment in European-populated colonies.

“Where they richer in 1860 with slaves, than they would have been without?” is kind of an academic question. The more germane question seems to be, “Are we richer today, because of slavery, then we would have been without it?” Seems like we’ve just been adding up losses since 1861. The loss of practically all urban centers and higher taxes, doesn’t even quite seem to be the end of it.

IMO, the Renaissance shows that Europe was on a significant upward trajectory, even before Vasco de Gama made it to India, let alone before any significant wealth was brought back from the New World. The greatest New World contribution to Europe was the potato, and its impact was much greater than the Spanish galleons, or the Triangular Trade – but it was a long time before it became a common crop and Europe was already taking off before its introduction.

Of course, Afrocentrists will say but there was still slavery in Europe during the Renaissance.

But I think if you look at things like Cathedrals, mechanical clocks, the impact of the printing press, and optic lenses, it is hard to see any contribution of slaves.

I would have liked to see manumission held out as an incentive for either repatriation (most ideal) or some sort of territorial consolidation (less ideal, if within US borders, because of shared borders and possible future mass migration). Freeing the slaves all at once swamped any capacity for a realistic separation. And steam power was really coming into the fore. One of my ancestors immigrated on a steam ship (with masts) that was built during the Civil War. Such ships coming to America could have followed the coast down to the South and then crossed over to Africa, or to nearer places, like Cuba, exchanging populations.

Brazil, similarly, should have at least tried to consolidate its blacks into one area, perhaps, using a mulatto state as a buffer. Doing so and then partitioning the country would have probably been a better plan.

Of course, politically, in the face of a strong progressive drive to free them and then educate them up to civilization, before repatriating them, separation might have been impossible, or else ultimately in vain, if the egalitarian drive just allowed them to come back later, as it probably would have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_Jersey

New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to abolish slavery completely. The last 16 enslaved Africans in New Jersey were freed in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Seems those men north of the Mason-Dixon Line didn’t all get their rights recognized before those in the South Did.

In this alternate timeline, you have a separate country consisting of the two aforementioned states, with Alabama and Mississippi added. And that would have been the extent of it. Louisiana was purchased by the Virginian Jefferson, and Florida was conquered by the Tennessean Jackson. So in the end, you have a tiny, backwards rump confederacy completely cut off from the Gulf of Mexico, populated mostly by Africans. Meanwhile, the rest of the US, unhampered by slavery or a Civil War, would be much more prosperous.

It’s a damn good idea, but I think that West Florida ie. the Gulf coasts of Alabama & Mississippi, would’ve wound up in proto-Confederate hands too. This whole “cutting them off from the Gulf of Mexico” idea is ambitious, but unlikely to have come to fruition, I think.
Still, even with that caveat, much better than our timeline.

Victor Davis Hanson said that at the time of the Civil War, 7% of U.S. households had slaves. (Lincoln, our worst President, harvested 750,000 lives to abolish a 7% problem that had only a decade or two remaining in western countries anyway.) I don’t know what the 7% figure was at the time slave importation began. I suspect it was about that low. It boggles the mind to think that the decision to import slaves and thus ruin the country was made because such a tiny sliver of the country wanted it.
And now, history repeats — a tiny sliver ruins the country (what’s left if it).

I think the general idea in the late 1700s was that slavery would die a natural death akin to what indentured servitude was going through. For most of human history, slavery was looked at as the worst of any number of “mean” conditions, but the removal of other “mean” conditions in the wave of the American Revolution made it stand out all the more. And these ideas were making progress, hence the abolition of slavery and the institution of human rights for all men north of Mason-Dixon. It wasn’t irrational to think the South wouldn’t follow the same trend because it hadn’t diverged *that* sharply from the North yet.

Two things changed this: the cotton gin and the Haitian Revolution. The former made a “sugar” economy possible. The latter scared the crap out of Southern landholders who began to turn the defense of slavery into an ideological good rather than something to be ignored.

Rather than asserting that without slavery the United States would not have become as wealthy and technologically advanced as it is today, it seems the opposite is true–without ending slavery, the United States would not have ever become as wealthy and technologically advanced as it is today. And the perverse incentives and retarding aspects of slavery port quite well onto cheap labor through immigration.

That’s it? One paragraph on a major economic issue, an opinion, and nothing to support it?

Brazil imported more slaves than the US did, so many that they had to concertedly import waves of European immigrants in a conscious effort to “whiten” the populace after slavery was abolished in 1888. Prior to that, it was the most rural, agrarian parts of the Deep South on steroids, complete with a culture of cruelty on the sugar plantations that made Mississippi look tame. There’s your slavery built powerhouse there, contra all 1619 arguments.

Slavery was an archaic system that was ultimately incompatible with modernity. The Northern victory in the Civil War ensured that the US would end up in the new, revolutionary industrialized camp: at that time, consisting only of a handful of European countries at that point. This contrasted with the default of human tradition: an agrarian society, usually supported by a partially free or unfree labor class in the countryside. I think history is pretty clear that it was the right side to be on, and we were far from the only nation to struggle with this: Russia abolished serfdom around the time of the Civil War, and ended up having a far uglier experience than anything the US went through.

Had the Confederacy survived, they would have proven every bit as vulnerable as other “behind” nations were in the age of predatory imperialism. And having fought a massive, blood-filled ideological struggle over the issue, a Japanese-style overhaul would have been ideologically impossible in the 1870s. The notion that a surviving CSA would have thrived is ludicrous, as is the idea that slavery did anything but retard us.

BTW, there are still some descendants of “Confederado” immigrants who went South to Brazil after they lost the Civil War, out there in Sao Paolo state.

A golden opportunity to end slavery was missed at the Constitutional Convention. This was before the cotton gin, and as you mentioned, slavery was on the downturn in Virginia. The representatives from Virginia were willing to end slavery as part of the deal. Indeed the only two states for whom slavery was nonnegotiable were Georgia and South Carolina, who threatened to form their own separate country. They should have been allowed to, and America would have turned out a lot better. In this alternate timeline, you have a separate country consisting of the two aforementioned states, with Alabama and Mississippi added. And that would have been the extent of it. Louisiana was purchased by the Virginian Jefferson, and Florida was conquered by the Tennessean Jackson. So in the end, you have a tiny, backwards rump confederacy completely cut off from the Gulf of Mexico, populated mostly by Africans. Meanwhile, the rest of the US, unhampered by slavery or a Civil War, would be much more prosperous.