Over the past two decades, the New History of Capitalism has transformed debates about Western development by restoring slavery to the center of the story of modern economic growth. A burgeoning literature now contends that slavery was not simply a moral atrocity intertwined with capitalism but the essential engine that powered the rise of the Atlantic economy itself. According to this interpretation, slave labor generated the capital accumulation, commodity production, and financial sophistication that made the modern West rich. When British politician Kemi Badenoch publicly opposed this argument, critics accused her of minimizing slavery’s economic significance. Yet the central empirical difficulty with the enrichment thesis remains unresolved: if slavery is such a powerful generator of prosperity, why did societies organized around slavery remain poor for most of human history, despite slavery existing across nearly every major civilization?
At the heart of the argument lies a subtle but consequential confusion between entanglement and causation. Western economies undeniably became deeply entangled with slavery, but this does not establish that slavery created Western prosperity. Long before the Atlantic slave trade reached its height, countries such as England and the Netherlands had already developed sophisticated commercial institutions, secure property rights, advanced legal systems, and increasingly complex financial markets. These institutional advantages enabled slavery to become integrated into Atlantic commerce on an unprecedented scale. Slave traders could insure voyages, mortgage slaves, mobilize international credit networks, and circulate slave-produced commodities through organized exchanges not because slavery created these institutions, but because those institutions already existed and were sufficiently advanced to absorb slavery into their operations.
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