The slave trade
and the Atlantic economies 1451-187065this regional specialization based originally on the production of cotton in the
south for export that made economic the establishment of large-scale industries
in the United States between 1790 and I860.^26
It can, therefore, be concluded that economic development in Atlantic
Europe and North America was critically influenced by the growth of world
trade between 1500 and 1870. The next question is the extent to which the
growth of world trade in this period depended on the slave trade. Since this
growth depended almost entirely on the exploitation of the resources in the
Americas, the question boils down to whether the exploitation of those resources
would have been possible at all, or whether the scale of their exploitation would
have come anywhere near to what it was, without the availability of slave
labour. This is looking at the problem from the point of view of supply. Another
way is to look at it from the point of view of demand and ask whether the
employment of non-slave labour would not have considerably advanced the
cost of production and therefore have raised the prices of the products in
Europe to a level that would have considerably reduced their consumption and
therefore the quantity imported into Europe. If this had happened, the level
of incomes in the Americas would have been reduced, thereby reducing the
volume of goods imported from Europe. The overall effect would have been
a drastic reduction in the volume of world trade. All this would have depended
on the price elasticity of demand in Europe for the products of the Americas.
Recent publications on the subject of slave labour show that in some cases
it was either slave labour or nothing. It has been pointed out that Spain and
Portugal, the possessors of the majority of the American tropical colonies,
were not in a position to provide workers 'who were prepared to emigrate at
any price'.^27 For the capitalistic production of sugar in the West Indies gener-
ally, it is stated that ' free labour was simply not available in sufficient quantity
and what there was would not (would not rather than could not) put up with
the conditions of work on a plantation so long as cheap farmland was to be
had in other colonies. It was slavery or nothing.'^28 As a general statement for
all the Americas outside Spanish and Portuguese America, it is argued thatWage or indentured labour would have been forthcoming in some additional numbers
at some high wage. Such wage levels would have been high owing to certain factors
impeding labour movement into plantation agriculture, [so that] any attempt at
sizeable increases in the production of agricultural staples under the inelastic supply
patterns characterizing free and indentured labour would have advanced those labour
prices substantially.^29Apart from the foregoing arguments, it has been shown that in the decade
before the civil war southern slave farms produced 28 per cent more output
per unit of input than southern free farms, and 40 per cent more than family-