http://www.ozpolitic.com/articles/heavy-legacies-our-past.html#slaveryIt has become popular among socialists and other groups with an axe to grind against capitalism, economic freedom, democracy or even white people in general, to insist that the rise of western Europe and its colonies is a result of slavery. This can be an attractive fallacy, given that the recent rise of European powers coincided with their involvement in the global slave trade. However, it is a correlation, not a causation. I argue here the opposite – that freedom and democracy are the cause of Europe’s rise.
The historian Daron Acemoglu uses the broader terms of political and economic inclusiveness to describe this theory. This is in part to avoid inevitable arguments about what constitutes true freedom, democracy or capitalism. Furthermore, his argument is (rightly) that these are opposite extremes on a spectrum, and more significantly, that this is a naturally polarising spectrum. That is, countries tend to drift towards the nearest end of the spectrum. In his book, Why Nations Fail, he explores the positive feedback loops (ie, self-reinforcing mechanisms) that make this happen.
In the context of the arguments regarding slavery, I would phrase it thus: only a small advantage was needed for European nations to have the upper hand and take over the world. The historical tendency for corrupt nations to reinforce their oppressive social institutions meant that Europe’s competitors were easy to overtake. This, combined with Islam’s grip on the bulk of western civilisation, meant that European countries did not have far to go to get that upper hand. Although Europe was rapidly transitioning towards liberal democracy, history would not wait for perfection, and so a society recently risen from barbarity found itself ruling the world. Thus Europeans ramped up the slave trade, as they ramped up all global trade. But they also brought their liberal morals in whatever form they took at the time, and as the path to liberalism continued they wound down the global slave trade, while continuing to ramp up the global market.
During the Roman Empire, this advantage took the form of political inclusiveness – a rough, messy form of democracy that was eventually abandoned, to Rome’s detriment. Later, this advantage took the form of economic inclusiveness. Slavery turned into serfdom, which turned into a free market in human labour every time a plague increased the value of labour and decreased the relative value of capital. Entrepreneurs were more free in western Europe than elsewhere to invest in the industrial revolution and take advantage of the mobile workforce (and profit from it). Political inclusiveness came later – a sudden upheaval in mainland Eruope, a gradual transition in Britain.
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