1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [54]
During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, England chose slaves over servants—indeed, it became the world’s biggest slaver. So well known nowadays is the English embrace of slavery that the idea of another path is hard to grasp. But in many respects the nation’s turn to bondage is baffling—the institution has so many inherent problems that economists have often puzzled over why it exists. More baffling still is the form that bondage took in the Americas: chattel slavery, a regime much harsher than anything seen before in Europe or Africa.
On the simplest level, slaves were more expensive than servants. In a well-known study, Russell R. Menard of the University of Minnesota tallied up the prices in Virginia and Maryland of slaves and servants whose services had to be sold after their masters’ deaths. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the average price of a prime-age male African slave was £25. Meanwhile, the servants’ contracts typically cost about £10. (Technically, I should say that Menard discovered the price was equivalent to £25 and £10, because coins were scarce and even illegal in colonial Chesapeake Bay, and people paid their bills with tobacco.) At that time, £25 was a substantial sum: about four years’ pay for the typical hired worker in England. The servant was substantially cheaper.
To be sure, servants would eventually be able to leave their master’s employ, lowering their value (attempting to take this into account, Menard looked only at servants with more than four years remaining on their contracts). But the longer period of service one could expect from a slave still would not justify slavery economically, the great economist Adam Smith argued. An inherent flaw with slavery, he maintained, is that slaves made unsatisfactory workers. Because they were usually from distant cultures, they often didn’t speak their owners’ language and could be so unfamiliar with their owners’ societies that they would have to be trained from scratch (Africans, for example, knew only tropical forms of agriculture). Worse, they had every incentive to escape, wreak sabotage, or kill their owners, the people who were depriving them of liberty. Indentured servants, by contrast, spoke the same language, accepted the same social norms, and knew the same farming methods. And their contracts were for a limited time, so they had little reason to run away (unless they thought the planter was going to cheat). Because willing hands are more likely to do their jobs well, Smith reasoned in The Wealth of Nations, “the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” All else being equal, he argued, economics suggests that planters should have chosen the cheaper, easier, less threatening alternative: servants from Europe.
Smith, who hated slavery, was trying to prove that something he detested was not only immoral, but foolish economically. Slavery, in his view, was largely the irrational product of humankind’s “love to domineer.” But he also believed that people try to find ways around economic problems that stand in the way of their desires. Just as one would expect, slave owners throughout history have created incentives for their slaves to work efficiently: paths to liberty. Work hard and true, masters in effect said, and you will eventually be allowed to walk away. Often, too, slaves were assigned tasks that brought some satisfaction, as in the case of African or Roman armies made up of captive soldiers—the slaves had switched sides, so to speak, but their lives were unchanged in many ways, and there was always the prospect of earning glory.
Slavery in the Americas, though, was something else: a lifelong sentence, in most cases,