The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [53]
Data from George Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas shows that in advanced horticultural societies, which supported populations of about forty people per square mile, some 80 percent of landowners were found to employ slaves. Yet as the plow increased agricultural productivity and population densities rose past one hundred people per square mile, more than half of landlords paid their workers a wage rather than coerce them to work.
Slavery could quickly reestablish itself, however, if something were to change the ratio between land and labor. The Black Death, which wiped out half the population in fourteenth-century Europe and returned periodically for three hundred years, provided one such change. Serfdom was unknown in Russia before the sixteenth century. But the population shock from the plague led the landed gentry to lobby the czar to restrict the mobility of tenant peasants, keeping them attached to the land through debt servitude and laws allowing landlords to recover fugitive peasants.
In Western Europe, where serfdom had been popular for four hundred years, the Black Death paradoxically seems to have hastened its demise. Though landowners had the same incentive to shackle peasants to the land, powerful Western urban elites that were nonexistent in the East also wanted the labor and opposed these efforts.
The evolution of serfdom provides a clue as to why slavery is not more popular today. The massive loss of population following the Black Death failed to entrench serfdom across Western Europe because big cities offered workers opportunities outside agriculture. While there were attempts to reintroduce serfdom, the lack of strong central authorities made it difficult to limit peasants’ movements. The emergence of competing economic interests among the powerful urban bourgeoisie prevented landowners from imposing their will.
That didn’t mean Western Europeans renounced coercion, however. The discovery of vast, scarcely populated lands in the Americas led Western Europeans to embrace slavery where labor was scarce on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Slaves accounted for about 90 percent of the population of the West Indies in the eighteenth century. About 2 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the Caribbean isles between 1600 and 1800. And three quarters of the 290,000 European migrants were indentured servants. Slavery was a particularly effective institution when the land supported large-scale farming. On these plots a few gang bosses could monitor large groups of slaves, keeping the costs of enslavement down. That made the lucrative Caribbean crops of sugar and tobacco particularly attractive to slave owners.
MANY DYNAMICS CONTRIBUTED to the decline of labor coercion. Employers who could increase production by adding more inexpensive slaves had little incentive to invest in laborsaving technologies. Coerced workers had no incentive to become more productive—because they would just be handing a higher surplus to the boss. Both these effects hindered economic progress.
In the Americas, slavery led to slower subsequent economic growth. New World colonies in which slave labor was common in the 1830s, such as Jamaica and Guyana, are today much poorer than colonies in which slavery was rare, such as Barbados or Trinidad. In the United States, states where slave labor was widespread in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, are much poorer today than free states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
An examination of the prices of slaves underscores how the institution slowed productivity growth. The price of a slave in South Carolina rose from about $110.37 in 1720 to about $307.54 in 1800. But that increase barely matched the rate of inflation. In real terms, slave prices remained flat. But, as economists