[simonsarris]

I think you're going off of old/bad data. Olmstead's paper in 2016 writes:

> Other findings of the NHC, such as the assertion that the Cotton South was the primary force driving national expansion in the antebellum period, are neither original nor correct.

As you say:

> it provided over half of all US export earnings.

This is not true. It may(?) have been over half of US exports, by some measure, but cotton was definitely not over half of earnings. Per Olmstead 2016:

> North’s fellow new economic historians promptly assaulted his thesis. It was widely recognized that cotton was leading U.S. export in the antebellum period. But exports represented less than one-tenth of total income (Kravis 1972). Figure 2 graphs the values of cotton exports as a share the value of U.S. merchandise exports, and then both U.S. cotton and merchandise export values as shares of GDP.30 As the bottom line makes clear, cotton exports were a very small share of national product—less than 5 percent over much of the of the antebellum period (Engerman and Gallman 1983, p. 28).

Emphasis mine. It goes on:

> Perhaps more surprising, given the NHC narrative, is that in 1839 and 1849 corn, not cotton, was even the South’s leading crop in terms of value! Some familiarity with historical data might have moderated the sensational claims of the NHC literature.

If you're interested in the topic, I suggest you read it, especially the section "The Economic History Slavery Debates". You should also read the sections relating about diversification if you have a strong belief in the over-specialized south.

https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/...

[zapita]

Are you arguing that slavery did not contribute significantly to the wealth of the North, first by using slaves directly, then by integrating advantageously with the South’s economy and the slave trade?

[simonsarris]

My condensed argument is that Slavery per se does not make countries rich. Rather I am only arguing that slavery, in many countries including the USA, Brazil, and others world-wide, did not contribute to the long term economic success of the nation nearly as much as many claim it does (or solely claim it does in the USA).

We don't have a counterfactual Twin Earth where those countries did not have slaves, but we know for sure slavery is not necessary for a country to be successful. And if we look at countries that had way more slaves, the advantage of simply having slave labor seems hugely insufficient for a country to be successful.

It is possible that the USA had slaves and was able to economically leverage them far greater than all the other countries that had slaves, but this seems unlikely, and such a scenario would also be the biggest gain for a counterfactual scenario that the USA would have been successful without them, too.

[thinkpad20]

I think the problem is that no one was arguing that slavery per se makes a country rich. The argument was that it did in the case of the US.

[zapita]

So your answer is no, then?