[greenie_beans]

> While slavery made money for the slave owners, the South as a whole was poor and couldn't keep up with the North when it came to actual economic activity. That is why they lost their war of survival.

This is 100% false. The South was wealthy as fuck. The North and South had a very important trade relationship where they both benefited. The southern plantations grew the cotton that the northern industrialists profited from.

> One of the reasons why slavery died out in the Western world was that it was becoming uneconomical in a world that was shifting from agriculture to industry.

This isn't true as far as I know. The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable. The South fought the Civil War because they were fighting to protect their right to slavery since it made them so rich.

[inglor_cz]

"The South was wealthy as fuck."

No, the average Southerner was fairly poor. The rich oligarchy was rich, but that is a tautology; the same situation applies in contemporary Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, two countries that are very clearly not wealthy as fuck.

"The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable."

If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't. The South was the sick man of American economy. All the innovative businesses of the Gilded Age were built on free labor.

John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry Huttleston Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, Meyer Guggenheim, Jacob Schiff, Charles Crocker, Cornelius Vanderbilt - show me a Southerner among them. The furthest one was born in Pennsylvania.

[greenie_beans]

lol didn't expect anybody to respond to this argumentatively since it's fact but then again we're on hacker news. i'm not meaning to flex, but i have a degree in southern history. not even gonna bother to argue after reading this:

> If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't.

not even gonna explain why

[api]

Wealthy in what way? I’m sure the South had massively rich plantation owners and bankers, but like most resource extraction economies I suspect monetary velocity was lower and the general public was much poorer and less educated. Extraction economies usually amass a lot of static wealth but are poor in terms of dynamic wealth.

The relationship with Northern capitalists would have been similar to what you see today with petrostates, resource extraction states, and vendors of cheap labor.

Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation. Chattel slavery would probably have ended when fossil fuels were discovered at large scale and it might be a petrostate now.

[wheelerof4te]

"Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation"

You do know how the US economy works today? You know why everyone accepts the US dollar, a literal piece of paper, in exchange for real, tangible goods?

Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.

[inglor_cz]

Whoa. You are overestimating the American military capacity by a lot.

There are regionally used strong currencies like the Euro. Us Euros mostly do our internal trade in, well, Euros, without being bombed or even sanctioned. That is quite a lot of trade.

Aside from the Euro, there isn't much of a competition in the international arena. China wants to control the renminbi tightly, which precludes its wider adoption as a reserve currency. UK is a shadow of its former imperial self, and so is the pound. The Japanese economy is too weak for the yen to be a serious competitor.

And with currencies like the rupee, you will find that few people outside India are willing to trust them. Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again, and Indian exports aren't a great match for Russian economic needs.

[inglor_cz]

"That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar."

The petrodollar is about 50 years old, and international trade grew IDK, fivefold? in that period. No surprise that the previous patterns don't hold any more. There is a difference between a market of three villages and a market of fifteen villages. If the # of connections between corporations and nations grows quadratically, it becomes infeasible to juggle around dozens of different currencies. The market will trend towards dominance of one.

"Euro is irrelevant outside of Europe."

But Europe is fairly relevant in the world. About 20 per cent of forex reserves worldwide are kept in Euro, it is the only serious, though not peer, competitor to the USD in this regard.

[wheelerof4te]

"Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again".

That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar.

Now, Saudis or Qatar or pick your favorite Middle eastern monarch sell oil to US and everyone else in exchange for $USD. Since oil is used in nearly every other product line, either for transport or actual product, now world trade depends on how much $USD you have to buy said oil.

Euro is irrelevant outside of Europe.

[nec4b]

>>Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.

TIL, people buy iphones and use facebook, because they are afraid to be bombed otherwise. You know there is a good reason why even rich and powerfull people from Russia or China don't want to keep their wealth in their home currencies. And it's not because they are afraid to be bombed by Americans.