[mapt]

Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus.

Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.

[jltsiren]

Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.

In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.

[cucumber3732842]

>Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.

It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.

Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.

>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i

I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.

[graemep]

Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.

[mapt]

Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.

I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.

This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs

[master_crab]

Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.

This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.

[graemep]

It was abolished in western Europe. Even in eastern Europe serfdom was not the same as slavery.

The African slave trade happened between west Africa and the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.

Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and tired to prevent them being converted : https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery

[thelock85]

I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).

[graemep]

My points are:

1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.

2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe

3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave

4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.

5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/bl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial_de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bible...

[xhkkffbf]

The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.

[cucumber3732842]

The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.

[alpinisme]

These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.

Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?

I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.

[estearum]

And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.

[graemep]

A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war.

There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron

[somenameforme]

Contrary to what most people seem to think about the past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago, he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead of working forward from first principles and he did in other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did accurately predict the end of slavery:

"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.

Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.

[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt

[cucumber3732842]

>These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.

These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.

If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).

This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.

>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?

That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).

>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.

It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.

Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.

[walterbell]

> It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved

Or digital transaction cancel-sanction-kill switch tied to biometric identity of fugitive human assets.

Paper passport hostages are crude approximation.

[spacebanana7]

> It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.

Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for example, are undeniably important forces in moving the history of many regions.