So what about the slave trade was so important to industrialization?

Like, you can’t just say “the slave trade powered industrialization,” because what does that even mean? Here’s the thing about industrializing. It is FUCKING EXPENSIVE. You’ve got to build your factory, right. Then you’ve got to buy all the raw materials to go INTO your factory. Then you’ve got to hire all these workers and pay them to WORK in your factory. And with how slow your merchant ships toodled around the world at the turn of the 19th century, it’s probably going to be about A YEAR before you actually get any money back from selling whatever you made.

That’s a LOT OF MONEY to spend on a RATHER RISKY ENDEAVOR that will not see any profits for A PRETTY LONG-ASS TIME.

But that’s cool. It’s cool. There are multiple solutions to this problem. This money problem.

Britain’s solution: Credit.

Just give your factory-building guy a loan, what’s the big deal. But what do you need in order to give people giant loans for untested business ventures? Giant fucking banks, is what.

And what do you need in order to have giant banks? Well…A fuck-ton of money floating around.

So why did Britain have a fuck-ton of money floating around? Well…kind of a lot of reasons, but the slave trade was definitely one of of them. It turns out that selling people is REALLY PROFITABLE! Like, we’re talking profit margins around 300%. And since the 15th century, Britain had mostly been frittering those profits away on guns and crumpets or whatever, but by the mid-18th century, Americans wanted to buy SO MANY slaves that even the Britons’ insatiable hunger for crumpets could not devour all that money.

Even more important to Britain’s status as the world’s most ballin motherfucker, however, was the American market for everything else: about 80% of ALL BRITISH EXPORTS went to the Americans. America was their meal ticket. They’d buy anything. Oh man. All that sweet, sweet American money, pouring into the Motherland’s coffers, bolstering its economy, making it possible to have huge banks that could offer huge loans.

And how were the Americans making all this money? Well, there was one thing America had a shitload of, and that was LAND. Wow. So much land. Look at all this dirt. Europe doesn’t have this much dirt. We should plant stuff in this dirt, and then sell it.

Sweet idea, says America. What should we plant?

I don’t know, like tobacco and cotton, those are lucrative crops.

Okay, says America. Who’s going to plant them? Like, we literally do not have enough people to plant stuff in this much land. Do you have any idea how much land we have?

Oh, no problem. You can just use slaves for that.

Oh, cool, says America. What about harvesting the cotton? That’s really labor intensive. Paying workers to do that would really eat into our profits.

What are you, stupid? You can use slaves for that too. Use your head.

Oh man. What a great idea, says America. It’s almost like all these people we bought for Britain’s exorbitantly marked-up prices are still an insanely good value for us.

—What I’m trying to get at here is that the link between Britain’s booming economy and the slave market in the New World was robust, but difficult to quantify. Without cheap slave labor, America couldn’t have generated enough profits to buy British exports. Moreover, without cheap slave labor, America couldn’t supply enough raw cotton to fuel the British factories (the Industrial Revolution was driven by the textile industry; industrialized steel, the next major market, wouldn’t be made possible for another 60 years). Would Britain have industrialized without the existence of slave labor in the New World? Maybe. Maybe not. Without the ability to offer those lines of credit, how would the factories get built? Without access to huge quantities of American cotton, what would you even feed into the factories?

Japan’s solution: Centralize the economy.

Hey, here’s the first country to find a solution to the money problem that wasn’t “get rich and then offer credit.” So, in 1852, America sent over Commodore Matthew Perry to open Japan to international trade, in these huge, scary, technologically dominating ships that made the Japanese go “what the fucking shit.”

Big changes were clearly needed in Japan if they wanted to catch up to the West. If they didn’t, they ran the risk of being brought under the influence of a foreign power. This was the biggest driving force behind the Meiji Restoration. The Meiji Restoration is super interesting and had a lot of moving parts and I feel bad about oversimplifying it here, but this post is already super long, so: basically, it ended feudalism in Japan and centralized the Japanese government for the first time. They got rid of the finanicially burdensome samurai class, brought all the land in Japan under government control (and therefore made it possible to tax it), and broke down the rigid class system which had dominated Japan for centuries and stifled economic growth. Japan’s economy flourished as a result.

And the new Meiji oligarchy turned that economic growth into industrial growth in the most direct possible way: they simply raised taxes, and then used the money to build factories. You can skip the banks and loans when the government is what’s building things up. But all of this took time: and Japan was not really what you could call an “industrialized power” until around 1900, about a century after the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Britain.

Russia’s solution: Hey, why not just use slaves TO BUILD THE FACTORIES? Eh? Ehh??

So, Russia didn’t really start to industrialize until the 1920s and 30s. This was one of the major goals of the new communist government. You remember communism. They fuckin loved factories. No other ideological system has ever had such a boner for factories.

But to say that the Soviet government’s efforts at overhauling the Russian agricultural and industrial landscape was a fucking boondoggle is an insult to boondoggles everywhere. Millions of people starved to death, the conditions for which were caused by decisions both intentionally malicious as well as disastrously incompetent. Construction of factories was so rushed and went forward with such substandard materials that all the resulting factories were any good at was burning down. Even when the factories themselves could be made to function, the infrastructure was not in place to get the raw materials TO the factories. It was a disaster. It was a fucking disaster. I cannot overstate how much of a disaster it was.

And then the ruling Soviets were like, hey, you know what? We’ve got tons of land. And loads of people whose lives we don’t value. How about we just arrest all those people and get them to dig our roads, build our canals, mine up our raw materials, and undertake our dangerously shoddy construction initiatives? Sure, millions of them will die under conditions of brutal uncompensated forced labor, toiling for a cynical and unprofitable prison system run without oversight by our secret police, but: we’ll have factories! =DDD

China’s solution: Basically Russia’s solution, only with even MORE needless deaths, although they were slightly more coy about the slavery.

I mean, they didn’t just straight up have the Gulag system, so I guess that’s…something. But somewhere in the ballpark of 30 million people died during the Great Leap Forward. China didn’t really start industrializing effectively until the 1970s, by which time the world’s markets were flush enough that we were ready to buy pretty much whatever they figured out how to produce. In a very real sense, China is still in the process of industrializing…and it’s still being done by exploiting cheap human labor.