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Slavery was a evil system. It is probably not fully understood just how evil, but there is no doubt that it was a terrible system and an enormous violationm of basic human rights. We notice that the evils of slavery are used as an iddiutement of capitalism in some quaters. A problem here is that we find capitalism is defined by some is any economic systemn that is not socialist. Of course this is nonsence. Slavery has existed since time memorial--millenia before capitalism existed. Even the Atlantic slave trade began sdeveral centuries before capitalism and the United States came into existance. The Atkantic slave trade began at a time that the dominant system was mercantilism amnd the countries ebgaged in tghe skabde trade had mercantilist economies. Of course there was still no socialust state in the 19th century, but there were a handful of capitalist states. The United States was the largest capitalust state, but the South was not dominated by a capitalist economy, but the econmy was primarily agrarian until the late 19th century. Most Amerivans lived in rural areas until the 1920s. One historian maintains that slavery laid the foundation for and 'drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.' [Baptist] Now we believe that the ante-bellum cottob boom did help finance the beginnng og Amerivan capitalism and industrial revolution, but Baptist is saying much more. Another autho has provided a telling criticism of the rekatuionsgip between American capitalism and slavery. "If the slave trade were capitalist then, for example, the slave abductors of Africa were capitalist entrepreneurs. Nonsense. At best the slave-cotton-shipping triangle was the addition of agrarian commerce to a colonial mercantilist trade led by the British shippers who had as strong a role in Parliament as the slave owners had in the governments of the southern states. Plantation slavery was the essence of a government-sanctioned aristocratic-agrarian economy that was nearly the opposite of market capitalism. Great accumulation of wealth, contrary to the thinking of Mr. Baptist and others, doesn’t make an economy capitalist. Rome wasn’t capitalist, neither was medieval feudalism. Karl Marx missed the fact that his wage slaves refused to revolt, preferring to become consumers especially in the West where we realized that along with production there must be consumption. As with Marx long ago, Mr. Baptist doesn't seem able to envision a capitalism that actually prefers a society of free consumers to a society of minimally productive slaves." [Teevan]
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