The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.
The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.
Almost all of the “slavery was economically efficient” notions come from a handful of scholars, who are historians and not economists: https://economicsdetective.com/2019/09/cotton-slavery-and-th...
The work is not only methodologically flawed, but depends on shifting definitions of “capitalism”: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=3191210060650810...
A leading NHC scholar has refused to define what he means by “capitalism” preferring to let the term “float as a placeholder.”