Thanks for an attempt at objectively describing what can only be described as a hornet's nest.

Slavery is evil. Yet is has existed for thousands of years and still exists. It's still evil. It made the Noble Romans and the most to be admired Greeks wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. It was still evil. Slavery got conflated with skin color, that may have made it more evil, certainly it made dealing with slavery's aftermath much harder. Slavery is still evil.

Slavery's evil is even more evil if in it's absence the industrialization of America would have taken roughly the same path. For then the misery and the brutality and the rape and the viciousness was all for naught wasn't it?

What this hornet's nest may illustrate is the weakness of both sides. Railroads, in general, may have been about the same economic cost as canals but it is hard to cut a canal to moving front lines to directly support troops - which the Union did regularly. It is also hard to see how you could cut a canal through Nebraska or Kansas. (How do you do that? Let's not talk about Denver, I'm sure that could be done with a ladder of locks.) At the same time the great revolution of Annales was to pull history out of the hagiography of great men and into the messiness of real life. Just how much grain could be extracted from those lazy serfs really did make a difference as to who gained and kept power.

The big problem is that neither economics nor history really want to grapple with is the problem of meaning. History is supposed to teach something, that is the common belief. It has to have meaning. Economics is supposed to be able to predict things. It has to be able to add meaning to whatever is going on now. That's not a foundational stand of the discipline, it is the demand of the rest of us. That pubic demand is not unreasonable.

History and economics both deal, at root, with decisions. I tend to think of history as how people, both known and unknown, managed the challenges thrown at them in the context of their resources, that they knew about, or that they created, and in the context of their constraints, known, unknown until run against and dealt with, unknown with fatal consequences, and imagined. That allows history to be useful. Economics is not yet that useful. Truman's quip about wanting a one handed economist still stands as a great observation as to their usefulness to a decision maker. Until then I tend to follow a modification of Arthur C. Clarke's maxim; when the respected economists agree that something is possible it probably is, when the respected economists say that something is impossible it probably isn't.

Regarding the author's claim that economists lack a vocabulary to discuss impacts of slavery other than GDP consequences, I will just draw her attention to this American Economic Review article by Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon studying the long-run impacts of the African slave trade on trust.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/nunn_wantchekon_aer_2011.pdf

Hayek's book, "Capitalism and the Historians" is relevant to this discussion. Historians have for the most part been ardent Marxists for over a century. I remember when the USSR collapsed and the presidents of the two US historical societies both made speeches lamenting the collapse of communism and predicting dire consequences for the world.

For economic history, I'll go with the economic historians like Fogel and Robert Higgs every time.

The "industrial revolution" began long before slavery and not in the US. It began it the Dutch Republic in the 17th century with windmill powered factories. Ship building was the leading industry.

Slavery was clearly profitable or people would not have owned slaves. But the post-war expansion of cotton growing in the US proved that paid labor was much more efficient than slaves. Even George Washington wrote about the economic fallacies of slavery.

The Black Count, a Pulitzer Prize winning book about General Alex Dumas, includes a wonderful history of slavery as it evolved from Aristotle's speculation that slavery was necessary to democracy and white "slav" slavery to the predominately black form. In the colonial production of sugar slavery was clearly important. The wealth created from the sugar plantations clearly helped fund the intellectual products during the Age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution that followed.

We don't have the capability to model slavery's impact on technological progress with any rigor.

It is a natural experiment of phenomenal complexity that was sparsely documented and lacked a control group or the data to use methods of Heckman and others.

Counterfactuals are in the very fabric of discussions about the causal effects of anything. Marginal analysis in any form implies counterfactuals.

The discussion of the importance of slavery to the industrial revolution is an instance of Bertrand Russell's frivolous game in which we ask what the world would be like if Cleopatra's nose had been an inch longer.

This isn't that complex.

Historians say that slavery was very important to the social and political history of America. This is correct.

Economists say that slavery's earlier extinction wouldn't have much changed the growth path or rate of industrialization in America. This is probably correct or at least a very reasonable argument.

Historians -- and others -- get apoplectic because they desperately want everyone to agree that slavery was a tragic evil -- which it was -- so they put their fingers in their ears and misunderstand the economists.

Slavery was very important in American history but it didn't much change the rate of growth or industrialization.

Slavery? So what? Africa has been the centre of slave trading since time immemorial and continues to this day.
The industrial revolution in Britain involved the enslavement of millions of people to work in factories, down mines and on farms. These were all white persons sent to early graves from coal-miners silicosis/peumoconiosis, poor working conditions in factories often supported by child labour and farmworkers paying landowner's their life savings to be tenant farmer's or just tenants. All were impoverished in the process.
Of course slavery is wrong just as abuse of labour is always wrong. It's not a white on black, white on white or black on black issue but an issue of man's inhumanity. When there is a source of excess labour, any man will do anything to advance his position and attempt wealth creation. For negroes to place some perspective into their history, it is time they realised how lucky they were to have been carted off to America instead of maintaining a life on the continent of their origins to face genocide, corruption and certain death of biblical proportions at the hands of their fellow Africans.

Suppose on one hand you have a very detailed description of cell division & on the other hand you have an explanation of cell division. There may be less difference than you imagine. But the most important thing to remember about the past is that it's over. It's history. Evolution is more interesting in that it isn't over & theory (explanation) provides clues.

But economists do not lack any way to capture the historical importance of slavery outside of its effect on growth and GDP. It's just that the effect on growth is the focus of this study.

Re slavery: Cotton is a red herring. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean were the major source of the capital that funded the industrial revolution.

Re railways : It is depressing that economics persists in undervaluing transport investment ex ante. In Fogel, the 'dismal science' found someone who could also undervalue them ex post facto.

You write both: "[H]ad slavery in America been abolished much earlier, the industrial revolution would probably have unfolded much as it actually did, and today's economy would not look vastly different than it does"

But also: "[T]he institution of slavery has been a fundamental influence on nearly every aspect of American history and society and politics."

Well, which is it? If the second claim isn't to turn the first on its head, there's presumably a way to isolate economy from history, society and politics. Perhaps there is. But even were that trick pulled off, the same demand for counterfactual-based explanation would apply to the claim about slavery's pervasive effect on American society. How, on the causal standard required, do we know that the social flaws you see were due to slavery?

Is there a general snag here for "economistic" folk who tend either to see economics behind everything in life or who take economics for sealed in its own domain. When such folk say, "x doesn't matter economically", it's natural for the rest of us to drop the adverb and hear "x doesn't matter".

Fascinating blog, thanks, Edmund Fawcett

Looking for proper positioning of slavery in the context of capitalism I'd rather go back to Max Weber. He clearly demonstrated how superior, in purely economic terms of greater efficiency and innovation, a non-slave free-work system was in comparison to slave-based one.
To this you can add his analysis of economic and social system, and puritan ethics and work morale predominant in northern colonies; and how this culture, promoting entrepreneurship and value of individual work finally achieved a big win over sclerotic socio-economic culture of Southern states, based on slavery, lavish consumption and big monopolies.
In this whole context the historians-v-economists debate,presented in the article, over the role and possible merits of slavery for economic development seems completely irrelevant.

Found the book challenging for its detail and slave narratives. I recommend it and an open mind. Many quotes from the president to enslavers and the enslaved resonate with things I've heard around my home and community and deduced from socio-economic experience, particularly now. The denigration and denial of education resonates especially in Little Rock, Arkansas today. The nations largest international company based in this state supports charter schools while not having one store in Food Desert inner yet small city that is the Black Community. #Walmart.

Strikingly, Fogel concluded that railroads mattered, but only a bit; alternatives like canals weren't much costlier and could have expanded and improved in much the way that railroads did over the second half of the century.

It appears from this that Mr Fogel is ignorant not only of economics but of geography. It is hard to imagine any way in which a canal could have substituted for the transcontinental railroad. And that is just the most dramatic of the places where a canal would simply not be feasible.

Author did not read Baptist's book. Oops.

"I find myself wondering if it is stranger that historians feel it important to establish that slavery—which is so obviously a foundational, definitional part of America—must also have mattered in this particular economic way; or that economists lack any way to capture the historical importance of slavery outside of its effect on growth and GDP."
Add both to your list of distortions of thought and action caused in every corner of American life by the crime of people owning other people.