Capitalism and Slavery

Was it just me or did anyone else notice how significant the triangular trade became? In most of my classes, that part gets a triangle shape on the board with a few arrows telling you which direction everything goes. I do not remember anyone ever connecting infant capitalism with slavery before.

But it makes sense. For the Industrial Revolution to be successful, it needed a large labor pool that could be paid cheaply and individual workers who were replaceable with the rest of the labor pool willing to do anything for a job. It's what made strikes so difficult and allowed a relative few to gain huge fortunes in a small amount of time.

But infant capitalism had a large labor pool that didn't even have to be paid. And whenever they died, depending on where in the New World they were taken, they could be replaced by one leg of the triangular trade. Meanwhile, the other two legs enriched the a colonial merchant class and the mother country. The system was self-sustaining.

According to the book, the wealth from this trade is what jump-started England's manufacturing. The same manufacturing that later became the first industrialized power. An industrialized power whose ideas were later stolen by its neighbors and former colonies to begin their own industrialization. Most of the time, history books teach us that slavery was particular to the southern economy. No one ever mentions the North's industrial power may not have even been possible without slavery. It certainly makes the fact that the North was industrialized being part of the reason it won during the Civil War a little ironic.