Link: No, Mehdi Hasan, slavery didn’t build America
The article points out that slavery was evil. It also argues it is not a feature of capitalism and that slavery was not a net benefit to the United States economy.
Quotes from Article:
Adam Smith, a big influence on many of the founders, was a vehement critic of slavery and indentured servitude on both moral and economic grounds. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith brands slavery the “vilest of all states.” In Wealth of Nations, he argues that slave labor is the most unproductive and expensive of all labor because it necessitates everything be “squeezed out” of a slave “by violence only.”
Indeed, it might come as a shock to a lot of progressive Democrats that the greatest slave trading empire in history was run by Arabs. It was the abolitionist British, spurred by a Christian awakening, that finally moved to stop slavery in their own dominion and then the entire slave trade, which was a feature of the Islamic world from Muhammad into the 20th century.
