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In my paper “Industrial Slavery: The efficiency of the slave system,” I want to look at the structure of slavery as an efficient, industrial system. Often, slavery is thought of or taught as a backwards, agricultural, feudal society that does not relate to the great industrial might of “advanced economies.” The very nature of the slave system and slave owners is portrayed as almost bumbling through land acquisition, slave trading, and simplistic systems of punishment in order to produce profit. Often slave owners are seen as sacrificing technological advancement or machine efficiency because they have grown lazy by a dependence upon slaves. My paper will focus in on how historians have shifted this narrative to the argument that slave owners and traders methodically created systems that were not only advanced, but mirrored the industrial centers of the world in the efficiency of production and maximization of product. This was not lucky or born out of massive land holdings, but rather the deliberate structuring of a slave society that focused upon efficiency of labor and production in order to maximize profit in concert with their industrialized neighbors (in the north or around the world).
In order to trace how historians have approached this issue, I will need to focus on a few key questions. First, in what ways have historians tracked the slave trade itself as a “factory” of efficient production of labor? How did slave traders create efficient methods or systems in order to obtain and control slaves in transit to sale? Second, did plantation owners create methods of control in order to exact maximum efficiency from a labor force that had no incentive to work hard? In what ways was punishment used as a means of efficient production? And finally, how did the slave system use technological advancements or structures in order to get mass amounts of product to market?
There are many primary sources that could be addressed for this study. First is always the eyewitness slave accounts that detail the treatment and methods of slavery (Northup, Equiano, Douglas, etc.). These sources are valuable for a slave perspective and also provide interesting issues of validity as many have been questioned for their authenticity as abolitionist tracts. There are also documented records and census data of cotton production and exports from southern ports. Slave trade databases can also be a good place to achieve numbers and figures that explain the vast amount of people that crossed the Atlantic. This could be valuable when assessing the efficiency of the trade in human labor. I am interested to look into slave owner documentation as a way to trace how much they thought about efficiency of the slave system. I would specifically want to see if there is language that points to methodical methods that may be industrial in nature.