Selective Consciousness of the Evils of Slavery

Brad Delong’s Blog: Grasping Reality With Both Hands HERE, 14 January:

“Modern Liberalism and Libertarianism: An Economist's View” contains a most interesting piece by Brad, followed by an intelligent comments column from his readers.

Brad states in his text:

‘on issues of the persistence of "unfree" labor--Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery, but ending slavery took a war, and the market economy in America did not appear to be doing very much at all to undermine Jim Crow...”

Roger Koppl, an alert reader (a worthy person, obviously, and more than welcome to comment on Lost Legacy) posted a comment:

"Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery."

“Huh?
Smith lamented, "This institution therefore of slavery, which has taken place in the beginning of every society, has hardly any possibility of being abolished." Though unproductive in Smith's eyes, slavery persists because of the "love of domination and tyrannizing." (Lectures; 1762-3, 114-117, pp. 186-187 of my Glasgow edition.

Comment
Excellent use of evidence to contradict a careless (Brad DeLong is too good an economist, who normally knows exactly what Adam Smith, and many others, wrote, for him to be absolutely ‘wrong’ in an aside by one of the busiest Bloggers on the Internet – Brad runs several Blogs simultaneously, as well as a heavy teaching and research programme.

But Roger Koppl is right and Brad, alas, is, er, not.

Public comment in Britain and North America, aided by endless television repetitions that ‘slavery’ means the ‘slave trade’ from Africa to the USA, is almost completely blind to the fact that slavery from Africa to the Arab Middle East, classical Europe, and all countries to the East, persisted for thousands of years (note the number of African slaves in ancient Egypt) long before America was ‘discovered’.

The appalling practice of slavery was widespread in Eastern Europe and Russia at the time Smith was writing Wealth Of Nations, and Smith was pessimistic that it would ever be abolished.

The camel-led slave-trading 'trains' that left sub-tropical Africa to cross the Sahara, hardly penetrate public consciousness in the way that the African slave ships, made visual by film and television, which only show of the lesser, and shorter in calendar time (though no less evil), slave trade to America.

Not only were Arab traders active in the overland slave trade, they were often the local slave agents active in supplying slaves to slave trading ships from Europe for the American and Caribbean markets.

When the American market was closed eventually by the self-imposed political action of the governments of the USA, Britain, and other European countries, the Arab slave traders continued their despicable trade north across the Sahara, and by sea along the East African coast.