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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?

The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.

Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.

And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.

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> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?

Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.

> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.

The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.

> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.

Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.

"Oxen? Paid laborers? "

In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.

I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.

But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.

"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."

Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)

And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?

"it was at least in part cultural."

Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.

> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.

Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.

> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.

There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.

> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.

What we'd now call the developed world.

That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.

"What we'd now call the developed world."

The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.

I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?

"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"

Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.

Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.

> The Russians you mention managed it in 1723

In 1861.

The link lists this in 1723:

> Peter the Great converts all house slaves into house serfs, effectively making slavery illegal in Russia.

1861 ditches serfdom, too.

Yep. The power of rebranding.

Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.

And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.

> This is a system stretching over millennia

not quite. 'Slavery' has been around that long. 'Chattel Slavery' started in the 1600s and peaked in the 1800s. So like, half a millenia.

Chattel slavery in the Islamic world definitely predates the 1600s. By a thousand years or so.

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