Slavery and Market Society?

Question

how did slavery function in a market society? lets say during pre american civil war era.

Answer 1

You should read contemporary books on it. I had read a great book on slavery from around 1810, but I have forgotten the title. It was basically a book on the care and feeding of slaves, basically cattle husbandry.

There are a couple of distinct issues present here. First, you are not carefully looking at the use of the phrase "market society." In a market society, labor is traded freely. In slavery, you have suspended the market society. If, using the ideas of the time, you look at slaves as capital instead of people, then you need to look at the marginal product of capital and the marginal product of labor for physical capital, free labor and slaves.

Viewing slaves as cattle, one would expect the marginal product of capital to be very low. This is of course because they are humans not cattle. The laws holding them in slavery are market restricting laws. The law prohibits the free sale of labor. So the second issue is whether a market economy actually existed. Is there a market economy when the government controls part of the market in favor of the politically powerful?

Plenty of slavery data does in fact exist as well as price, interest rate, inflation and monetary data. A good place to start on interest, money, inflation and prices is Peter Temin's "The Jacksonian Economy." It might instead be titled "Jacksonian Economics." It has been a long time since I have read it.

A serious paper on this could be very valuable. The north became very rich because of its use of free markets and the ability to convert capital into productive output. The south became increasingly poor over the same period. This implies that the lack of free market workings limited the ability of the southern economy to thrive. It is likely that plantation owners were in a "prisoner's dilemma." Had the eschewed the methods of their competitors, their plantations would not have been profitable. Had they developed a viable alternative to slaves with machinery, they would have found themselves trapped with millions of slaves who were out of work. That also would have been a dangerous situation.