"Slaves were the main" asset "of the planters in the south of the United States"

Nicolas Barreyre, lecturer at the Center for North American Studies of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), describes the quarrels between historians in the United States over what the development of capitalism owes to slavery at the beginning of the XIX^e century.

What was the role of the large slave plantations in the southern United States in the American economy until the American Civil War (1861-1865), which ended slavery?

In the 1970s, the prevailing view among historians, as among economists, was that the enslaved South lived in an inefficient and unprofitable precapitalist economy that could not survive against the North, engaged from the beginning of the XIX^e century in the industrial and capitalist revolution. But after the 2008 crisis, historians have once again looked at the origins of the American economic system, forging what has been called "the new history of capitalism".

The idea is that the slave economy of the South was capitalist, that it greatly contributed to the development of capitalism in the North, whose factories "turned" with cotton from the South or supplied the agricultural machinery for plantations, and whose banks were financing and expanding. The demand for cotton was such that in the 1820s there was an explosion in cultivated areas, and therefore in the number of slaves, in the southern states.

But European demand, in full expansion of its textile industry, is also exploding: cotton represents a large part of American exports. The planters finance their investments with British cotton merchants in Liverpool, who then served as bankers. However, the main "collateral" that the planters provide as collateral for their loans is … their slaves. Slaves are indeed their main "asset", and their purchase, their main investment, because at that time the land – taken from the Amerindians – was overabundant.

Do fortunes also build up in the slave trade?

Trafficking, that is to say, the capture of slaves in Africa and their transport, was prohibited from 1808. The bulk of the slave trade to the United States was held by British merchants. But the domestic market in the United States, between planters, continues.

This interpretation of the driving role of the plantation economy in the expansion of capitalism is disputed by other historians. Why ?

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