The Economics of Slavery - Calculated, Recorded, and Exploited

When Americans think about slavery, the picture is often a familiar one: men and women bent over fields of cotton or rice, driven by the lash, forced to labor from sunup to sundown. That picture is accurate—but it is incomplete. It depicts violence yet conceals the design. It reveals the suffering, but not the machinery that made such suffering profitable, repeatable, and enduring.

Slavery in the United States was not only a brutal labor system. It was a carefully constructed economic and psychological enterprise. Every stage of an enslaved person’s life—from birth to death—was calculated, recorded, and exploited. Human beings were reduced to numbers in ledgers, risks in insurance policies, and assets in loan agreements. What follows is not a catalogue of isolated cruelties, but an examination of how slavery functioned as an organized business, sustained by law, finance, and deliberate psychological control.

Sources:

Slave Insurance: How Slave Masters in the US Profited from the Death and Injuries of Enslaved Africans - TalkAfricana

Stockmen Trade: The 19th Century Practice of Renting Enslaved Men to Plantation Owners for Breeding in America - TalkAfricana

The Great Slave Auction of 1859: The Largest Single Sale of Enslaved Africans in U.S History - TalkAfricana

The Ruthless Methods White Enslavers Used to Shape Enslaved Africans into the “Perfect Slave” - TalkAfricana

We Can’t Understand Capitalism Without Understanding Slavery - CounterPunch.org