Long-Term Viability of Slavery in a Backward Closed Economy

Abstract

Long-Term Viability of Slavery in a Backward Closed Economy As in other areas, professional views in economic history are often based on a few outstanding case studies. As brilliant as these may be, however, the circumstances present in those instances may be special, so that the same model estimated in different conditions would lead to very different results. For example, since Conrad and Meyer's pathfinding paper, the impression may have been gained that slavery was a self-sustaining, economically viable form of labor-market organization.I This view of slavery, however, is based on the special case of the ante-bellum United States. Conditions in other slave-owning systems, which were perhaps more typical historically, may have been different, leading to different outcomes. The purpose of this note is to provide some comparative perspective on this question, with a discussion of the experience of another large slave-owning country, nineteenth-century Brazil. The estimates presented in Table I suggest that the absolute number of slaves in Brazil rose until 1850, the year in which large-scale importation of slaves from Africa was stopped. The nineteenth century, however, saw a sharp fall in the percentage of slaves in the population of Brazil. In I819, slaves constituted approximately a quarter to a third of the country's population; in 1872, the figure was down to I5 percent.2 Other estimates, based on shakier data, suggest a larger percentage of slaves in the country's total population at the beginning of the century, and an even steeper decline.3 By the time abolition came in