Questions for seminar 4
Hello everyone,
See the questions for seminar 4 below. There are no particular recommended readings from the syllabus this week. If you need inspiration for discussing the questions, I would suggest Google (or your preferred search engine). It is in my experience a very efficient tool, but it is especially effective if you use it before the seminar and not during. See you next week!
- Adam Smith says in Wealth of Nations ‘’The wear and tear of a slave ..is at the expence of his master; but that of a free servant is at his own expence.’’ What does it mean? If true, what implications may the statement have for our understanding of slavery?
- Slavery and forced labor are said to be the most common form of labor transactions in history. We invite you to speculate:
- How would you understand and define forced labor compared to free labor?
- What gives slave owners power over the slaves?
- How does coercion affect labor effort – do you think?
- When – under what conditions – is labor most likely transacted in free markets rather than in relationships of coercion? What role may labor scarcity imply for coercion versus free labor?
- How free is free labor?
- Give a critical discussion of the each paragraph in the following text (from the Gilder Lehrman institute of American History)
‘’American plantations were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. In the Caribbean, slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding 150 slaves or more. In the American South, in contrast, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand slaves, and just 125 had over 250 slaves.
In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of US slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
US slaves were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US slaves were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans.
Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half.’’
4. Give a brief overview of ‘modern slave labor’, see for instance the from the international labor organization (ILO)