S. David Sultzer's essay, "The Greatness of Capitalism and Slavery's Negligible Impact," nails a truth that's often drowned out by politically charged narratives: America's wealth wasn't built on the backs of slaves, but on the engine of capitalism. As someone who's looked at the numbers and the history, I agree with Sultzer's core argument. The explosive growth of prosperity in the Western world, particularly in the United States, is a story of markets, innovation, and human ingenuity, not the exploitation of enslaved labor. Let's break it down, leaning on the evidence Sultzer provides and adding some perspective to show why this view holds up.
For most of human history, economic life was a flatline. As Sultzer points out, citing Our World in Data, the average person's income barely budged for centuries, stuck at subsistence levels, scraping by to support a tiny elite of royals and nobles. From the Bronze Age to the 17th century, your average Joe's shelter, food, and clothing looked eerily similar, no matter the era. Imagine living in a world where your great-grandkids would use the same crude tools and eat the same meagre meals as you. That was reality for millennia.
Then came the Age of Discovery, kicking off with Columbus's voyages in 1492. Trade routes opened, colonies formed, and mercantilism laid the groundwork for something bigger. By 1776, when Adam Smith dropped The Wealth of Nations, capitalism as a coherent system took shape. This wasn't just a new way of trading goods, it was a revolution in how wealth was created. Suddenly, markets rewarded innovation, efficiency, and scale. The result? A middle class emerged, and incomes began to climb in ways unimaginable to prior generations.
Sultzer's reference to Our World in Data paints a stark picture. Before capitalism, global per capita income hovered around £1,051 (in adjusted terms). Fast forward to today, and it's over £30,000, a 29-fold increase. That's not just growth; it's a transformation. An average person in the UK now earns in two weeks what their ancestors earned in a year. This isn't abstract economics, it's a revolution in living standards, from electricity to indoor plumbing to smartphones. No other system, not communism nor socialism, has come close to matching this. The Soviet Union, for example, collapsed in 1991 with a GDP about a third of the U.S.'s, a testament to central planning's failure.
The essay's chart (not shown here but described vividly) underscores this. If you plotted global GDP from the year 1000, or even the Bronze Age, it's a flat line until the capitalist era, when it shoots upward like a rocket. That's not the work of any single industry or labour system; it's the power of markets unleashing human potential.
Now, let's tackle the claim that slavery built America's wealth, a narrative pushed by figures like Mehdi Hassan and some House Democrats, who in 2021 floated reparations figures as high as $14 trillion. Sultzer calls this "unmoored from reality," and he's right. The data doesn't lie. At the time of the Civil War, only 2% of Americans owned slaves, a tiny fraction. "King Cotton," often romanticised as the backbone of early American wealth, accounted for just 5% of GDP. That's significant but hardly the foundation of a nation's economy.
If slavery was the cornerstone of U.S. prosperity, its abolition in 1865 should've tanked the economy. Yet, as Sultzer notes, GDP grew steadily through the Civil War era: $2.66 billion in 1850, $4.41 billion in 1860, and $7.90 billion by 1870. No depression, no collapse, just growth. This suggests slavery was a peripheral factor, not a driver. Capitalism, with its ability to adapt and innovate, kept the engine running, war or no war.
Slavery, let's be clear, was a moral abomination. But tying it to America's wealth distorts history. It existed under capitalism, sure, but it wasn't a feature of it. Capitalism thrived before, during, and after slavery's end, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The system's strength lies in its flexibility, rewarding those who create value, not those who exploit.
Sultzer's point about communism and socialism is spot-on. Look at the scoreboard: no communist or socialist economy has ever rivalled capitalism's wealth creation. The Soviet Union's implosion is a case study in failure, with empty shelves and stagnant growth. Even Europe's so-called "socialist" golden age after World War II, as Sultzer notes, leaned heavily on American subsidies through the Marshall Plan. Without U.S. capital, those welfare states wouldn't have looked so rosy.
Capitalism isn't perfect, it's messy, unequal at times, and prone to excesses. But it's the only system that's consistently lifted billions out of poverty. From the Industrial Revolution to the tech boom, it's driven innovation and opportunity. Compare that to Venezuela's collapse under socialism or China's pivot to market reforms to escape Mao's economic disasters. The evidence is clear: capitalism works.
The narrative that slavery built America's wealth isn't just historically shaky, it's divisive. It fuels demands for reparations based on exaggerated economic impacts while ignoring the real driver of prosperity: a system that rewards creativity and hard work. By focusing on slavery's supposed centrality, we risk undervaluing the broader story of human progress through markets. Worse, it distracts from the fight against modern threats to prosperity, like creeping collectivism or overregulation.
Sultzer's call to "defeat communism for the good of the Western world" might sound dramatic, but it's rooted in a truth: ideologies that stifle markets stifle progress. Capitalism isn't just a system; it's a mindset that trusts individuals to build, innovate, and thrive. Slavery, by contrast, was a dead-end system, morally and economically. It contributed little to the West's greatness, and pretending otherwise distorts the past and misguides the future.
Sultzer's essay cuts through the noise with hard data and clear reasoning. Capitalism, not slavery, built the wealth we enjoy today. The numbers, 2% slaveholders, 5% GDP from cotton, and uninterrupted growth post-1865, debunk the myth of slavery's economic dominance. Meanwhile, the 29-fold income surge since the capitalist revolution tells the real story. The lesson is clear: bet on markets, not woke myths, for a prosperous future.