Changing history

[Rhondazvous]

The US obviously didn't need slavery. In fact it only became an economic superpower when it was abolished. I think there are several good arguments that slavery actually retarded development, both in the US and globally. When you have access to cheap slave labor you have no incentive to create labor saving systems of devices and I think it is not a coincidence that those were invented around the time of the abolition of slavery. In fact Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, made this very same argument. Also lots of countries had just as much invested in slavery. Look at how many slaves were in the British or French empires and they let them go without a war. This is just moral excuse making.

No the US and no other country needed slavery, ever.

While it's true that slavery does cripple a nation's economy, it was hard for them to realize that. For a while in the early 1800s slavery was dying out because it just wasn't cost-effective for small farmers to keep slaves. Then commercial use of the cotton gin spread and made it possible to create large, labor-intensive plantations. Plantation owners realized they could increase their profits if they didn't have to pay everybody, so slavery came back with a vengeance.

No country needs slavery and yet, the structure of the world market is based on the world-wide slave trade.