Productivity Growth of Enslaved Workers

Abstract In this article, we seek to explain the increase in cotton output per enslaved worker in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. As we will see, there is considerable evidence that slave owners increased monitoring and pushed enslaved workers to labor more intensely as the antebellum period progressed. Consequently, the rise of industrial capitalism in the United States and Europe with its accelerating demand for cotton intensified slavery in the southern United States – not only in terms of the number of enslaved workers it encompassed and its geographic expansion from the upper to the lower South – but also in terms of the intensity under which enslaved workers were forced to toil.