I have often said that the oligarchs were very clever in abolishing slavery...
In business, the biggest cost is labour; with slavery, profits were weighed down/eaten up by the costs of keeping slaves - housing, feeding, keeping them healthy...
By freeing slaves, the oligarchs transferred most of their costs back onto the slaves, who continued to work for almost nothing because they still had to, to survive...
And then they lost those jobs to industrialisation and the mechanisation of plantation agriculture...
Abolishing slavery was not a humanitarian act; if it was, the abolitionists would have ensured the newly-freed slaves had a life of dignity to go to - which, supposedly, was the whole justification for the anti-slavery movement...
What is humanitarian about letting beings out of cages, setting them free, sending them off into the wild to fend for themselves without giving them the skills and means to do so?
We don't do that with animals we re-introduce to the wild, but we did it with people...
Abolition was a con...
On the other hand...
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