THE OLDEST BARGAIN
Slavery from the First Harvest to the Last Plantation — and the Machines That Changed Everything BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front: Slavery did not begin with slave ships. It began with agriculture. When human societies settled into sedentary farming some 11,000 years ago, they created for the first time the conditions — concentrated surplus, fixed settlements, labor-intensive production — that made the systematic coercion of human beings both possible and profitable. What followed was a continuous 10,000-year history of bondage spanning every major civilization on earth, culminating in the Atlantic slave trade's forced displacement of 12.5 million Africans between 1492 and 1867. That trade's end was inseparable from another revolution: the substitution of coal and oil for human muscle, which made the free labor of machines cheaper than the coerced labor of enslaved persons. Today, the average American commands the energy equivalent of more than 200 human laborers working around the ...