Abstract
Slaves do not want to be enslaved, so they resist, which creates large control costs that enslavers try to foist off onto taxpayers and others. This chapter examines the considerable costs to society of protecting slaves, non-slaves, and enslavers from themselves and each other, as well as other public control costs and the costs of interdicting slave trading and restoring freed slaves to productive economic roles. It also sums up all the costs surveyed in Chaps. 6 and 7 and argues that they greatly outweigh the economic benefits generated by the profitability of slavery (Chap. 5), especially when considered as a marginal analysis. In other words, only a small part of enslavers’ profits are attributable to slavery as enslavers would earn profits almost as high had they used a freer form of labor.
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Wright, R.E. (2017). That Which Is Unseen II: Slavery’s Hidden Costs. In: The Poverty of Slavery. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48968-1_7
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