slave economy
Unpaid workforce production
A slave economy is an economic system in which enslaved people provide the primary labor force, with their unpaid work generating wealth for slaveholders.
The term typically describes societies where slavery was central to production rather than incidental—the antebellum American South, Caribbean sugar colonies, ancient Rome.
The plantation slave economy depended on cotton exports.
- plantation agricultureLarge-scale single-crop farming
- field handsAgricultural manual laborers
- plantation ownersLarge-scale agricultural landholders
- antebellum SouthPre-1861 slave states
- human rights violationsBreaches of basic dignities
abolitionist movement · auction block · systemic oppression · mercantilism · human trafficking · Middle Passage · exploitation · racial hierarchy · Ottoman Empire · civil rights movement · triangular trade · sugar industry · indentured servitude · cash crops · dehumanization · King Cotton · mining operations · social stratification
- economic systemscapitalism, mercantilism, communism, feudalism, socialism
- Economic ErasGreat Depression, Industrial Revolution, Gilded Age, Roaring Twenties, Great Recession
- Caribbean Slaveryplantation, sugar plantations, abolitionists, Jamaica, Barbados
- Latin American Economicsimport substitution, debt crisis, hyperinflation, foreign debt, currency devaluation
- Northern MissouriAlbany, Bethany, Boonville, Brookfield, Cameron
slave economyfree market economy
free enterprise · market economy · industrial economy · feudal economy
slave, economy, slaves, slaved, slaving, slavish, slavishly, slavery, enslaved