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Estimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth‐century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this paper, we use data on enslaved person valuations to calculate the contribution made by enslaved workers to regional and national gross national product (GNP) in 1839 and 1859 and to the growth in per capita output in the 20 years before the Civil War. We find that in the United States, enslaved workers were responsible for somewhere between 12.49 per cent and 18.0 per cent of the increase in output per capita between 1839 and 1859. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build an overlapping generations model to analyse the evolution of inequality as an economy develops. Our model economy resembles a 'very capitalist society'. Initially, wealth is exclusively concentrated in a rich dynasty. We ask whether or not this type of capitalist economy contains a fundamental contradiction, as claimed by Piketty in his recent book. We derive a condition under which the economy is driven to a state of perpetual inequality. However, we also show that an economy where capital deepening triggers the development process is very unlikely to be absorbed in that state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between the economy's long‐run growth rate, its capital‐income ratio, and its factor income distribution? A satisfactory answer requires an endogenous growth and savings rate. We scrutinize Piketty's (2014) theory in a richly parameterized variant of Romer's (1990) seminal model with and without population growth. The economy's growth and savings rate are exogenous in Piketty's theory and endogenous in Romer's. In contrast to Piketty's Second Fundamental Law of Capitalism a smaller growth rate may be associated with a smaller capital‐income ratio. Moreover, it may go together with a greater or a smaller capital share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the 'Williams thesis': that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth‐century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti‐slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]