How viable would a plantation slave economy be in the modern world?

What high-skilled jobs? I assume you mean stuff like artisanship. Even today many people don't understand how much skill it takes, because they label it as "physical labour", under impression "physical labour"="unskilled labour".
Blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons, brickmakers, etc. Skilled artisans were if anything higher status in the nineteenth century than today, with the general term "mechanic" (meaning skilled artisan) being a recognised one and at least the equivalent of middle-class status.

According to this source here, the records of Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate, at the time of his death reveal that more than one-quarter of the slaves there were classified as skilled workers (carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, coopers, millers, distillers, spinners, weavers, and seamstresses). This proportion at Mount Vernon may well be higher than the norm, but there were certainly enough skilled slaves to form a significant social class.

Slaves were not permitted to learn to write or read in many states, which demonstrates that most people were not able to cope with the concept easily, even though over time, there will less and less jobs one could do without knowing how to read and white. Even Nazis had official policy that their future slaves were to have basic knowledge of written German to be able to read instruction manuals for their work tools. But then, Nazis had different moral justification for slavery than CSA.
Slaves were mostly forbidden from being taught to read and write because it was considered dangerous, not because there was any doubt that they could learn to read and write. Naturally, there would be no point having laws forbidding teaching slaves to read and write if they were thought to be too dumb to learn.
 
Teaching slaves to read will be increasingly necessary for most jobs, yet it will remain dangerous.

@Jared, What's your take on the case of runaway slave I mentioned?
 
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I remember a case of runaway slave. She was very light skinned. From strictly legal POV, slavemaster was in the right. He had documents to prove she was his, and demander her returned, trial was just formality.
Woman's lawyers arguing that "she looks white, she acts white, she's obviously smart and educated, how possibly she could be slave? Are you gonna trust some scrap of paper, or your own eyes?"
Jury seemngly couldn't comprehend white-looking, intellectually bright slave, and declared her free.
Appearing bright would certainly have helped, but I suspect that the whiteness was the decisive factor. The South's racial classification system had in part a practical bent: when patrolling or otherwise checking for would-be runaway slaves, it helps to be able to check if someone is deemed "black". Someone deemed black might be free, but is probably a slave, and so can be safely arrested and checked later. Someone who looks white is almost certainly free, and stopping to arrest all of them is both impractical and likely to offend any wealthy people.
 
Quick comparative case. Uzbekistan's Cotton exports account for 15-20% of Uzbek exports. Because the Cotton industry is majority state-owned, the Uzbek government forces tens of thousands of public servants to leave their office jobs to work on the Cotton fields during the harvesting season without pay. This also includes child labor from children as young as 9.

This is to say that there appears to still be an economic value to choosing labour over capital in agricultural harvesting. But I don't know how industrialised Uzbek agriculture is.

The other thing is that unlike plantation slavery I'm under the impression that the Uzbek harvesters live otherwise 'normal' lives except for during the Cotton harvesting season so Maybe more akin to semi-plantation slavery.
 
I remember a case of runaway slave. She was very light skinned. From strictly legal POV, slavemaster was in the right. He had documents to prove she was his, and demand her returned, trial was just formality.
Woman's lawyers arguing that "she looks white, she acts white, she's obviously smart and educated, how possibly she could be slave? Are you gonna trust some scrap of paper, or your own eyes?"
Jury seemngly couldn't comprehend white-looking, intellectually bright slave, and declared her free.

Ok, that's got to be one of the most hilarious things I've heard. How did the slaver get a correct identification anyways? Even if he knows his slave looks white, without a photograph how was he sure this white woman was his slave? Did the woman's lawyers believe themselves, or did they know their client was the slave? Most factually guilty clients who go to trial, lie to their lawyer, thinking that confessing to him is the same as confessing to the court.

"Jury seemngly couldn't comprehend white-looking, intellectually bright slave, and declared her free" Ha

"Jury seemngly couldn't comprehend white-looking, intellectually bright slave, and declared her free" Phft-chuckle

"Jury seemngly couldn't comprehend white-looking, intellectually bright slave, and declared her free." Ah ha ha ha

Always a bit of black humor from our evil slave owning society.
 
I don't think you'd want slaves in customer facing positions. And overnight stock jobs can be done cheaply with part time labor that you don't need to even pay healthcare costs for. Slavery doesn't fit the needs of retail particularly well.

I mean, you and I wouldn't want to shop at a supermarket staffed by slaves, because we'd find it abhorrent. 19th century white Southerners or their ideologically similar descendants wouldn't mind so much though, I bet.
 
In most of the debates I've seen on whether if the confederacy won the war it would have continued slavery for a long amount of time I've always had this question? Would a plantation style economy where chattel slaves work on an estate in large scale agriculture be a viable economic model, even for a third world country, in modern times? Slavery I think would only last for as long as it benefits the plantation aristocracy, so could they create a modern banana republic like state based on the same model as the Antebellum period? I have heard that modern migrant workers picking crops for agribarons is a similar process and comparable in how it works.
Probably not since anyone who tried would get Sanctions up the ass unless they are literally too irrelevant to be noticed, in which case they won't have much of an economy. Maybe if you had a POD where somehow slavery is wanked that could be different, but writing such a timeline would likely cause a huge controversy on the board, due to how dark it could get.
 
Probably not since anyone who tried would get Sanctions up the ass unless they are literally too irrelevant to be noticed, in which case they won't have much of an economy. Maybe if you had a POD where somehow slavery is wanked that could be different, but writing such a timeline would likely cause a huge controversy on the board, due to how dark it could get.

That TL was written years ago, it's called Decades of Darkness. Because the slavocratic alt-USA is clearly portrayed as evil and not something to emulate it didn't produce much controversy.
 
That TL was written years ago, it's called Decades of Darkness. Because the slavocratic alt-USA is clearly portrayed as evil and not something to emulate it didn't produce much controversy.
I don't think I ever got around to reading that one. The description seemed a little too grimdark for my tastes.
 
I don't think I ever got around to reading that one. The description seemed a little too grimdark for my tastes.

I would recommend it. TBH I don't know how grimdark it is from a global perspective, though it feels that way to a US and probably Latin American reader. The Americas are a mess but Europe is OK, China and Russia are better off and Africa isnt worse than OTL at least.

Jared upthread wrote it some time ago and it's an interesting look at an alternate US where Manifest Destiny really ran amok. And a New England on its own.

Read it! It isn't that long compared to Look to the West or Male' Rising and it's a classic of the site.
 
I would recommend it. TBH I don't know how grimdark it is from a global perspective, though it feels that way to a US and probably Latin American reader. The Americas are a mess but Europe is OK, China and Russia are better off and Africa isnt worse than OTL at least.

Jared upthread wrote it some time ago and it's an interesting look at an alternate US where Manifest Destiny really ran amok. And a New England on its own.

Read it! It isn't that long compared to Look to the West or Male' Rising and it's a classic of the site.
Alright I'll check it out

Edit:
>Jefferson dies
NOOOOO!!!
 
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