I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.
This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.
I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)
(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)
The postan thesis states that labor relations in europe in the middle ages are dependent on demography. Esentially tenancy was phsed out because after the black death labor was scarce. Then worker co ditio s deteriorated as population increased. And ultimatley this rezulted in landlessnes and proletarization(wage labor).
We can extend the model further so that in an early state you lack agrarian peasents so you have to go and kidnap hunter gatherers to do yohr work for you. A sitjation similar to tjat descrived in against the grain by sc scot.
Then as your population increases you have more poor people to work the fields and it becomes less profitable to go and kidnap slaves. Eventually your poor are enough that the landlord can negotiate an extreamly one sided tenancy agreement.
So wage labor would be the other side of the coin from tenancy demografically speaking.
For sources:
The brener debate is a book arguing against the postan thesis also incluedes postans original article. I dont necesarily agree but its a good read.
Koepke has an article calculating the optimal feeding for slaves taking into acount the capital cost of buyng them. In another article he shows slaves were taller and thus better fed during childhood than free whites during antebellum south.
You can probably find them by searching gor koepke antropometry. Both scots book and tge brener debate should be free on libgen.
As for why slavers were against it. They already had huge capital invested in the system.
In order to formalize this a bit:
Mpl(l) marginal productivity of labor. Is the value aded by the ith worker. in neoliberal theology this is very close to the wage (or other labor relationships) because if one capitalist offers too litle the next one will ofer a bit more. But no one will offer more than the mpl. In reality it is less because there is coertion and social institutions that favor the ruling clases.
The mpl is always declining with respect to labor. Because the most productive tasks are filled first.
The average productivity of labor is the sum or integral of the mpl at every worker divided by the amount of workers. This is decreasing at a slower rate than mpl.
The substraction of one from the other is the profit the capitalit or landlord gets. At the begining both look very similar so there is little profit to extract. So you see the maximum amount of coertion: Slavery.
However coertion has a cost and as mpl decreases the sulprus value you can expropiate by force also decreases until it is less than the cost of the original coertion so you use other methods. Prehaphs you transiion to some form of share croping system from a slave society.
As for the argument that slaves are only viable for low complexity tasks imagine a society with both low and high complexity tasks. Training a worker to do the later is very expensive but since there are are few of this types their mpl os very high with respect to apl so you cant profit from them. So you can theoretically have a wage market for low complexity tasks and slavery for pmcs.
This is the case in medieval islamic societies. And to an extent in imperial societies from ancient assyria to china were scrives and high end beurocrats would be property of the king.