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Lovat69 t1_iqzbr86 wrote

I'm no historian and this is a very off the cuff answer with next to no sources. But according to my history teacher. When you have slaves you don't need an industrial revolution. There's no impetus to bother with all the work of setting up the complicated logistics it requires.

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BobbyP27 t1_iqzjvqc wrote

Not exactly. While slaves don’t need to be paid, they are not free to keep, and there is a limit to what one slave can do in a day. If you are working with high value products, there is also the problem that an unwilling workforce (slaves) has the potential to destroy a lot of value simply due to being uninterested in doing a good job.

If a factory machine can produce more in a day than 10 manual workers and require 1 operator, but if the operator neglects their job the machine gets badly broken, it is far more economically advantageous to have 1 happy, paid worker to run the machine than 5 slaves whose cost is the same as the paid worker doing the job by hand.

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