The British Navy Did A Lot To End Slavery

 

The Economic Impact Of Slavery On 19th Century Land Use

Free men were reluctant to farm in slave states, even though there was plenty of arable land available.

To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border. 

We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side. Half of the border region was half underutilized. This does not support the view that abolition was a costly constraint for landowners. 

Indeed, the lower demand for similar, yet cheaper, land presents a different puzzle: why wouldn’t the yeomen farmers cross the border to fill up empty land in slave states, as was happening in the free states of the Old Northwest? 

On this point, we find evidence of higher wages on the slave side, indicating an aversion of free labor to working in a slave society. This evidence of systemically lower economic performance in slavery-legal areas suggests that the earlier literature on the profitability of plantations was misplaced, or at least incomplete.

From a new NBER working paper by Hoyt Bleakley and Paul Rhode.

Why Does Oklahoma Have A Panhandle?

This meme isn't true. But the real story is interesting.

The Oklahoma Panhandle derives from one of those "how sausages are made" stories of the legislative process and the sustained fights in Congress over slavery prior to the Civil War. It started with the Missouri Compromise (requiring new northern states over a certain line of latitude to be "free states"). 

This affected the efforts of Texas to be admitted to the United States as a slave state, which gave rise to the Compromise of 1850 that had Texas cede the portions of its territory that violated the Missouri Compromise and tweaked eastern boundary of what would become New Mexico.

Also, the drafting of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was sloppy. It really should have extended the Kansas border further South to the Missouri Compromise line at the 36°30' parallel north. A bill that passed by both houses of Congress, that was vetoed for some reason that isn't obvious by President Garfield in 1886, would have moved the boundary of the Kansas territory south to the Missouri Compromise line.

If this had been done, then what is now the Oklahoma Panhandle would very likely have become part of Colorado and not Oklahoma.

Wikipedia tells the story of how the Oklahoma Panhandle came to be:

The Oklahoma Panhandle (formerly called No Man's Land, the Public Land Strip, the Neutral Strip, or Cimarron Territory) is the extreme northwestern region of the U.S. state of Oklahoma, consisting of Cimarron County, Texas County and Beaver County, from west to east. 

. . .

The Western history of the Panhandle traces its origins as being part of New Spain. 

The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 between Spain and the United States set the western boundary of this portion of the Louisiana Purchase at the 100th meridian. With Mexican independence in 1821, these lands became part of Mexico. With the formation of the Texas Republic, they became part of Texas. When Texas joined the U.S. in 1846, the strip became part of the United States.

. . .

When Texas sought to enter the Union in 1845 as a slave state, federal law in the United States, based on the Missouri Compromise [of 1820], prohibited slavery north of 36°30' parallel north. Under the Compromise of 1850, Texas surrendered its lands north of 36°30' latitude. The 170-mile strip of land, a "neutral strip", was left with no state or territorial ownership from 1850 until 1890. It was officially called the "Public Land Strip" and was commonly referred to as "No Man's Land." The Compromise of 1850 also established the eastern boundary of New Mexico Territory at the 103rd meridian, thus setting the western boundary of the strip. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 set the southern border of Kansas Territory as the 37th parallel. This became the northern boundary of "No Man's Land." 

When Kansas joined the Union in 1861, the western part of Kansas Territory was assigned to the Colorado Territory but did not change the boundary of "No Man's Land."

After the Civil War, cattlemen moved into the area. Gradually they organized themselves into ranches and established their own rules for arranging their land and adjudicating their disputes. There was still confusion over the status of the strip, and some attempts were made to arrange rent with the Cherokees, despite the fact that the Cherokee Outlet ended at the 100th meridian. In 1885, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the strip was not part of the Cherokee Outlet. In 1886, Interior Secretary L. Q. C. Lamar declared the area to be public domain and subject to "squatter's rights". The strip was not yet surveyed, and as that was one of the requirements of the Homestead Act of 1862, the land could not be officially settled. Settlers by the thousands flooded in to assert their "squatter's rights" anyway. They surveyed their own land and by September 1886 had organized a self-governing and self-policing jurisdiction, which they named the Cimarron Territory. Senator Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana introduced a bill in Congress to attach the so-called territory to Kansas. It passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives but was not signed by President Grover Cleveland. The organization of Cimarron Territory began soon after Secretary Lamar declared the area open to settlement by squatters. The settlers formed their own vigilance committees, which organized a board charged with forming a territorial government. The board enacted a preliminary code of law and divided the strip into three districts. They also called for a general election to choose three members from each district to form a government. The elected council met as planned, elected Owen G. Chase as president, and named a full cabinet. They also enacted further laws and divided the strip into five counties (Benton, Beaver, Palo Duro, Optima, and Sunset), three senatorial districts (with three members from each district), and seven delegate districts (with two members from each district). The members from these districts were to be the legislative body for the proposed territory. Elections were held November 8, 1887, and the legislature met for the first time on December 5, 1887. Chase went to Washington, D.C., to lobby for admission to Congress as the delegate from the new territory. He was not recognized by Congress. A group disputing the Chase organization met and elected and sent its own delegate to Washington. A bill was introduced to accept Chase but was never brought to a vote. Neither delegation was able to persuade Congress to accept the new territory. Another delegation went in 1888 but was also unsuccessful. In 1889, the Unassigned Lands to the east of the territory were opened for settlement, and many of the residents went there. The remaining population was generously estimated by Chase at 10,000 after the opening. Ten years later, an actual count revealed a population of 2,548.

The passage of the Organic Act in 1890 assigned Public Land Strip to the new Oklahoma Territory, and ended the short-lived Cimarron Territory aspirations.

Beaver County encompassed the whole Panhandle from 1890 until statehood. . . . "No Man's Land" became Seventh County under the newly organized Oklahoma Territory and was soon renamed Beaver County. Beaver City became the county seat. When Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory were combined in 1907 as the state of Oklahoma, Beaver County was divided into Beaver, Texas, and Cimarron counties. 

The Oklahoma Panhandle had the highest population at its first census in 1910, 32,433 residents, compared to 28,729 in the 2020 census.

Slavery On Colorado's November 2016 Ballot

Slavery was banned by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution right?

Well, only sort of.  Both the 13th Amendment and Colorado's state constitutional counterpart have exceptions to the prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude for punishments for crimes.  Both the federal and Colorado constitutions allow someone to be declared a slave, or more realistically, subjected to a term of forced labor, as punishment for a crime.

But, in this November's election, the state legislature has decided to ask voters to remove the punishment for a crime exception to the slavery and involuntary servitude clause of the state constitution. Inmates could still volunteer to do prison labor or work on a chain gang because there was some benefit to them in doing it, but they couldn't be forced to do so as part of their crime.

For prison inmates, this makes a lot of sense, but it might be worth some thought to determine how, if at all, this would impact sentences of community service for minor misdemeanor or ordinance violations that don't involve incarceration.  My sense is that these sentences are predominantly awarded in plea bargains or at least with defendant consent, and that defendants would consent to this option.  But, I'm not certain.

England Used To Be A Lot Like ISIS

For over a century, English husbands sold their wives at auctions. We argue that wife sales were an institutional response to an unusual constellation of property rights in Industrial Revolution-era English law. 

That constellation simultaneously required most wives to obtain their husbands’ consent to exit their marriages and denied most wives the right to own property. In doing so it precluded direct Coasean divorce bargains between spouses that could dissolve inefficient marriages when wives’ valuation of life outside their marriages was higher than husbands’ valuation of life inside them. To overcome this problem, spouses used wife sales to conduct divorce bargains indirectly. Wife sale auctions achieved this by identifying and leveraging “suitors” — men who valued unhappy wives more than their current husbands, who unhappy wives preferred to their current husbands, and who had the property rights required to buy unhappy wives’ right to exit marriage from their husbands. The resulting transactions enabled unhappy wives in inefficient marriages to exit those marriages where English law otherwise prevented them from doing so.

This is the abstract for Boettke, et al. "Wife Sales" (Review of Behavioral Economics, 2014, 1: 349-379) via the Legal Theory blog whose proprietor notes: "Today is not April First and I did not make this up."

Many of the things we now find most appalling about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) involve corporal punishments, the reinstitution of slavery, its treatment of women, and its treatment of religious minorities, all of which are not that much different than the law of England in the early days of the Industrial Revolution through the Victorian era.

This revelation should give us hope that current practice is not destiny for even the most hardline Islamic countries today, even if they remain Islamic (just as England remained Christian).  And, this historical fact should also cause us to be humble in assuming any inherent ethnic moral superiority.

While I would happily defend the legal regime in modern Western countries as superior to those of the Islamic state, I would also argue that this superiority is the product of cultural innovations that are relatively recent in history which are not exclusive to any one group.

Also, while I again, would argue that the modern Western regime is superior to that ISIS legal regime, it could very well be the case that institutions that we find abhorrent are bad mostly for different reasons than conventional wisdom would suggest, and that they might address problems within the ISIS legal regime as a whole in ways that are not widely understood, in much the same way as the economic analysis of Wife Sales in the linked article explains that benefits of that institution to men and women alike in the legal context in which they took place.

Finally, of course, the existence of Wife Sales, reminds us that what is commonly viewed as "traditional marriage" is a much younger legal institution than is commonly acknowledged.  Older forms of "traditional marriage" would be virtually unrecognizable as such today.

Saudi Arabia Expands Its Meaningless Franchise

The Short History Of Municipal Elections In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, at which time there were about 300,000 slaves in the country (which had a much smaller population than it does now).

Fifty-three years later, it has gotten around to giving women the right to vote (although in fairness, the right to vote in Saudi Arabia for anyone is only ten years old).

This year, Saudi Arabia is, for the first time, allowing women to register to vote in municipal elections under electoral reforms adopted by the King in 2012, following Saudi Arabia's second municipal election.  The 2012 reforms also allowed women to be full members of the 150 member advisory legislative body that makes policy suggestions to the King, if appointed by the King to do so.

The first two municipal elections in Saudi Arabia were all male affairs held in 2005 and 2011 to elect half of the members of a largely powerless municipal council, which is presided over by the regional governor for the region in which the municipality is located and by appointed members making up the other half of the membership of the municipal council.  In those elections, male citizens aged 21 and older who registered to vote were allowed to vote.

In 2011, there were 1,056 council seats with six year terms filled in 285 municipalities (up from 178 municipalities in 2005).

Turnout for municipal elections in Saudi Arabia is a bit lower than turnout for off year local elections in the United States (about 18% of eligible voters and just 2% of the total municipal population in the capitol city of Riyadh in 2005), which is to say, not very high, and the electorate is very conservative.  There was a three week period during which voter registration took place, followed by a single work week during which candidates could file to be placed on the ballot, followed by the election itself held on a single day three and a half months later.

Municipal councils are probably less powerful than a typical American home owner's association with significant regulatory power, assessment rights and property under their control.  Instead, they are more like Denver's neighborhood associations or a typical American student council at a middle school or high school, which provide a means to allow notable people to monitor and to provide friendly input in an organized and recognized manner to a governmental body that has real power  (in Japan and Korea and many institutions of higher education in the U.S., student council's often have more real power).

The Secular Government of Saudi Arabia

The general public in this nation of 30.77 million people will continue to have no right to vote for national government officials (political parties are also banned), as the King in this absolute monarchy has all of the powers of both a European President or constitutional monarch (i.e. "head of state") and of a Prime Minister (i.e. "head of government"). The King has supreme executive, legislative and judicial power. The King appoints a couple of dozen cabinet members, the 150 members of the advisory national legislature whose sole power is to make suggestions to the King, and the thirteen regional governors.  Regional governors, like feudal lords, have judicial as well as executive and legislative powers.

Only four other countries in the world are rated as more authoritarian by The Economist magazine.

The King serves for life and is chosen from the roughly two hundred adult patriline descendants of the first Saudi Arabian King, Abdul Aziz Al Saud, who are "technically" eligible to serve as King.  The ranks of this group of "technically eligible" Princes are narrowed by an "Allegiance Council" (formed in 2007) composed of the first King's sons, the eldest sons of brothers who have died, and the sons of the King and Crown Prince, for a total of 28 members lead by Prince Mishaal, who serve in a capacity similar to a corporate board of directors. The Council generally appoints the person named "Crown Prince" by the previous monarch at the time of his death, generally based on a line of succession that allows a current King to skip the next person in line for good cause.

The current King of Saudi Arabia, who took office in January of this year, is the seventh to serve since the first King created Saudi Arabia through a series of conquests from 1902 to 1932. Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia six year later in 1938. So far, all six of his successors right up the present day, have been his sons, although the current Crown Prince is a grandson of the first King.

Most other leading positions in government in Saudi Arabia are also chosen from the Royal family, although a handful of key positions have been held by exceptional commoners.

Recall that as a state governed by Islamic law, that men can be married to up to four women at a time and can easily divorce and remarry, and affluent royal family members are particularly likely to do so and to have many children. So, it isn't uncommon for older Saudi Arabian men in the royal family to have more than a dozen sons.  The first King had 45 legitimate sons.

The royal family dominates the political system. The family's vast numbers allow it to hold most of the kingdom's important posts and to have an involvement and presence at all levels of government. The number of princes is estimated to be anything from 7,000 upwards, with the most power and influence being wielded by the 200 or so male descendants of King Abdulaziz. The key ministries are generally reserved for the royal
family, as are the thirteen regional governorships. With the large number of family members seeking well paying jobs, critics complain that even "middle management" jobs in the Kingdom out of reach for non-royal Saudis, limiting upward mobility and incentive for commoners to excel.

There is roughly one male Prince in Saudi Arabia per 40,000 people, and, presumably, a similar number of, often closely related, women who were born as Princesses (excluding commoner women who have married Princes).

The real politics in Saudi Arabia are mostly power struggles between various factions within the Royal family, and between religious and secular authorities in Saudi Arabia.

Islamic Religious Leadership and Law In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has lots of well educated citizens from Royals down to the middle classes, both men and women, but a large share of them have degrees that have no economic utility.

Islamic theology is probably the most common of these.  This makes more sense when one recognizes that pretty much the only path to significant power in Saudi Arabia for a non-Royal is to become part of the "ulema" (which is the collective group of Islamic religious leaders and jurists).  Heredity plays an important part in the ulema as well, however.

The ulema have historically been led by the Al ash-Sheikh, the country's leading religious family. The Al ash-Sheikh are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th century founder of the Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam which is today dominant in Saudi Arabia. The family is second in prestige only to the Al Saud (the royal family) with whom they formed a "mutual support pact" and power-sharing arrangement nearly 300 years ago. The pact, which persists to this day, is based on the Al Saud maintaining the Al ash-Sheikh's authority in religious matters and upholding and propagating Wahhabi doctrine. In return, the Al ash-Sheikh support the Al Saud's political authority thereby using its religious-moral authority to legitimize the royal family's rule. Although the Al ash-Sheikh's domination of the ulema has diminished in recent decades, they still hold the most important religious posts and are closely linked to the Al Saud by a high degree of intermarriage.

Most "everyday" criminal and civil law is vested in the Islamic courts with a combined 700 or so ordinary religious trial court judges. In the Islamic courts, however, in addition to heredity, geography and ideology play a powerful role:

Saudi judges come from a narrow recruitment pool. By one estimate, 80% of the 600+ Saudi judges and almost all senior judges come from Qasim, a province in the center of the country with less than 5% of Saudi's population, but known as the strict religious Wahhabi heartland of Saudi Arabia. Senior judges will only allow like-minded graduates of select religious institutes to join the judiciary and will remove judges that stray away from rigidly conservative judgments.

Secular courts handle claims against the government, criminal corruption charges, and administrative law in areas like labor and commercial law.  A secular anti-terrorism court was created in 2008, and regional governors and the kings also directly resolve significant civil disputes within the jurisdiction.

Foreign Technocrats and Menial Workers

Technocratic positions that Saudi Arabia lacks people with the skills to fill, and jobs deemed to menial for any Saudi Arabian citizen are carried out by a huge number of foreign workers with temporary work visas.

[A]s of 2013 foreign nationals living in Saudi Arabia made up about 21% of the population. Other sources report differing estimates. Indian: 1.3 million, Pakistani: 1.5 million, Egyptian: 900,000, Yemeni: 800,000, Bangladeshi: 500,000, Filipino: 500,000, Jordanian/Palestinian: 260,000, Indonesian: 250,000, Sri Lankan: 350,000, Sudanese: 250,000, Syrian: 100,000 and Turkish: 100,000. There are around 100,000 Westerners in Saudi Arabia, most of whom live in compounds or gated communities. 

Foreign Muslims who have resided in the kingdom for ten years may apply for Saudi citizenship. (Priority is given to holders of degrees in various scientific fields, and exception made for Palestinians who are excluded unless married to Saudi national, because of Arab League instructions barring the Arab states from granting them citizenship.) 

As Saudi population grows and oil export revenues stagnate, pressure for "Saudization" (the replacement of foreign workers with Saudis) has grown, and the Saudi government hopes to decrease the number of foreign nationals in the country. Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemenis in 1990 and 1991. and has built a Saudi–Yemen barrier against an influx of illegal immigrants and against the smuggling of drugs and weapons.In November 2013, Saudi Arabia expelled thousands of illegal Ethiopians from the Kingdom. Various Human Rights entities have criticised Saudi Arabia's handling of the issue.

No Taxation And No Representation

One of the rallying cries of the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation" and it turns out that this is pretty much a global norm at the root of most new democracies not imposed by colonial powers.

But, in Saudi Arabia, the nation has chosen to path of no taxation and no representation, rather than taxation and representation.  It will be interesting to see how this balance changes as Saudi Arabia's oil supplies and sovereign wealth funds are gradually exhausted.

Citizens of Saudi Arabia and select regional allies pay no individual income taxes other than Zakat (a religious tax similar in concept to a tithe), although there is a corporate income tax.  This is possible because the Royal family owns the country's most valuable economic assets, its oil and gas resources and sovereign wealth funds, personally.

The Case For D.C. Statehood

There are two ways that the residents of the District of Columbia are disadvantaged in our political system relative to other states. First, they lack a representative of Congress or Senators of their own (although they do get electoral voters as if they did in Presidential elections). Second, the Congress in which they lack voting representation messes around with how they run their local affairs on a routine basis.

District of Columbia officials expressed outrage on Saturday about two provisions of the budget deal between Democrats and Republicans, saying they dictate how the capital should spend money. One bans it from using its own locally raised funds to pay for abortions for poor women. The second is a federally financed school voucher program, which city officials said was unnecessary because 40 percent of students already go to public charter schools.

There are upsides, of course, as well. The District of Columbia has far more revenues than it would as a state with mostly less affluent residents and a very large share of the District's tax base in the form of tax exempt governmental and non-profit enterprises.

There are also legitimate concerns that the District of Columbia, as a mere part of a larger metropolitan area, doesn't have a "complete" enough economy to be an economically viable entity, and that an independent District of Columbia, through its local control of the place where the nation makes its laws, could have undue influence on the legislative process.

Some alternatives that have been suggested to statehood for the District of Columbia (or all of it except a small federal district), which could be accomplished with a vote of Congress alone, would be the retrocession of the territory of the District to Maryland with Maryland's consent as well as that of Congress. This would follow the precedent of the retrocession the territory of the District that came from Virginia, called the County of Alexandria, in 1846 which allowed it to retain its slave trade. The slave trade, although not slavery, were banned in the District in 1850.

A retrocession of territory to Maryland would probably give Maryland an additional safe Democratic seat in Congress and would make some Senators accountable to D.C. residents, but would not tip the balance in the Senate any further towards Democrats, would actually slightly reduce the power of D.C. in the Presidential election (assuming that rump D.C. loses its electoral votes via constitutional amendment), would make already Democratic party leaning Maryland more safe politically at the state level, would provide greater local control, and would alleviate any doubts about economic viability. On the other hand, it would also suddenly impose upon the residents of D.C. a great many unfamiliar Maryland laws, in lieu of the laws that residents had crafted themselves in the District.

The Founders Weren't Saints

Many were slaveholders.

Best Blog Headline Of The Day, So Far

Plantation Revisited -- Prisoners on Farms at Thinking Outside The Cage, one of my newest blogroll additions.