According to William L. Shirer (his sources for this were mainly German generals at Nuremburg, so fwiw) Hitler's decision to move into the Balkans after the Yugoslavian coup, and therefore delay Barbarossa by some six weeks, was the main factor in Germany losing in Russia and one of the big contributors to them ultimately losing the war.

Well starting 6 weeks earlier would have meant they would have 6 weeks more advance before the bad weather set in, making Moscow a much more achievable target in the first summer offensive.

That said, even with starting 6 weeks later they still could have won in Russia with some better decisions and some run good.

such as not waste time on Stalingrad when they were there for the oil

Regardless, they didn't have a chance thanks to the US.

Hitler could have just gone east and maybe kept the US out of the war in Europe. Towards the end of the war in the Pacific we could have ended up fighting Russians in China and Korea.

As it is, seemingly Hitler wanted something like complete German domination of at least all of Europe and Russia, a new Roman Empire, and he was always going to bite off more than he could chew.

If they beat Russia then what is the US going to do?

As I said earlier, if Germany is free to put the 80% of its total combat forces from the East front into the Western Theater, then an allied landing is impossible. Its also worth pointing out that the Russians killed in two months more Germans than the Allies killed in the whole war. The Allies never faced more than 15-20% of the German war machine, if the Germans beat the Russians by 43 then not only will the Allies have to face the entire German war machine, but that entirety will be bigger due to much less casualties caused by Russians in 43 and 44.

It would be able to move all its production out of range of bombers and would have **** tons of oil and resources.

The Allies were playing Stalin, no doubt. Hitler was way too aggro for his own good, kick-ass war machine and industry or not. He was destined to overplay whether it was in Russia or somewhere else.

Hitler runs out of gas without the middle east, north Africa, Russia, or control of shipping. He couldn't get any of that.

If he focused on Russia and kept the US out, and Britain's role limited, maybe he doesn't have to end up sending 1/2 naked 15 year olds to get killed by Russians in the snow.

If he does that and doesn't holocaust anyone, he ends the war with everything the USSR had and then some.

Lol pvn

Yeah, slavery might not have been very cheap but there was such a massive labor shortage that it was a solution that became common. Maybe the south could have been much better without slavery or even cotton as a major industry, but you can always just say that about anything when dealing with the state space of possible counterfactuals.

The beginning of this article talks about the value of slavery to the American economy just before the war. I was talking to a historian last week about this question, and he said its been a long debated question that has recently shifted to the side of slavery as a positive economic influence. He linked the belief that slavery was unprofitable with the Dunning School and other lost cause style perspectives. I should have asked for book references.

You're probably right that the comparison of labor and capital isn't particularly helpful. Its certainly thrown around a lot by historians. I haven't given it a ton of thought.

Immigration didn't really take off until the 1840's, and was driven at least as much by conditions in Europe as in America. The slave trade ended in 1808, having imported around half a million slaves from Africa that you would have to replace in early and colonial America (more actually, since you could extract more value from a slave than a wage laborer by controlling movement and threatening violence). Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom talks about the critical role tobacco played in both instigating and winning the American Revolution. Well before the North took off economically, the US was securing its freedom and actively expanding on the strength of Southern agricultural exports.

Morgan and Acemoglu in Why Nations Fail both talk about precolonial America turning to slavery importation after the failure of free immigration to provide sufficient labor.

From the first article I linked - "Northern merchants gained from Southern demands for shipping cotton to markets abroad, and from the demand by Southerners for Northern and imported consumption goods. The low price of raw cotton produced by slave labor in the American South enabled textile manufacturers — both in the United States and in Britain — to expand production and provide benefits to consumers through a declining cost of textile products."


A more urbanized, industrial South would be an interesting counterfactual. It was such a massive supplier of cotton that nearly the entire economic history of the world would have to change to accommodate it.




Something about Hitler, for some reason.

Yeah, I think alot of the "slavery wasn't profitable" arguments started with Confederate apologists and get unwittingly repeated by morons.

again, "profitable" and "led to the US being the leading economic power" are not the same thing. Obviously somebody profited.

The links make the claim that somebody is pretty much all americans that weren't slaves and that slaves were responsible for a fairly large percentage of GDP. And its reasonable to conclude that the slaves wouldn't have even been in the US without slavery.

Yea, I was sort of mixing an outside discussion with the purpose of this thread (when we're not talking about nazis). I guess my point would be that without slavery and the value it added to early America, you need to come up with a pretty elaborate and far-reaching counterfactual concerning diplomacy, population growth, and economic systems to come up worth an America that looks the same as it does today. Its certainly not a preordained outcome that the US develops into the economic power that it did. Something like Canada or Australia might be a reasonable template.

Pretend the south wins the war and slavery continues in an independent CSA. Will all that extra slavery make the agricultural CSA an economic powerhouse on its own?

If not, you need to give us some sort of mechanism by which slavery is actually expanding the economy (as opposed to merely transferring wealth to plantation owners)

The world in 1861 was very different than it was 1600-1850

The United States has certain topographical and resource advantages that would have made it a success regardless of political systems chosen. Quality of farmland, natural energy and mineral resources, countless deepwater ports, the Great Lakes, our chain of navigable rivers in key sections of the country. Take Brazil, great farmland, no internal waterways to speak of.

Not to mention the easily defensible mainland. Nasty Dessert to the south and west, vast oceans on three sides, rugged arctic terrain to the North. It is in a sweet spot geopolitically. There are many things we don't do anymore, but they could be ramped up easily in a true war economy.

Imagine trying to fight an all out war against a country that is 100% food and energy self sustaining, with well developed, abundant, efficient natural waterways. There is a reason Britain attempted to control the Mississippi River during the war of 1812. The American victory at New Orleans is perhaps the most under rated millitary accomplishment in American history.

Compare our natural advantage in ports to the Russians/USSR. Our Navy far exceeded theirs because they lack sufficient warm water facilities for staging. It's why Putin is moving on the Crimea. He knows, as Hitler and Manstein did, that Sevastopol is the key to Soviet naval and economic power.

In no way can Canada and Australia be compared from an economic point of view with the United States, and it has nothing to do with slavery. You picked two, highly functional modern economies that pale in comparison to the United States. Beside the fact that Australia is in the middle of nowhere, making logistics on a grand scale a challenge if not a nightmare, the interior of the country is almost completely not utilized, for very practical reasons. Canada has it's own topographical problems that make it difficult to project economic power outward.

When judging the potential of a country, think weather, water, tillable land, and energy. No matter what we invent or how many internets we have it all comes down to food, energy, and the ability to move those things efficiently. Can you think of a country that has such a natural combination of these like the U.S.?

a lot of people also underestimate the natural advantages our river systems give us. The most productive farmland in the world, the American Midwest, is within a days ride to The Mississippi River. From here it can link to the Gulf of Mexico and South America, the Great Lakes chain and into the Atlantic on to Europe. The initial staging area is almost never impassable, and is internal to the Nation, making outside disruption a difficult proposition. There are empires that failed simply because they didn't have this. Has very little to do with smart and a whole lot to do with lucky. We have kind of been on the right side of geopolitical variance.

Think about why countries succeed and fail. Chad, landlocked with no navigable internal waterways, so you know what, stuff doesn't work out there. Iraq, cradle of civilization with huge rivers leading out to the sea, site of a great empire and we still care what happens/who controls it. Egypt, same deal. Great civilizations always have access to water. The Romans, Turks, British, French, Spanish, Japanese, the list goes on. Those barren, landlocked countries just suffer terribly. You could send 5 million slaves to Niger and it just wouldn't matter. The property just doesn't cut it.

You guys fail to realize that many other countries that have natural resources and or enjoy geographical advantages are underdeveloped economically.

We didn't get ****ing lucky. That's bull****. It's intellectual weak sauce.

name one country that has tillable land able to feed the entire world within 300 miles of a year around internal waterway that has access to three oceans. please.

The Midwest does not have access to three oceans. But that's not the point. Every country has some geographical advantage or natural resources. That's not why some countries are wealthy and others are poor. Hong Kong doesn't have **** but a harbor. No land for agriculture, no diamonds, no gold, no oil, no nothing. It's one of the most developed economic cities in the entire world. The reason it's economically successful is rule of law and property rights.

Places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Lichtenstein et cetera have financial power. None are self sustaining states. There is a difference between wealth and true economic power. There is not doubt that America's political and economic systems have contributed to it's success, but natural geographic advantages can not be underestimated. I am not being Jingoistic, but most less strategically advantaged nation states exist at the pleasure of some more powerful entity. Case in point, places like Singapore or Hong could not sustain themselves if say China or the United States chose to consume them. Contrarily, no nation, under current condition, could lay siege to the United States, largely because of Geographical and economic factors. We couldn't be starved out, couldn't be denied energy to support a war economy. Compare this to Germany, Japan, France, Egypt, et cetera. The same could not be said about almost anyone. Perhaps China is a contender, but that is about it. Putin's Russia as well, especially if he is able to reestablish complete control of the Ukraine.

Brazil has as many natural resources as any place. Also was the last major country to abolish slavery.