I can’t wait to read your book.

the discussion over at alternet about this film is interesting. i think the point of the film is to uncover the racism hidden in our contemporary society by comparing an outrageous alternative to reality—not to create a realistic alternate world.

because, of course, the world depicted here is completely unrealistic. slavery would have died around the turn of the 19th/20th century for purely economic reasons. the us became a world power by adjusting (somewhat late) to and adapting the industrial revolution, and, as anyone knows who’s studied this, urban industrial development is only economically feasible using wage slavery, not chattel slavery.

chattel slavery as it was practiced in the south was primarily a way of enabling agricultural mass production of products for foreign trade: tobacco, cane sugar/molasses, cotton, etc.

in the predominantly agriculturally-based culture of the american south, families with only one or two slaves to help domestically and in the fields, viewed and treated their slaves (economically speaking) as “one of the family.” they had to weigh and balance the economy of having children against buying slaves. this culture was on its way out for other reasons, and soon enough, small farmers with only one or two slaves would have begun to find it economically impossible to keep slaves either because of cheaper machines they could buy to do the same work, or because they began losing their farms to consolidation, or their children to the better jobs in the cities.

another issue that is completely buried (because history is written by the victors) is that there was a powerful debate going on in the antebellum south about the future of slavery and the near consensus was that slavery couldn’t have continued indefinitely. the debate was about what to do about it: gradual emancipation was popular. some thought slaves should be deported back to africa (gradually). but there was so much pressure from the north that the debate never really had a chance to develop. any realistic alternate history about a triumphant south would have had to take this strange debate into account and played out some “gradual emancipation” scenario.

if slavery could have been maintained for any reason, the us’s economic development would have been slowed, but that doesn’t mean that economic development elsewhere in the world would have slowed to any degree as a result. the us simply would have been a much more backward, much less powerful nation at the dawn of the 20th century.

by that point, however, a number of things would have happened: 1) 40 years after the civil war era, some “gradual emancipation” policy would be bearing fruit; 2) the us would be falling behind european nations in development so noticeably, that immigration might be reversing itself; 3) any responsible or savvy government would be taking steps to remedy the situation by creating a labor system more akin to wage slavery to help spur industrial growth. 4) westward expansion would either have become impossible because of the us’s industrial backwardness (industry -> greater militarization -> quicker settling of the west) or would have distorted (as it actually did) the us’s agricultural and pastoral development to the extent that keeping slaves would have become economically impossible in the west, even if the new states *were* slave states.

(i’ve been thinking about all this stuff a lot in the past few years because my novel is an alternate history where the civil war never happened and slavery is in the process of petering out around the turn of the century.)