"Protestors are protesting against things that they think are seriously wrong."
OK, but that was sort-of my point. The more outrage, the less you need to really think about things.
"err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery"
That is a chicken-and-egg question. Why did those mass movements only emerge at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and why did they emerge first in places that were influenced by the Industrial Revolution the earliest, while other places (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire) only followed suit after their own industrialization began?
I don't think the arrow of causality is so simple here. A hypothetical society that abolished slavery, serfdom etc. in the 15th century could easily prove non-viable against its slavery-powered foes, which had more brute force at their disposal. By 1820, the situation was very much turning around and it was the modern, personally freer societies that were more effective in commerce and at war.
Notably, even though Victorian Britain was very anti-slavery, starting with the monarch herself, it had no moral qualms against subjugating a quarter of humanity in another form of submission. Which tells me that it was less about morality (equality) and more about practicality of the situation.
Everyone agrees that innocent people are being killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that this is an outrage. The disagreement is over exactly which people fall into this category and who is to blame. Acknowledging the horror and being outraged by it does not preclude thought, and it is ungenerous and inaccurate (and, indeed, cynical!) to characterize all protests about the conflict as thoughtless.
Your take on slavery is pretty wild. The Industrial Revolution did not replace Haitian slaves with machines for harvesting sugar cane. Nor did Spartacus invent the steam engine.
Wars are brutal. No doubt about that. Nevertheless the disagreement that you mention ("which people fall into this category and who is to blame") seems to run so deep even here in the West, that I wonder if some of those protests wouldn't end up in an old-fashioned pogrom, if they weren't thoroughly policed from the outside.
Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution. I don't think my take is pretty wild. The historic correlation between industrialization and abolition of slavery is rather strong, and while we can argue about whether it was causative, the hypothesis is at least plausible.
"Wild" would be if I attributed abolition of slavery to something that is clearly uncorrelated with it, so, say, the Milankovic cycle.
>Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution
That's the point. The Haitian revolution didn't have anything much to do with the economic viability of slavery, but it still happened, and was a major and very definitely causative event in the broader history of the abolition of slavery.
If you think that slavery ended for purely economic reasons, then perhaps you can point to a mainstream historian who advocates this theory. I don't think you are doing your overall argument any favors by tying it to wild revisionist lost causes.
OK, but that was sort-of my point. The more outrage, the less you need to really think about things.
"err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery"
That is a chicken-and-egg question. Why did those mass movements only emerge at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and why did they emerge first in places that were influenced by the Industrial Revolution the earliest, while other places (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire) only followed suit after their own industrialization began?
I don't think the arrow of causality is so simple here. A hypothetical society that abolished slavery, serfdom etc. in the 15th century could easily prove non-viable against its slavery-powered foes, which had more brute force at their disposal. By 1820, the situation was very much turning around and it was the modern, personally freer societies that were more effective in commerce and at war.
Notably, even though Victorian Britain was very anti-slavery, starting with the monarch herself, it had no moral qualms against subjugating a quarter of humanity in another form of submission. Which tells me that it was less about morality (equality) and more about practicality of the situation.