The United States of America
From traders, slave owners to capitalists, America’s economy boomed amid the slave trade. As research shows, slave owners in the Upper South benefited immensely as they were paid for the people they sold while slave owners in the Lower South also profited because they forced the people they purchased to work in the productive cotton and sugar fields.
Then there were the ship and railroad owners who carried enslaved people, and merchants who provided food and clothing to the slave traders; they all profited. In the North, capitalists made money by investing in banks that oversaw the exchange of money for people, so did America’s cotton textile industry, which profited off enslaved people forced to pick cotton. In New York, firms on Wall Street including New York Life, JPMorgan Chase, and Lehman Brothers, made it big by investing in the slave trade.
