Ah, the master of bad takes is at it again.

> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,

Except that of course it wasn't.

> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.

And many smart people do.

> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.

Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.

> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.

You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.

> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.

Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.

And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.

> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.

It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.

Because slavery was everywhere.

It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.

In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.

I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!

Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast. and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?

>Except that of course it wasn't.

Except that it definitely was.