The Hidden Economics of Food - Part 2: The Bitter Legacy

A Vegetable That Crossed in Chains

Okra originated in Africa—probably Ethiopia or West Africa, where it had been cultivated for thousands of years. Today, it’s ubiquitous in the American South, essential to gumbo, and a staple across the Caribbean.

How did an African vegetable become a Southern American icon?

It crossed the Atlantic the same way millions of Africans did: in the holds of slave ships.

Slavers discovered that their “cargo” survived the Middle Passage better when fed familiar foods. So they brought okra seeds, black-eyed peas, watermelon, and other African crops. These plants didn’t volunteer for the journey. They were tools of an economic system designed to maximize the survival rate of human beings treated as property.

Every pod of okra in a Southern garden carries this history.

The Economics of Evil

The Atlantic slave trade is often discussed as a moral catastrophe—which it was. But it was also an economic system, and understanding it as economics reveals uncomfortable truths about how wealth gets created and distributed.

The Numbers

Between 1500 and 1900, approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. Another 2 million died during the Middle Passage. Countless more died in capture and transit to the coast.

For the slavers, this was a business. Ships were investments. Human beings were inventory. Mortality rates were cost-of-goods-sold. Prices fluctuated with supply and demand.

The Profits

The profits were enormous. The Caribbean sugar islands were, per capita, the richest places on Earth in the 18th century—for the white planters, not the enslaved workers who produced that wealth.

British wealth in the 18th and early 19th centuries was substantially built on slavery:

• Sugar plantations generated vast fortunes

• Slave trading itself was profitable

• Financial services like insurance and banking grew to service the trade

• Manufacturing expanded to produce goods traded for enslaved people

When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, the government paid £20 million in compensation—about 40% of the national budget. Not to the enslaved people. To the enslavers, for their lost “property.”

Many prominent British families, banks, and institutions trace their wealth to this payment.

The Colonial Extraction Machine

Slavery was one component of a larger colonial system designed for extraction.

Built to Export

Colonial infrastructure wasn’t built for development. It was built for extraction.

Look at a map of railways in colonial Africa. The lines don’t connect African cities to each other. They connect mines and plantations to ports. The goal was getting wealth out, not building an internal economy.

This pattern persists. Many African countries still have infrastructure oriented toward export of raw materials rather than internal trade. The colonial template wasn’t erased; it was inherited.

Monocultures of Dependence

Colonial economies were deliberately structured around single crops or resources:

• Jamaica meant sugar

• Gold Coast meant gold (and later cocoa)

• Belgian Congo meant rubber (and the atrocities that maximized its extraction)

• Malaya meant rubber and tin

This created dependency. When prices dropped, entire economies collapsed. When independence came, these countries had no diversified industrial base—they had extraction systems designed to benefit the metropole.

The Racism Came Second

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: racial ideology followed economic practice, not the other way around.

The Portuguese began the Atlantic slave trade in the 15th century. At that point, slavery wasn’t race-based. Europeans enslaved each other (the word “slave” comes from “Slav”). Africans enslaved each other. Various forms of unfree labor existed everywhere.

The Atlantic system created race-based slavery because Africans were available, could be identified by appearance (making escape difficult), and came from societies far enough away that enslavement didn’t create diplomatic problems.

The elaborate ideology of racial inferiority—the “scientific” racism, the biblical justifications, the claims of civilizing missions—came later. They were constructed to justify a system that existed for economic reasons.

This matters because it means racism isn’t an irrational prejudice that mysteriously descended on humanity. It was manufactured to serve economic interests. And it persists because the economic structures it was built to justify persist.

The Long Shadow

Why are former slave societies and colonies generally poorer today than countries that weren’t colonized?

Path Dependence

Economists call it “path dependence”—where you start from affects where you can go. Countries designed as extraction economies have to overcome that design. It’s not impossible (South Korea was once a Japanese colony), but it requires overcoming structures built for a different purpose.

Institutional Inheritance

Colonial powers established institutions—legal systems, property rights, government structures—designed to facilitate extraction. Independent countries inherited these institutions. Changing them is harder than continuing them.

Human Capital Destruction

Slavery and colonialism deliberately destroyed human capital:

• Education was forbidden or limited for the enslaved

• Local industries were suppressed to prevent competition

• Leadership was eliminated or co-opted

• Knowledge systems were delegitimized

Rebuilding takes generations.

Capital Flight

Colonial economies sent wealth to the metropole. After independence, this continued through less formal channels—unfavorable trade terms, debt structures, multinational extraction of resources.

The Comfort of Forgetting

Rich countries prefer to forget this history. The narrative becomes:

“We developed because of our culture/institutions/work ethic. They’re poor because of their culture/corruption/geography.”

This is convenient. It erases the historical transfers of wealth that contributed to current prosperity. It transforms extraction into achievement.

But the evidence is uncomfortable:

Countries that were richer before colonization are often poorer today. The places Europeans most heavily exploited (like the Caribbean) were rich in resources and productive potential. Today, many are poor.

The intensity of extraction correlates with current poverty. Within Africa, regions that were more heavily enslaved show worse economic outcomes today—centuries later.

The slave-trading ports thrived; the interior was drained. The geography of colonialism still shapes the geography of development.

Okra’s Americas

When okra arrived in the Americas, it adapted. It became gumbo in Louisiana, callaloo in the Caribbean, a fried side dish across the South.

But it remains an African plant. Its DNA hasn’t changed. What changed was the context around it—from a vegetable cultivated by free African farmers to a survival food for enslaved people to a comfort food in their descendants’ kitchens.

The transformation wasn’t the okra’s choice. It was carried along by economic forces larger than any individual plant or person.

The Bill That Comes Due

Some argue for reparations—direct payments to compensate for slavery’s theft of labor and life. Others argue for broader transfers to address the structural disadvantages colonialism created.

But even without reparations, understanding this history changes how we interpret the present.

When we see poverty in former colonies, we shouldn’t assume it reflects something inherent to those places or peoples. We should recognize it as a legacy of extraction—systems designed to transfer wealth rather than create it locally.

When we see wealth in former colonial powers, we shouldn’t assume it reflects pure achievement. Some of that wealth was transferred, not created.

The okra doesn’t care about this history. It grows where it’s planted, producing pods regardless of who plants it or why.

But we’re not okra. We’re humans who created these systems, and we can change them—if we first understand what they are and where they came from.