The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)

[Lord Thesaurian]

I prefer the cited economic and historical facts (I will refer to them as such because that’s what they are) to the sociological and pop cultural reverse engineering of revisionist activists.

[wanderwegger]

Academic Study vs Internet Study
Gladiator vs Soldier
Complex Data Driven Research seeking constantly refined revelations vs Old Timey Emoting Interpretation based on the Simplest models possible to reach absolute preordained conclusions

[Ludicus]

sociological and pop cultural reverse engineering

Social engineering, Legio. In fact, to know about something is to know the facts about how it works. But I'm afraid I'm not Ben Affleck in Paycheck.

-------
More,



"The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery has been too-long dismissed, and with it, the centrality of African and African American labor to the foundation of our modern economic system. Slavery's Capitalism announces the emergence of a new generation of scholars whose detailed research into every nook and cranny of emerging capitalism reveals the inextricable links between the enslavement of people of African descent and today's global economy."—Leslie Harris, Emory University


The Clear Connection Between Slavery And American Capitalism - Forbes By Dina Gerdeman

Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.

The ties between slavery and capitalism in the United States weren’t always crystal clear in our history books. For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity.

Now 16 scholars (1) are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties between 19th century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage in the 2016 book Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.

Contrary to popular belief, the small farmers of New England weren’t alone responsible for establishing America’s economic position as capitalism expanded. Rather, the hard labor of slaves in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi needs to be kept in view as well. In fact, more than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves, according to the book, which was edited by Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and visiting professor at HBS, as well as Seth Rockman, Associate Professor of History at Brown University.

The slave economy of the southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire U.S. economy, with plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities—and enjoying plenty of riches as a result.

“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,” Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. “… Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and banks.”

We asked Beckert—who researches and teaches the history of US capitalism in the 19th century—to discuss the book and to talk about what lessons today’s business leaders can learn from the past.

Dina Gerdeman: The book makes note of the fact that a myth existed for many years: that slavery was “merely a regional institution, surely indispensable for understanding the South, but a geographically confined system of negligible importance to the nation as a whole.” Why do you think for so many years historians made slavery out to be a "southern problem" and didn’t seem to make a strong connection between slavery and things like innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance, which are at the heart of American capitalism?

Sven Beckert: This is an excellent question, and indeed, as you note, quite puzzling. It is puzzling for three reasons: For one, into the early years of the 19th century, slavery was a national institution, and while slavery was never as predominate a system of labor in the North as it was in the South, it was still important.

Second, there were a vast number of very obvious economic links between the slave plantations of the southern states and enterprises as well as other institutions in the northern states: Just think of all these New York and Boston merchants who traded in slave-grown goods. Or the textile industrialists of New England who processed vast quantities of slave-grown cotton. Or the bankers who financed the expansion of the plantation complex.

And third, both the abolitionists as well as pro-slavery advocates talked over and over about the deep links between the southern slave economy and the national economy.
Why did these insights get lost? I think the main reason is ideological and political. For a long time after the Civil War, the nation really did not want to be reminded of either the war or the institution that lay at its root—slavery. A country that saw itself as uniquely invested in human freedom had a hard time coming to terms with the centuries’ long history of enslaving so many of its people.

When slavery became more important to our historical memory, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the work of reconciling the history of freedom and the history of enslavement involved quarantining the history of slavery to one section of the nation only. That allowed for doing two things simultaneously: It allowed for the belated acknowledgement of the importance, barbarity, and longevity of slavery in the United States. But it also allowed for a continued telling of the story of freedom, since the national story could be told as one in which one section of the United States, the North, fought hard to overcome the retrograde, coercive, and inhumane system of slavery in the other section.
Of course, this story is not completely wrong. Yet what it effectively did was to insulate the national story from the problem of slavery. A focus on the economic links generated around slavery, the story that our book charts, brings the story of enslavement squarely back into the center of the national history as a whole. And this is where it belongs.

Gerdeman: The book says "the relationship of slavery to American capitalism rightfully begins on the plantation." Can you explain how the North benefited from the slave-grown cotton in the South? And how did this "empire of cotton" help create modern capitalism?

Beckert: There are very many economic links between the southern plantation complex and the development of American and global capitalism, involving trade, industry, banking, insurance, shipping, and other industries. The most prominent link developed around cotton.
As you know, the cotton industry was crucial to the world-altering Industrial Revolution as it first unfolded in Great Britain and then spread from there to other parts of the world, including the northern states of the Union. Until 1861, until the American Civil War, almost all cotton used in industrial production was grown by enslaved workers in the southern parts of the United States. Slavery thus played a very important role in supplying an essential raw material for industrial production.

Yet there were further links: British and later U.S. capital financed the expansion of the slavery complex in the American South. Advancing credit was essential for southern planters to be able to purchase land and labor. Northern merchants, moreover, organized the shipment of cotton into global markets.

And of course northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime. Plantation slavery, far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution. And in the United States, cotton was central to that “second slavery.”

Gerdeman: Some argued that with the abolition of slavery, the North was poised to “kill the goose that has laid their golden egg.” Can you explain why that wasn't the case?

Beckert: Slavery was important to a particular moment in the history of capitalism. But there were also severe tensions between the deepening and spread of capitalism and slavery.

For one, slavery was quite unstable. Slaves resisted their enslavements, and slave owners needed to deploy a lot of violence, coercion, and oversight to ensure the stability of the plantation and slave society more broadly. Moreover, slavery did not satisfy the labor needs that emerged in modern industrial enterprises; very little slave labor was used there.
And last but not least, slave owners had a very definite idea about the political economy of the United States, focused on the export of agricultural commodities to world markets, free trade, and the territorial expansion of the slave regime into the American West. That was quite distinct from the increasingly urgent and also powerful political needs of northern industrialists and bankers. They wanted tariff protection and the expansion of free labor into the American West. Both these political economies depended on the control of the federal government.

With the advent of the Republican Party and then especially with the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, that control became uncertain. As a result, southerners struck out on their own, provoking a violent Civil War that was won by the forces opposed to slavery.

Gerdeman: Do you think today’s business executives could learn any important lessons from this new understanding of the connection between slavery and the American market?

Beckert: Yes, definitely. The most important lesson this history provides is that business leaders whose companies’ history goes back into the antebellum era need to be proactively researching this history and confronting it. No one alive today is responsible for slavery—a crime against humanity. But we all need to face our histories and then try to move forward from that acknowledgement of the past.

More generally, it is crucially important that companies have a full understanding of their supply chains and of the labor conditions that are to be found throughout these chains. If they violate fundamental human rights, companies have the responsibility and also the ability to act.
There were powerful business interests in the 19th century who worked diligently against slavery. Just think of the Tappan brothers of New York, merchants who combined their business with anti-slavery activism. And then there were also entrepreneurs who refused to process slave-grown cotton. These people can serve as examples of what is possible. They show that to have a full understanding of all aspects of one’s business and to aggressively enforce fundamental human norms and rights is possible and necessary.

When you read the letters of businessmen of the 1840s and 1850s, you see numerous efforts to separate business and morality into distinct realms. Merchants and manufacturers in the past did know that slavery was a moral problem, but then they tried to say that such moral considerations were extraneous to the concerns of business. In retrospect we can all agree that these claims are preposterous. Such observations should make everyone today acutely conscious about making rationalizations that seek to insulate business from moral responsibility. History (and historians) don’t look kindly on this.

(1) It's called the "Gang of the 16" because it bears a striking resemblance to the Chinese "Gang of the Four"

[Lord Thesaurian]

No, I meant reverse engineering. As in the case of what you’ve cited here, the explicit approach is one of revision, working backwards in order to write “new history.” Nothing you’ve continued to reference accounts for the material facts I’ve cited affirmatively. Again, central to the pro-slavery premise of American capitalism thriving thanks to slavery, to the revisionism of this “new” history, is the idea of economic development. On the contrary, to the the extent a permanent chattel labor class impacts economic development, it is a negative one.

Our recent paper (Markevich and Zhuravskaya 2015) sheds light on this debate. We are the first to conduct a rigorous empirical analysis to assess the effects of serfdom on economic development of the Russian empire throughout the 19th century. Our results strongly confirm the conjecture that serfdom was a crucial factor causing a slowdown of economic development of Eastern Europe and that the difference in timing of the abolition of serfdom is an important reason for the divergence of development paths across the European continent.

This analysis was made possible due to a novel province-level panel dataset of development outcomes that we constructed for the European part of the Russian empire in the 19th century. Using these data, we document a very large (in terms of magnitude) and sharp (in terms of timing) increase in agricultural productivity, peasants’ living standards, and industrial development as a result of the abolition of serfdom.

https://voxeu.org/article/serfdom-an...ic-development

This is borne out by the facts of history. The financialization of slave value, so often referenced as some kind of “new history,” further trapped the South in this outmoded system that was utterly dependent on the export of a single crop. It was this heavy export dependence that impeded the development of northern industry by cheapening foreign, namely British, textiles. This was a factor in potential British support for the South in the latter’s war against, you know, American capitalism and Christian abolitionists. Long before that, the South used her political power to subjugate economic development to cotton exports, thwarting protectionist measures for American industry, as well as public expenditure on “internal improvements” and infrastructure, in service to her “peculiar institution.” It was the expansion of this Slave Power in the South that led northern business interests to understand theirs were under threat.

Slavery and US Growth

The preceding section suggests that if slavery had been abolished nationally at the time of the Constitution, the Cotton South would have developed through family-scale farms like the rest of the country, delivering as much or perhaps more cotton to the eager textile mills of Lancashire, and building a more diverse and prosperous regional economy in the process. Many historians will respond that they are less interested in hypothetical histories that did not happen, preferring to focus on the undeniable fact U.S. slavery persisted and grew. The question then becomes: what was the significance of slave-based southern expansion for U.S. economic development? Beckert is in no doubt: “It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world (p. 119). In their introduction to a recent collection, Beckert and Rockman put it even more strongly: “During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States (2016, p. 1). As with the British case, timing is crucial in assessing these claims. As discussed above, the port cities of colonial North America were intimately tied to slave-based commerce in the Atlantic economy. These trade connections revived after independence, and northeastern ports flourished during the Napoleonic Wars, at least until Jefferson’s Embargo of December 1807. The legacy of this urban and financial development clearly fostered later economic activities. If one were looking for a Williams-type transition from mercantile to industrial investment, post-Embargo New England provides a nearly ideal example. Wealthy New England merchants such as Francis Cabot Lowell turned to cotton textiles, launching the innovative Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813 (Dalzell 1987). In contrast to Lancashire, however, American textiles were designed for the protected domestic market, as opportunities in foreign trade declined. A generation later, the same New England capitalists turned their attention to railroads and development in the Midwestern states (Johnson and Supple 1967). Beckert and Rockman, however, along with Edward Baptist, clearly mean to include the rise of cotton in their narrative. In an earlier article, Rockman wrote: “But no matter how frequently southern slaveholders denounced bourgeois liberalism, there can be little doubt that the slave system played an indispensable role in the emergence of a national capitalist economy...the simultaneous expansion of slavery and capitalism [was] no mere coincidence” (2006, pp. 346-347). Baptist writes: “Cotton also drove U.S. expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest- growing economy in the world” (2014, p. 113). In this formulation, the New Historians of Capitalism are reviving an intellectual tradition associated with Douglass North, often regarded as one of the first contributions in cliometrics. In 1961, North wrote: Cotton was strategic because it was the major independent variable in the interdependent structure of internal and international trade. The demands for western foodstuffs and northeastern services and manufactures were basically dependent upon the income received from the cotton trade...it was cotton which was the most important influence in the growth in the market size and consequent expansion of the economy...Cotton played the leading team role (1961, pp. 67-68, 194). There is just one difficulty: this Cotton Staple Growth theory has largely been rejected by cliometric research. Drawing on contemporary southern newspapers, railroad reports and periodicals, Diane Lindstrom (1970) confirmed Fishlow’s finding that the South provided only a limited market for imported foodstuffs: “the needs of the lower South for flour and corn were insufficient to absorb the output of these products from the upper South, to say nothing of their serving as a major outlet for western produce” (p. 113). The reason for this pattern is that most cotton plantations were themselves self-sufficient in food, planting ample corn crops to spread the fixed costs of slave labor across the year, and maintaining swine to feed the residents (Gallman 1970). Taken together, the evidence rejects the claim that “the growth of the market for western foodstuffs was geared to the expansion of the southern cotton economy” (p. 68). As a market for northeastern manufactured goods, the South was sizeable in the immediate aftermath of the War of 1812, but its role was never dominant and diminished over time. Using capture-recapture methods to analyze the coastal trade from New York City, Lawrence Herbst (1978) estimated that no more than 16.4 percent of northern manufacturing output went South in 1839, of which only a subset was attributable to surging exports of cotton. In her study of economic development in the Philadelphia region, Lindstrom (1978) found that manufacturers rarely sold goods in distant markets before 1840, and when they did, these markets were normally in the East. Longer-distance trade grew over time, but primarily along east-west lines. The transportation revolution hastened both western settlement and commercialization, together comprising the majority of demand growth for U.S. manufactures. Figure 8 shows that total income of the South steadily declined as a share of national income, from the Revolution to the eve of the Civil War. Even during the 1850s, the most prosperous decade in southern economic history, the region’s share of national income ticked downward from 31.4 percent to 30.5 percent, primarily because of slower population growth. Baptist asserts that “almost half of the economic activity of the United States in 1836 derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by... slaves” (2014, p. 322). As Olmstead and Rhode show, this figure is an egregious overstatement, generated by double-counting outputs, inputs, asset sales and financial transactions (2018, p. 13). Cotton production accounted for about five percent of GDP at that time. Cotton dominated U.S. exports after 1820, but exports never exceeded seven percent of GDP during the antebellum period. True, cotton textiles were important for U.S. industrialization, and New England mills used the same slave-grown raw material as their competitors in Lancashire. But location within national boundaries had little economic significance for this industry. As a bulky but lightweight commodity, raw cotton travels easily, and transportation costs play little if any role in textiles geography. The protective tariff – strongly opposed by the slave South – was of far greater importance for the competitiveness of the antebellum industry (Harley 1992, 2001). As New Historians of Capitalism have emphasized, financial connections between the slave South and northern money markets were extensive and important, servicing not just cotton but the interstate slave trade (Schermerhorn 2015). The Natchez branch of Biddle’s Bank of the United States offered accommodation paper to planters so aggressively in the 1830s that the Bank found itself in possession of numerous slaves and several plantations after the failures of 1837 and 1839 (Kilbourne 2006). To the extent that outside credit financed moves onto better cotton land, it contributed to productivity growth. Olmstead and Rhode’s picking rate graph shows impressive gains, strongly correlated with the shift to the southwest. Equally evident is the fact that the rate of advance was slowing over time, as one would expect from a growth source driven by geographic shifts (albeit, augmented by improvements in cotton plants). Because overall labor supply was inelastic, the primary effect of capital inflows was to drive up the price of the limiting factor. Soaring antebellum slave prices, often taken as signs of robust performance, can also be seen as symptoms of economic dysfunction. It would wrap this analysis into a tidy, self-contained package to conclude that Anglo- American industrial and financial interests recognized this growing dysfunction and in response, fostered or at least encouraged the antislavery campaigns that culminated in Civil War. This is not exactly how it happened. Slave owners had extensive business and financial ties to northern firms, most of whom apparently felt no compunctions and would have happily continued these arrangements indefinitely. Many of the “Cotton Whigs” associated with the textiles industry cultivated personal ties with southerners in the 1830s; an English visitor to the Lawrence family was amazed at “their sympathy with the Southerners on the slavery question” (O’Connor 1968, p. 133). In his book on New York City’s elite, Beckert reports that most bourgeois New Yorkers, especially merchants and bankers, wanted to accommodate the South politically (2001, p. 85). During the secession crisis, New York Mayor Fernando Wood openly favored the city seceding from the Union and setting itself up as a free city. Despite these common interests, the slave South increasingly assumed the role of obstructer to a national pro-growth agenda. Not only did southerners favor low tariffs, but southern presidents vetoed seven Rivers & Harbors bills between 1838 and 1860, frustrating the ambitions of entrepreneurs in the Great Lakes states (Egnal 2009, pp. 101-122). The Dred Scott decision of 1857, apparently opening the territories to slavery, sharply depressed the share values of railroads who had plans for construction in Kansas (Wahl 2006). In the 1850s, the South stood in opposition to a Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad, currency reform, and federal support for agricultural research and education, measures that were favored by a majority of northern farmers, as well as business interests (Ron 2016, pp. 367-374). Regional differences in economic interests and policies by no means imply that these groups had active reasons to push for abolition. But when the slave South seemed intent on expanding into new territories, perhaps even into the free states through such measures as the Fugitive Slave Act, many northerners came to believe that their economic interests were under threat. Beckert writes that a rising group of upper-class New Yorkers believed “the political power of southern slaveholders over the federal government was nothing less than a threat to the development of the United States and to their own economic wellbeing...Moreover, the political power of southern slaveholders, these businessmen began to argue, prevented necessary reforms in the banking, currency, credit, and transportation systems” (2001, pp. 90-91). Slave owners, for their part, were riding high in 1860, perhaps captives of their own King Cotton rhetoric, which held that the South “can defy the world – for the civilized world depends on the cotton of the South” (Wright 1978, p. 146). Evidently, they conflated elite financial success with southern economic strength. Slavery was unquestionably the basis for the former, but the opposite held true for the latter. By 1860, the civilized world still needed cotton, but it no longer needed slavery. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...1111/ehr.12962

[Common Soldier]

Please don't use the term "facts" (your facts) as an ultimate,definitive and universal truth. _

There haven't been any "facts" presented to support your claim that capitalism and slavery are linked, even in the US. Given that the supporters of such claims are also tend to be supporters of the 1619 narrative, which the creators of 1619 myth admitbis not about historical truth, therevis no reason to believe the claims about the linkage of slavery and capitalism in the absence of facts.



**Deleted rest of post as duplicate***

[Ludicus]

https://voxeu.org/article/serfdom-an...ic-development

"Russia would have been about twice as rich by 1913 compared to what it actually was, had it abolished serfdom in 1820 instead of 1861"

Can you say the same about the US or Brazil? Russia lacked black slaves working and dying in cotton plantations, and slaves in S. America mines. Without slavery, would the U.S. be the leading economic power? What about Britain? the plantation colonies supplied the mother country dyestuffs, sugar, tobacco, then later coffee and chocolate as well - and cotton, a crucial industrial input. The Atlantic economy in the 1700s was founded on slave labour.
Atlantic slavery's impact on European and British economic development.

The results presented above offer evidence that the Atlantic slave trade contributed to the economic development of Europe, as measured by the growth of the urban population. Economic historians studying the British context specifically, have put forth a number of explanations behind why the slave trade and slavery more broadly may have had this stimulatory effect on domestic economic activity. First arguing this was Eric Williams in his seminal 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, where he argued that the profits from the slave trade figured decisively in funding the Industrial Revolution in England.

Following Williams’ text, a numbers debate ensued, challenging the magnitude of slave trade profits, their importance for overall investment, and structural economic change. The extremely high profit rates initially proffered by scholars of the slave trade have been revised downwards, from as high as 50% to between 7 and 8% (Morgan, 2000). Barbara Solow’s (1985) work revisiting the question of the slave trade’s influence nevertheless comes out strongly in favor of the Williams hypothesis, suggesting that the magnitudes of the slave trade’s contribution to national income and investment to be large and significant. Further, Solow supports the notion that Williams’ thesis can be expanded to European economic growth in general, citing Darity (1982), who calibrates a three-sector trade model showing European gains from the triangular trade and losses for Africa and the Americas.

Direct profits from slave-trading, however, remain just one channel through which the triangle trade may have affected European economic development. Morgan (2000) suggested, for example, that spillovers to sectors upstream and downstream from slavery spurred economic development. Long distance Atlantic trade was critical in the extension and development of credit markets, financial instruments, and the insurance industry, all key sectors for economic growth. Further, among industries downstream from the slave trade and plantation agriculture, cotton textile manufacturing served as the site of critical innovations related to the industrial development in the 19th century (Inikori, 2002; Beckert, 2014; Juhasz, 2018).

A third explanation highlights a market size effect: participation in the slave trade connected European ports to New World markets, increasing effective demand for domestically produced goods (Solow and Engerman, 2004). Tattersfield and Fowles (2011), for example, described how the opening up of the “African trade” to minor British outports allowed local merchants to solidify relationships with West Indian and North American planters, securing access to a previously untapped market for domestic manufactures. The hinterlands of slave trading ports, and of Liverpool in particular, would later become the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution.

The analysis in this paper provides overall evidence that slave trading positively affected European and British economic development, inconsistent with the notion that the slave trade displaced potentially more lucrative economic activity or that growing ports simply selected into the trade. Relative to the counterfactual of sending fewer slaving voyages or not participating in the slave trade at all, a 10% increase in slave voyages is associated with 1.2% faster city growth, a result that is robust to several alternative specifications and definitions of the treatment and control groups

Further analysis and data collection of other trading activities of non-British ports, historical industrial activity in the UK, the trajectories of British slave ship owners and slave holders, and jurisdictional and geographic variation in the ability to participate in the trade is ongoing to separately assess the contribution of each of these channels.

Edit- indirectly, let's add to this the Brazilian gold. Adam Smith, 1703: "Almost all our gold, it is said, comes from Portugal".The Brazilian gold helped to drive the industrial revolution in England as Portugal used gold collected as taxes from the colonists mainly to pay for industrialized goods (textiles, weapons) from England.
--------



--------

race and capitalism
Chapter 1- Opening remarks
Chapter 2- Diasporas of Racial Capitalism
Chapter 3 - The Land Question
Chapter 4- Imperialism and its Limits
Chapter 5- Race, Capitalism, and Settler-Colonialism
Chapter 6- Closing remarks
Just read the chapter 5 "On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism, and Settler Colonialism", page 42, etc. This essay offers some preliminary thoughts on the question of social reproduction as a means of addressing the constitutive triangulation of race, capitalism, and colonialism today.
---------------------

The living legacy of racism and colonialism -and the colonial nostalgia - still flourishes throughout Europe and its former colonies in Americas. On his Facebook broadcast, Jair Bolsonaro's racist comment
"Indians are undoubtedly changing…They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us".

For those who think that "Colonialism was good"(!!!), it's well worth reading, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of ... - Amazon.com
Excerpts,

Many natives of Haiti anticipated the fate imposed by their white oppressors: they killed their children and committed mass suicide. The mid-sixteenth-century historian Fernández de Oviedo interpreted the Antillean holocaust thus: "Many of them, by way of diversion, took poison rather than work, and others hanged themselves with their own hands.”

His interpretation founded a school I am amazed to read, in the latest (1970) book by the French technician René Dumont, Cuba: Is It Socialist? "The Indians were not totally exterminated. Their genes subsist in Cuban chromosomes. They felt such an aversion for the tension which continuous work demands that some killed themselves rather than accept forced labor”
Molded into cones and ingots, the viscera of the Cerro Rico— the rich hill— substantially fed the development of Europe. “Worth a Peru” was the highest possible praise of a person or a thing after Pizarro took Cuzco, but once the Cerro had been discovered Don Quixote de la Mancha changed the words: “Worth a Potosi,” he says to Sancho.
The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, showed his gratitude by bestowing on Potosi the title of Imperial City and a shield with the inscription: "I am rich Potosi, treasure of the world, king of the mountains, envy of kings."

In 1581 Philip II told the audiencia of Guadalajara that a third of Latin America’s Indians had already been wiped out, and that those who survived were compelled to pay the tributes for the dead. The monarch added that Indians were bought and sold; that they slept in the open air; and that mothers killed their children to save them from the torture of the mines.
Greco-Roman slavery was revived in a different world; to the plight of the Indians of the exterminated Latin American civilizations was added the ghastly fate of the blacks seized from African villages to toil in Brazil and the Antilles. The price of the tide of avarice, terror, and ferocity bearing down on these regions was Indian genocide.

While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, equally unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to the Indians whose killing labor sustained the kingdom. The fiction of legality protected the Indian; the reality of exploitation drained the blood from his body.
The Crown regarded the inhuman exploitation of Indian labor as so necessary that in 1601 Philip III, banning forced labor in the mines by decree, at the same time sent secret instructions ordering its continuation "in case that measure should reduce production".

In three centuries Potosi’s Cerro Rico consumed 8 million lives. The Indians, including women and children, were torn from their agricultural communities and driven to the Cerro. Of every ten who went up into the freezing wilderness, seven never returned. Luis Capoche, an owner of mines and mills, wrote that "the roads were so covered with people that the whole kingdom seemed on the move.” The Spaniards scoured the countryside for hundreds of miles for labor.
Many died on the way, before reaching Potosi, but it was the terrible work conditions in the mine that killed the most people. Soon after the mine began operating, in 1550, the Dominican monk Domingo de Santo Tomás told the Council of the Indies that Potosi was a “mouth of hell” which swallowed Indians by the thousands every year, and that rapacious mine owners treated them “like stray animals.” Later Fray Rodrigo de Loaysa said:
"These poor Indians are like sardines in the sea. Just as other fish pursue the sardines to seize and devour them, so everyone in these lands pursues the wretched Indians.”
While Indian labor legislation was debated in endless documents and Spanish jurists displayed their talents in an explosion of ink, in Latin America the law “was respected but not carried out.” In practice "the poor Indian is a coin with which one can get whatever one needs, as with gold and silver, and get it better,” as Luis Capoche put it. Many people claimed mestizo status before the courts to avoid being sent to the mines and sold and resold in the market. The mita labor system was a machine for crushing Indians.

Ideological justifications were never in short supply. The bleeding of the New World became an act of charity, an argument for the faith. With the guilt, a whole system of rationalizations for guilty consciences was devised. The Indians were used as beasts of burden because they could carry a greater weight than the delicate Ilama, and this proved that they were in fact beasts of burden. The viceroy of Mexico felt that there was no better remedy for their "natural wickedness" than work in the mines.
Juan Ginés de Sepülveda, a renowned Spanish theologian, argued that they deserved the treatment they got because their sins and idolatries were an offense to God. The Count de Buffon, a French naturalist, noted that Indians were cold and weak creatures in whom "no activity of the soul" could be observed.

The Abbé De Paw invented a Latin America where degenerate Indians lived side by side with dogs that couldn’t bark, cows that couldn’t be eaten, and impotent camels.
Voltaire’s Latin America was inhabited by Indians who were lazy and stupid, pigs with navels on their backs, and bald and cowardly lions. Bacon, De Maistre, Montesquieu, Hume, and Bodin declined to recognize the "degraded men" of the New World as fellow humans.
Hegel spoke of Latin America’s physical and spiritual impotence and said the Indians died when Europe merely breathed on them.
In the seventeenth century Father Gregorio Garcia detected Semitic blood in the Indians because, like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done them.”
When Bartolomé de las Casas upset the Spanish Court with his heated denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith.

[Infidel144]

Chicago-Area Leaders Call for Illinois to Abolish History Classes
"Concerned that current school history teaching leads to white privilege and a racist society, state Rep. La Shawn K. Ford, D-Chicago, will join local leaders today at noon at the Robert Crown Center in Evanston to call on the state to stop its current history teaching practices until appropriate alternatives are developed."
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...asses/2315752/

[Lord Thesaurian]

Can you say the same about the US or Brazil? Russia lacked black slaves working and dying in cotton plantations, and slaves in S. America mines. Without slavery, would the U.S. be the leading economic power? What about Britain?

If you're suggesting it's a false comparison, there isn't much left to discuss, unfortunately. The premise was empirically proven. Wright similarly engaged Beckert's and Rockman's key claims, debunking them on their terms. With the latter unmoored from fact, the premises underpinning this "new history of capitalism" amount to articles of faith. As for the British case, the New England and Middle colonies are a driver for growth independent of slavery, in line with Wright's conclusions. Population growth in the New England and Middle colonies was also noted to have been largely independent of international trade.

Slavery, the British Atlantic Economy and the Industrial Revolution

Modern economic growth first emerged in Britain about the time of the Industrial Revolution, with its cotton textile factories, urban industrialization and export orientated industrialization. A period of economic growth, industrial diversification and export orientation preceded the Industrial Revolution. This export orientation revolved around an Americanization of British trade for which the slave colonies of the Caribbean were central. Eric Williams explored the extent to which this export economy based on West Indian slavery contributed to the coming of the Industrial Revolution. His claim that profits from the slave trade were crucial to the Industrial Revolution has not stood up to critical evaluation. Nonetheless, modern speculations regarding endogenous growth plausibly postulate that manufacturing, urbanization, and a powerful merchant class all have a favourable impact for growth. These hypotheses need careful consideration. What set the British colonial empire aside from its rivals was not the quality of its sugar colonies but the involvement of the temperate colonies on the North American mainland. Unlike the slave colonies created to exploit staple exports, English emigrants to the northern mainland sought to establish independent settlement. These colonies lacked staple products and residents financed imports by exploited opportunities the empire provided providing for shipping and merchandising and compensating for the lack European market for the timber or temperate agricultural products by exporting to the sugar colonies which, in turn, concentrated on the export staple. The British Empire was unique and its development provided an important and growing diversified and relatively wealthy market for British manufactured goods that all other empires lacked. Although the mainland colonies financed their imports of British manufactured goods by intergrading into the slave-based British Atlantic, it seems likely that in the absence of opportunities in the slave colonies the mainland colonies would have imported similar amounts of British manufactured goods. The history of the northern mainland colonies did not share the staple-driven dynamic where potential profits from exploitation of staples drew labour – through the slave trade – and capital from the Old World. Instead New England and the middle colonies evolved from the migration and subsequent demographic growth of groups interested in creating an independent existence in the New World. These colonies involvement in Atlantic trade was thus different. There is no question that the growth of British trade and industrialization was heavily intertwined with the British Atlantic Economy of the old Imperial System and its mercantile basis. The trade of the Americas rested on the slave-produced staples of the West Indies and to a lesser extent the Southern mainland colonies. The northern mainland colonies participated by utilizing the opportunities that the growing staple trades presented to trade temperate foodstuffs and raw materials to the staple colonies and to exploit niches in the shipping and mercantile activities that were vital to its success. From Britain’s domestic point of view, the American colonies within the protected mercantile empire became important markets. This was particularly true for manufacturing industries. The Americas were almost solely responsible for the diversification of Britain's exports to the point where other manufactured exports exceeded the value of woollen exports. Even though this was clearly the actual historic case, we still do not really know to what extent the slave-based empire contributed to the coming of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of course, the Industrial Revolution was crucially about cotton (Findlay and O'Rourke, p. 320 comment: "Rostow's original characterization of cotton textiles as the leading sector of the British Industrial Revolution appears to have been well-founded"). Cotton, of course, depended on a slave-produced raw material. As such it seems to be the stimulus for Findlay's model that I have already discussed more than once. There are, however, several problems in building an argument on the importance of slavery for the emergence of modern economic growth on the British cotton textile industry. The first, and most obvious, is that the cotton industry emerged too late. A cotton industry existed in Britain from at least the late seventeenth century. However, it was a small industry, initially at least, dependent on protection from competition from imports from India. As is well-known, that protection was incidental to protection of England's woollen industry but it helped the cotton industry become established. This early cotton industry had only limited connections to the slave-based Atlantic. Its raw material came from Ottoman territories in the Levant, although the West Indies became a significant source of supply after the middle of the eighteenth century. Cotton textiles were a part of the cargoes sent to the west coast of Africa to finance slave purchases. These were, however, principally Indian cottons re-exported from Europe, although Inikori has shown (2002, p. 444) that by the second half of the seventeenth century, British 'cottons' (cloth of linen weft and cotton warp often, if inaccurately, referred to in the literature as 'fustians') had become significant. The great expansion of cotton only occurred after Arkwright's innovations at the end of the 1760s. The industry grew spectacularly from the mid 1770s but remained fairly small until near the end of the century. The United States did not become an important supplier of cotton until Eli Whitney's cotton gin came into widespread use in the 1790s. The expansion of cotton growing in the United States may have influenced a surge in slave imports in the final years of legal slave imports into the United States from 1800 to 1807. Nonetheless, as far a cotton production in the United States is concerned, its expansion occurred with a native-born, although un-free, labour force. How do slavery and cotton fit into endogenous growth models of the emergence of modern economic growth? Not very well. Allen uses Arkwright and the cotton textile innovations as an example of the importance of research and development in the emergence of nineteenth century technology (Allen, 2009). The story is persuasive, but the benefits of market size and prospects for market penetration do not really play a role. Although cotton textiles became British factory industry par excellence in the nineteenth century, it was small until after Arkwright's innovations. The incentives were not there to concentrate on cotton. Wool would have appeared to have a much higher payoff. Cotton fibre, however, proved easier to manipulate by machine. The second key element in thinking about the impact of the absence of slavery on British trade is the elasticity of the American demand curve and the extent to which it moved over time. First, the growth of population in the Northern colonies was largely independent of trading opportunities. Between 1700 and 1780 the population of New England increased from just over 90 thousands to over 700 thousand and that of the middle colonies from just over 50 thousand to over 700 thousand (McCusker and Menard, p. 103 and 203). It seems unlikely that these numbers would have been much different in the face of reduced export markets. New England’s population grew exclusively on its natural increase and even lost population to migration to other colonies. The attraction of the middle colonies consisted of good agricultural lands at very low prices. Imports made up only a small part of the colonies’ yeoman farmers’ consumption. It is likely also that the demand for European goods was relatively price inelastic. If this were true, British sales to the mainland colonies of North America would have been only modestly decreased if the sugar colonies had never existed. https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/mater.../harley113.pdf

[Lord Thesaurian]

Today, on this Glorious Day of My Birth, enjoy a dose of encouragement:

goodies

There are good men and bad men of all nationalities, creeds and colors; and if this world of ours is ever to become what we hope some day it may become, it must be by the general recognition that the man's heart and soul, the man's worth and actions, determine his standing. To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing. I have always been fond of the West African proverb "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have. Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures. It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty and intelligence. We face the future with our past and our present as guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by the record which we have made and are making. I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being. This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country. When the time of danger comes, all Americans, whatever their social standing, whatever their creed, whatever the training they have received, no matter from what section of the country they have come, stand together as men, as Americans, and are content to face the same fate and do the same duties because fundamentally they all alike have the common purpose to serve the glorious flag of their common country. Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. Greatness means strife for nation and man alike. A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out. We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, the courage, and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism. Our nation is that one among all the nations of the earth which holds in its hands the fate of the coming years. We enjoy exceptional advantages, and are menaced by exceptional dangers; and all signs indicate that we shall either fail greatly or succeed greatly. I firmly believe that we shall succeed; but we must not foolishly blink the dangers by which we are threatened, for that is the way to fail. On the contrary, we must soberly set to work to find out all we can about the existence and extent of every evil, must acknowledge it to be such, and must then attack it with unyielding resolution. There are many such evils, and each must be fought after a fashion; yet there is one quality which we must bring to the solution of every problem, that is, an intense and fervid Americanism. We shall never be successful over the dangers that confront us; we shall never achieve true greatness, nor reach the lofty ideal which the founders and preservers of our mighty Federal Republic have set before us, unless we are Americans in heart and soul, in spirit and purpose, keenly alive to the responsibility implied in the very name of American, and proud beyond measure of the glorious privilege of bearing it. - A selection of Birthday treats, courtesy of T.R.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Welp, that was quick

The response to this crisis has made it even more clear that party politics are a sham, and the real political affinity lies within class and race. While we’re working to abolish the police, we must also work to dismantle what the police were put here to protect: property. What is more evident of the legacy of settler colonialism and its violence than the idea of the ownership of land? What helped shape the unequal distribution of wealth and enduring segregation of our cities quite like centuries of racist property laws?

As millions of people, particularly Black and Latinx Americans, are on the verge of eviction, it is time that we look at the idea of private housing and the role it plays in maintaining economic violence in those communities.

There’s a disconnect between those in political office and the general public. That disconnect is wealth and class. The constitution was created by landowning white men, who were the only people who could vote for decades after this country’s founding. This legacy still guides the government’s funding priorities.

Instead of seeing housing as a right and something that should not be commodified, the state enlists its own armed forces — sheriffs and police — to remove occupants from residences if they cannot pay rent. The lack of protections for non-landowners should be to no surprise from a country founded on the genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples.

We need a housing movement based on a rejection of the construct that any one person should own this earth’s land.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/evic...irus-pandemic/

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[wanderwegger]

After reading the recent posts I see the point. If slavery was so essential to the South one would think they would have been willing to shatter the union, fight a war where there best strategy was survive long enough to force a peace, and than continue that war years after it was clearly lost while there economies and lands and people were devastated.

That southerners, even the majority of them who were non slave owners were unwilling to wage such a war over slavery, is as clear proof as any thinker would need that slavery just wasn’t that important.

[alhoon]

Ah... here we go again with the progressives.
I saw the ads for a series that seemed interesting: Lovecraft Country. It didn't seem to be too thematically close with Lovecraft but I didn't mind that, it seemed a potentially interesting horror series to keep an eye on, in case I want to follow it.


And then, I found an article today that puts race front and center in the series and praises it for the black cast. I have not even noticed the cast was all black. Not everyone sees race in everything as many vile progressives think!

Do I hold it against the series? Nope. If the series is not crap, I don't mind watching it. But I would watch it for the entertainment value, not to show how woke I am. If I like it, I will like it for the story and the characters, not the color of their skin.
But good story is much more than "bashing the uuuvvviiill America"

[Count of Montesano]

Ah... here we go again with the progressives.
I saw the ads for a series that seemed interesting: Lovecraft Country. It didn't seem to be too thematically close with Lovecraft but I didn't mind that, it seemed a potentially interesting horror series to keep an eye on, in case I want to follow it.


And then, I found an article today that puts race front and center in the series and praises it for the black cast. I have not even noticed the cast was all black. Not everyone sees race in everything as many vile progressives think!

Do I hold it against the series? Nope. If the series is not crap, I don't mind watching it. But I would watch it for the entertainment value, not to show how woke I am. If I like it, I will like it for the story and the characters, not the color of their skin.
But good story is much more than "bashing the uuuvvviiill America"

I agree with you that the story needs to be first and foremost above politics. And as a big Lovecraft fan (his mythos not him personally), I'm interested to see which way they go with this. But to be fair, America was a terrible place for Black folks in the late 40s and 50s. So if there's some bashing of White American culture at the time, it's completely justified.

[wanderwegger]

Are you trolling or did you just not realize your complaint about not solely seeing race is solely focused on race?

How do you know it was progressives? People from all sides of the political spectrum have been reimagining Shakespeare for centuries. Often using different races. Long before progressives were a label.

Better question. Are you as perturbed by the English equivalent progressives who sought to abolish slavery and child prostitution in 1800s England? Or is it just people making a the world better while you live that irks you?

Ah... here we go again with the progressives.
I saw the ads for a series that seemed interesting: Lovecraft Country. It didn't seem to be too thematically close with Lovecraft but I didn't mind that, it seemed a potentially interesting horror series to keep an eye on, in case I want to follow it.


And then, I found an article today that puts race front and center in the series and praises it for the black cast. I have not even noticed the cast was all black. Not everyone sees race in everything as many vile progressives think!

Do I hold it against the series? Nope. If the series is not crap, I don't mind watching it. But I would watch it for the entertainment value, not to show how woke I am. If I like it, I will like it for the story and the characters, not the color of their skin.
But good story is much more than "bashing the uuuvvviiill America"

[alhoon]

Are you trolling or did you just not realize your complaint about not solely seeing race is solely focused on race?

It's solely focused on progressives, with nothing to do about race. I would complain the same (and I do) about other crap the progressives do. Which is why this rant thread exists.
If you don't like us ranting on progressives, then you will be disappointed.

How do you know it was progressives?

Because progressives do that crap all the time and craptitles like "Awesome! New series has colored main cast! That was the series we needed!!!! Far less important details include that series is about lovecraft" are used by progressives.

People from all sides of the political spectrum have been reimagining Shakespeare for centuries. Often using different races. Long before progressives were a label.

What that has to do with my complain?!
Do you think my problem is that they used dark-skinned people in a series? Nope.

I am not complaining they used black people in that series as this is not Lovecraft's stories but inspired by them. My problem is not with that series. I may watch it as it seems an interesting series.
As I explained in my post my problem is with the progressives that literally judge the book by it's color.
I don't give a poop about them using black people (including their struggles in USA in the 50s) in the horror setting.

Are you as perturbed by the English equivalent progressives who sought to abolish slavery and child prostitution in 1800s England?

Nope.

Or is it just people making a the world better while you live that irks you?

Nooope, it's just people making the world a worse place in front of my eyes that irks me. You know, slacktivists, many progressives, people that go "awesome new series! Forget unimportant things like the story or the casting. This is a must see for no other reason other than the color of the skin of the protagonists" and other people that make the world a much worse place.

Please, don't join the people that make the world a worse place.

[wanderwegger]

I see. Getting angry about people plugging a TV show you say you are going to watch because an article trying to raise buzz about it discussed one of the ways it was unique and in zeitgeist rather that discussing the plot and other things you wanted seems pretty silly. It's not season 8 GoT. Remain calm.

Question: It sounds like they discussed the casting, just not in the way you wanted in this one blurb, but if they did forget about the story (which if they mentioned Lovecraftian sounds like they didnt) why "may you watch it"?

To hate some more or?

This seems like an overblown complaint, and have you considered renaming the thread more appropriately:

The Latest Anti Liberal Whine Thread seems more in line with the content. Why imply you are crazed and angry when you could just call it what it is.

It's solely focused on progressives, with nothing to do about race. I would complain the same (and I do) about other crap the progressives do. Which is why this rant thread exists.
If you don't like us ranting on progressives, then you will be disappointed.


Because progressives do that crap all the time and craptitles like "Awesome! New series has colored main cast! That was the series we needed!!!! Far less important details include that series is about lovecraft" are used by progressives.



What that has to do with my complain?!
Do you think my problem is that they used dark-skinned people in a series? Nope.

I am not complaining they used black people in that series as this is not Lovecraft's stories but inspired by them. My problem is not with that series. I may watch it as it seems an interesting series.
As I explained in my post my problem is with the progressives that literally judge the book by it's color.
I don't give a poop about them using black people (including their struggles in USA in the 50s) in the horror setting.





Nope.


Nooope, it's just people making the world a worse place in front of my eyes that irks me. You know, slacktivists, many progressives, people that go "awesome new series! Forget unimportant things like the story or the casting. This is a must see for no other reason other than the color of the skin of the protagonists" and other people that make the world a much worse place.

Please, don't join the people that make the world a worse place.

[alhoon]

but if they did forget about the story (which if they mentioned Lovecraftian sounds like they didnt) why "may you watch it"?

To hate some more or?

Because the idea of Lovecraft-influenced (but not remake) series in the 50s sounds like a seriously good idea. I watched some seasons of American Horror Story and this one shapes up to be better and the actors, at least from the trailers seem to be more to my liking than the AHS cast. Nothing wrong with the actors of AHS, they were not bad actors. I just prefer the Lovecraft country cast from the few things I watched. It also seems a better series (judging by the trailer) according to my taste. I can't place it exactly, but the "atmosphere", cast, theme, costumes etc seem better here. Or at least more to my liking.
HOWEVER... If I want to have a serious discussion about the series, I would use the appropriate forum (arts) and thread. This is about ranting over the progressives. Nothing to do with the series itself.

I see. Getting angry about people plugging a TV show you say you are going to watch because an article trying to raise buzz about it discussed one of the ways it was unique and in zeitgeist rather that discussing the plot and other things you wanted seems pretty silly. It's not season 8 GoT. Remain calm.


This seems like an overblown complaint, and have you considered renaming the thread more appropriately:

The Latest Anti Liberal Whine Thread seems more in line with the content. Why imply you are crazed and angry when you could just call it what it is.

Of course this is an overblown complaint! This is a rant thread.
While posting here I mostly want to just vent and go all "See how progressives ruin EVERYTHING!?!" and then accuse the progressives of this and that. What we miss is an anti-rightwing rant thread where I can vent against the other side and go all "See how alt-rights ruing EVERYTHING!?!?" and then accuse the ultra-conservatives, Trump-cultists, anti-vaxers etc of this and that.

[wanderwegger]

Alhoon I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

[Muizer]

What we miss is an anti-rightwing rant thread where I can vent against the other side and go all "See how alt-rights ruing EVERYTHING!?!?" and then accuse the ultra-conservatives, Trump-cultists, anti-vaxers etc of this and that.

For the analogy to be correct, it would have to be the "Latest anti-conservative rant thread" and in it, ordinary, fairly middle of the road conservatives would, by hook or by crook, be implicated in the doings of the far right and every individual F*&^ up by any insignificant self proclaimed conservative would be presented as a piece in a collage meant to revile conservatives in general.

[wanderwegger]

For the analogy to be correct, it would have to be the "Latest anti-conservative rant thread" and in it, ordinary, fairly middle of the road conservatives would, by hook or by crook, be implicated in the doings of the far right and every individual F*&^ up by any insignificant self proclaimed conservative would be presented as a piece in a collage meant to revile conservatives in general.

Impossible to argue against this without seeming an idiot.