Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Monday, August 15, 2016
SLAVERY'S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
SLAVERY PRODUCED CAPITALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
If the "malignancy" of slavery and of the slave trade, itself, were truly as malignant as they are now regularly claimed to have been; then, how did such presumed "malignancy" bring about such enormous prosperity until 1860, for: the tracker, the trader, the shipper, factor, planter, outfitter, banker, insurer, and their commercial and political cronies, when the legal importation of slaves was outlawed in the U.S. Constitution in 1808? Profits must not be malignant, regardless of their subject matter under capitalism.
Indeed so great were the profits that African slavery arguably produced capitalism, itself! The symbolic, now iconic, industrial revolution's looms of Liverpool were all diurnally spinning , weaving, cutting, imported cotton from the Americas. Along with "King Cotton," rice, sugar, tobacco, indigo, hemp, gold, silver, and many other slavery-made products, or kindred commodities displaced mercantilism with capitalism; displaced the royal monopoly with private corporations.
This makes one wonder, given the two economic revolutions flowing from it, just how "malignant" slavery could have been to these well-sated European and American profiteers?