Diary of Darkness

Submitted by Micky Love on Tue, 10/30/2007 - 1:56am. Tags:

Economics and Business

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the end of the Atlantic Slave trade. This has received a fair amount of attention in the United Kingdom, as far as I know, the only place where the anniversary is celebrated. Gresham College of London has hosted a number of lectures on the topic. They are available online in mp3 and transcripts here.

This one concerns the nuts and bolts of the trade from a business perspective - cowrie shells, insurance and the rest. The slave ships scoured the coast of West Africa for as long as 6 months before obtaining a full cargo of slaves. Up to 25% of the slaver's almost completely white crew died as a result of disease. They claim a fully laden ship could be smelled up to 7 miles downwind.

There were also other problems - the crew were often difficult to manage. Newton had more than his fair share of problems in this respect but had remedies to hand. A crewman stealing brandy was 'given a smart dozen' and when one of the crew attacked one of his fellows with a hammer Newton had him put 'in hand cuffs and stapled him down to the deck.' On more than one occasion, Newton transferred a troublesome member of the crew to a passing Royal Navy ship, always on the look out to recruit crew, and where discipline was brutally enforced.

Some 20 years after Captain Newton wrote these words, he'd undergone a change of heart about the slave trade. It was Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.

This lecture is concerned with the largely Quaker activism around 1807. At that point the trade had never been stronger and cotton and tobacco, which relied on slave labour, were America's most important industries. Sugar in the Caribbean was just as profitable. I was surprised to learn of the British experience in Haiti, not even mentioned in Wikipedia:

Something else happens that gives abolition and the campaign to end the slave trade a twist. It was full of political twists and turns: up and down, it goes back, it moves forward. But the one thing that transforms it is the impact of the French Revolution, after 1789, but particularly the seismic upheaval of the revolt in Saint Domingue in Haiti. The slaves overthrew the slave system in Saint Domingue in 1791, at which point the British tried to seize that island for our own material colonial interests, and the British Army was defeated. It is a little known fact that the British Army and Navy that invade suffered losses amounting to the best part of 40,000 men. It was the first defeat of a white European army by a black ex-slave army in recorded history. It was the first time a colonial power was rebuffed by indigenous peoples, and it was not to be repeated, in the British case, until the fall of Singapore. It is of that significance, and of course it sent tremors throughout the Caribbean: if this could happen in Haiti, it could easily happen 150 miles away in Jamaica, or elsewhere down the Leewards and Windwards. In fact, trouble did fan and ripple through the islands. Planters realised that they could only keep the lid on this by the most draconian of savage systems against their slaves, and if they did not, they go the way of Haiti.

Americans may find this lecture most interesting or most infuriating – a survey of race relations from Jefferson to Katrina. The lecturer is absolutely scathing in his assessment of Lincoln. In the Q&A at the end – which is in the mp3 but unfortunately not in the transcript, he compares Bush and Lincoln. Instead of fears of WMD, it was the entirely bogus fear of the spread of slavery throughout the continent that drew Lincoln into a war which cost America 625,000 casualties and didn't result in Democracy in the South until 100 years after the end of hostilities. None of the other presidents comes across very well; Eleanor was OK, but FDR refused to sign an antilynching bill. One president who is praised for his race policies is Nixon.

...

The “Scramble for Africa” characterized European involvement in the continent after the abolishment of the Atlantic slave trade. Much of it was folly. Chinese Gordon died in the Sudan not because Britain particularly wanted the place, but because Britain claimed Egypt, and Egypt had once claimed the Sudan. No fool, Bismark characterized the colonial enterprise as a swindle, but unavoidable. Africa served to absorb a lot of Europe's “excess capital” in the form of investments, but I think the results were disappointing. At the end of the 19th Century, Britain, who emerged from the scramble with the lion's share of African territory, had a world-wide empire. Indian trade accounted for some 30% of Britain's total trade. Africa, only 1%.

Today, China is the largest player in Africa. Between 2000 and 2006 the value of Chinese-African trade went from $US10 billion to $US 40 billion. Aid and loans are increasing at a similar rate. I have a friend who was was involved in this trade back in the days before the Hong Kong handover. He was a white Australian who had a South African father. He must have felt some ties to the continent, and he could also speak passable Mandarin. Being disinclined to involve himself in the work-a-day world, he found a niche as a go-between for Nigerian and Cantonese traders. They tended to hate and distrust each other. In those days the bulk of the trade was African shark's fins for mainland Chinese human hair. These days the Chinese are constructing infrastructure such as sports stadiums all over Africa, but mostly it's extractive industries.

India is Africa's second largest investor. Europe is Africa's third largest investor. The USA comes in at number 4 in terms of investments, but perhaps can claim the title as number one exporter of sluts to Africa. Not a place to invest in, rather as a suitable backdrop for those with an urge to wash away feelings of guilt.

Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just

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Confederacy Nostalgia From The Left. . . (#65260)

by M Scott Eiland on Thu, 11/01/2007 - 10:52am

. . .is a relatively new phenomenon I've noticed. I have a hunch that the professor's real objection to Mr. Lincoln is that his favorite flavor of totalitarians would have had a far easier time of it in the twentieth century if the United States was split in two and preoccupied with keeping eyes on each other. Given the Forvm rules, of course, I will not engage in similar speculation about commenters here.

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This strikes me more as being "purity troll" (#65268)

by Bill White on Thu, 11/01/2007 - 12:14pm

territory rather than nostalgia for the Confederacy.

Jefferson, of course was a racist, who believed blacks were inferior and ideally should be sent back to Africa. Like many other prominent presidents-Washington, Madison, Monroe and Jackson to name but a few-Jefferson was also a slave-owner and a rather cruel one at that. Abraham Lincoln did not own slaves, but he too was a racist who thought Africans were inferior and should be sent back to Africa. The Supreme Court, of course, was also racist and dominated by southerners and slaveholders before the Civil War. It held the same views of blacks that Andrew Jackson did, namely that they were simply chattels or property. Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 laid down that 'emancipated or not?'. 'they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.' In fact, they could not be citizens of the United States.

Jefferson and Lincoln were insufficiently free from "racist" sentiments to satisfy this fellow.

Pity.

From my perspective I see clowns to the Left of me (like the author of this quote) and jokers to my Right (Bush and Rudy Giuliani) with precious few stuck in the middle with me.

Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.

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Diary of Darkness

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