"You can't take freedom for granted."

Sudhir Hazareesingh discusses how the enslaved themselves resisted their oppressors. Podcast with Tanjil Rashid: https://castbox.fm/episode/Has-history-overlooked-the-enslaved-who-fought-for-freedom--|-Sudhir-Hazareesingh-interview-id2050977-id849073538

You may note the absence of the podcast on the New Statesman website: https://www.newstatesman.com/author/tanjilrashid🧶

#property #ownership #slavery #chattelSlavery #history #BlackMastodon #anthropology #podcast #book #bookStodon #Jamaica #Barbados #abolition #resistance

(continued)

from the backcover of the book:

"The forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society. In textile mills, iron and copper smelting, steam power, and financial institutions, slavery played a crucial part. Things we might think far removed from the taint of slavery, such as eighteenth-century fashions for indigo-patterned cloth, sweet tea, snuff boxes, mahogany furniture, ceramics and silverware, were intimately connected. Even London’s role as a centre for global finance was partly determined by the slave trade as insurance, financial trading and mortgage markets were developed in the City to promote distant and risky investments in enslaved people."

@bookstodon @histodons 🧶

#book #trade #trading #finance #London #slavery #investements #capitalism #chattelSlavery #deportation

To meet this artificial demand, the plantation system laid the foundations for the future capitalist organisation of labour and production. The sugar industry at the time was a ‘synthesis of the field and the factory’, a veritable “agribusiness” that was ‘unlike anything known in Europe at the time’. Sugar cane juice had to be processed quickly after harvesting to produce sugar crystals and molasses, which, when distilled, produced rum, a product that would soon become popular on European markets as well.

Plantation farming was therefore an integrated system that required major innovations for the time in order to organise and improve production. The accounting system put in place made it possible to calculate yields more accurately and, as a result, to cut back on the ‘needs’ of slaves in terms of food, housing and clothing in order to extract as much value as possible.

#exploitation #whiteSupremacy #whiteFragility #chattelSlavery #industry #innovation #productivity

In 1776, Scotsman Adam "Smith noted that the British West Indian sugar plantations were so profitable they their returns from rum exports, a byproduct of sugar production, paid for the entire overhead expenses of a sugar plantation. As far as Smith was concerned, this was an achievement without parallel in eighteen-century British imperial agriculture."

(excerpt from Seymour Drescher’s book "The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation")

#AdamSmith #economics #economy #slavery #chattelSlavery #WestIndies #agriBusiness #agriculture #sugar #Caribbean #lineofColor #systemicRacism #capitalism #whiteSupremacy #rum #accumulation #transatlantic #trade #slaveTrade #deportation #economics #BritishEmpire #BritishIsles #Tobago #Jamaica #Barbados