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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism
And is now leading back to economic slavery for the 99 percent(Bloomberg) When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.
Brown was among the world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his familys firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.
Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations.
The story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity. ................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html
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How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism (Original Post)
marmar
Jan 2012
OP
Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)1. k&r
bemildred
(90,061 posts)2. Slaves, drugs, and theft. nt
nt
MisterP
(23,730 posts)4. a good book is Vincent Brown's "The Reaper's Garden" on 1700s slavery, capitalism, and moral economy
marmar
(77,078 posts)5. Thanks for the recommendation....I've got to check that out.
nt
trof
(54,256 posts)6. Fascinating. K&R
Really puts capitalism and slavery into perspective.
Thanks.