----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 1:48 PM Subject: What's wrong with black markets ?
What's wrong with black markets ?
Hey Ian, do you think the original black market might have been the capitalist slave trade in Africans ? etymologically :>)
Charles
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Well if black markets is just a modern way of saying contraband, then yes. If we follow Tilly even a little bit and view the political economy of the Mediterranean world under various Papal regimes as a network of protection rackets, what better way to dispossess rival accumulators and plunderers and enslave people than by declaring their markets in various sorts of commodities as illegal --contrary to church 'law'-- and then expropriate lots of stuff from coastal cities in Africa. If there's no international legal regime then it becomes a matter of whose law's trump. Did I get the damn apostrophe stuff right?
Granted, some Papal regimes did come out against slavery --enforcement problems aside, but by the time of Phillip II and thereafter large tomes with titles like "Tratado juridico politico del contra-bando" by Pedro González de Salcedo are being printed in droves to deal with the complexities of legal and illegal commodities and their conditions of production and trade, given that a backlash to slavery was emerging in the Christian world. Grotius' "Law of the Seas" which is just a section of the much larger "The Law of Prize and Booty" --hey there's another couple of words to look at-- came out of a privateering and insurance case that was challenged by Mennonites who were having serious misgivings about privateering and plunder and slavery ["socially responsible investors of the age of mercantilism unite!"]. The quest for a political theory of neutrality emerges at this point too.
Ian