On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 3:30 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Good stuff.
>
> Joanna
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> NY Times Opiniator Blog
> March 30, 2013, 1:42 pm
> King Cotton?s Long Shadow
> By WALTER JOHNSON
>
> Last month, researchers at University College London made public a
> database that describes in illuminating detail one of the largest
> government bailouts in modern history. In 1833, Britain paid 20 million
> pounds to compensate 3,000 Caribbean slaveholders for the emancipation
> of their slaves. The payments constituted about 40 percent of total
> governmental expenditures that year. Conversation about the database in
> Britain centered on the recipients of these reparations for
> slaveholders, among them the ancestors of George Orwell, Graham Greene
> and David Cameron.
>
> Apart from a few hundred slaveholders in the District of Columbia, no
> one in the United States received such compensation for the loss of
> their human property. According to Abraham Lincoln, at least, the cost
> of emancipation in the United States was to be reckoned in blood. In his
> Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said he feared God would will the war
> to continue ?until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid
> by another drawn with the sword.?
>
> This reckoning of the value of slaves in blood and treasure raises an
> important, though too frequently overlooked, question. What was the role
> of slavery in American economic development?
>
> The most familiar answer to that question is: not much. By most
> accounts, the triumph of freedom and the birth of capitalism are seen as
> the same thing. The victory of the North over the South in the Civil War
> represents the victory of capitalism over slavery, of the future over
> the past, of the factory over the plantation. In actual fact, however,
> in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without
> slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same.
>
> At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a
> declining institution. Tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland had
> exhausted their soil and were switching to wheat. Wage labor was
> increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas
> of the upper South.
>
> And then came cotton.
>
> The first part of the story is well known: the invention of the cotton
> gin in the 1790s and the concomitant rise of industrial capacity in
> Britain and the urban North made possible the profitable cultivation of
> cotton in a vast region of the lower South, one that stretched from
> South Carolina to Louisiana, which came to be called the ?Cotton Kingdom.?
>
> Between 1803 and 1838, the United States, most famously personified by
> Andrew Jackson, fought a multifront war in the Deep South. In those
> years, the United States suppressed slave revolts and pacified whites
> still loyal to the European powers that had once controlled the region.
> These wars culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South. By the
> end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw
> and the Cherokee had all been ?removed? to lands west of the
> Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the
> leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.
>
> In the 1830s, hundreds of millions of acres of conquered land were
> surveyed and put up for sale by the United States. This vast
> privatization of the public domain touched off one of the greatest
> economic booms in the history of the world up to that time. Investment
> capital from Britain, the Continent and the Northern states poured into
> the land market. ?Under this stimulating process, prices rose like
> smoke,? the journalist Joseph Baldwin wrote in his memoir, ?The Flush
> Times of Alabama and Mississippi.?
>
> Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office
> would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that
> could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved
> people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast
> majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called ?soul
> drivers.? The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. ?Forests
> were literally dragged out by the roots,? the former slave John Parker
> remembered in ?His Promised Land.? Those who followed planted the fields
> in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped ? from
> ?sunup to sundown? every day for the rest of their lives.
>
> Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to
> Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution
> and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every
> year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American
> planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then
> traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the
> year, many of them produced in the North. ?From the rattle with which
> the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud
> that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the
> North,? said one Southerner.
>
> As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their
> slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against
> cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England
> merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land,
> African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry
> synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a
> national and a global scale.
>
> When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced
> payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers.
> Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability
> of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the
> credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.
>
> It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote
> 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million
> people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the
> capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States
> combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between
> slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.
>
> We are accustomed to reckoning the legacy of slavery in the United
> States in terms of black disadvantage. The centrality of slavery to the
> nation?s economic development, however, suggests that any calculation of
> the nation?s unpaid debt for slavery must include a measure of the
> wealth it produced, of advantage as well as disadvantage. The United
> States, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, was ?built upon a groan.?
>
> Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African and African-American
> Studies at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of ?River of Dark
> Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.?
>
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-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."