Nkrumahism, The Can Of Worms I Opened – Slavery and Racism (4)

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• francis kwarteng 10 years ago

  (a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
  
  1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
  
  Slavery transformed America into an economic power. ...
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  (a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
  
  1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
  
  Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The exploitation of black people for free labor made the South the richest and most politically powerful region in the country. British demand for American cotton made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era, boasting the single largest concentration of the nation’s millionaires.
  
  But slavery was a national enterprise. Many firms on Wall Street such as JPMorgan Chase, New York Life and now-defunct Lehman Brothers made fortunes from investing in the slave trade the most profitable economic activity in New York’s 350 year history. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one of the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.
  
  According to Harper’s magazine (November 2000), the United States stole an estimated $100 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6 percent.
  
  2) ENGLAND
  
  Between 1761 and 1808, British traders hauled 1,428,000 African captives across the Atlantic and pocketed $96.5 million – about $13 billion in value today – from selling them as slaves.
  
  From 1500 to 1860, by very modest estimations, around 12 million Africans were traded into slavery in the Americas. In British vessels alone, 3.25 million Africans were shipped. These voyages were often very profitable. For instance, in the 17th century, the Royal Africa Company could buy an enslaved African with trade goods worth $5 and sell that person in the Americas for $32, making an average net profit of 38 percent per voyage.
  
  Slave-owning planters and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain, but many other British citizens benefited from the human trafficking industry.
  
  Profits from slavery were used to endow All Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library; to build a score of banks, including the Bank of London and Barclays; and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first efficient steam engine.
  
  As the primary catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade provided factory owners who dealt in textiles, iron, glass and gun-making a mega-market in West Africa, where their goods were traded for slaves. Birmingham had over 4,000 gun-makers, with 100,000 guns a year going to slave-traders. The boom in manufacturing provided many jobs for ordinary people in Britain who, in addition to working in factories, could be employed to build roads and bridges, and in whaling, mining, etc.
  
  3) FRANCE
  
  With over 1,600,000 enslaved Africans transported to the West Indies, France was clearly a major player in the trade. Its slave ports were a major contributor to the country’s economic advancements in the 18th century. Many of its cities on the west coast, such as Nantes, Lorient, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, built their wealth through the major profits of triangular slave trade.
  
  Between 1738 and 1745, from Nantes, France’s leading slave port, 55,000 slaves were taken to the New World in 180 ships. From 1713 to 1775, nearly 800 vessels in the slave trade sailed from Nantes.
  
  By the late 1780s, French Saint Domingue, which is modern-day Haiti, became the richest and most prosperous colony in the West Indies, cementing its status as a vital port in the Americas for goods and products flowing to and from France and Europe.
  
  The income and taxes from slave-based sugar production became a major source of the French national budget. Each year over 600 vessels visited the ports of Haiti to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers.
  
  4) NETHERLANDS
  
  The Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of Dutch merchants, was established in 1621 as a monopoly over the African slave trade to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.
  
  WIC had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, but one-fourth of Africans transported across the Atlantic by the company were moved in slave ships from Amsterdam. Almost all of the money that financed slave plantations in Suriname and the Antilles came from bankers in Amsterdam, just as many of the ships used to transport slaves were built there.
  
  Many of the raw materials that were turned into finished goods in Amsterdam, such as sugar and coffee, were grown in the colonies using slave labor and then refined in factories in the Jordaan neighborhood.
  
  Revenue from the goods produced with slave labor funded much of The Netherlands’ golden age in the 17th century, a period renowned for its artistic, literary, scientific, and philosophical achievements.
  
  Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for the Dutch in the form of precious metals, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee and cotton and other goods, and helped to fund the creation of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals and city center.
  
  5) PORTUGAL
  
  Portugal was the first of all European countries to become involved in the Atlantic slave trade. From the 15th to 19th century, the Portuguese exported 4.5 million Africans as slaves to the Americas, making it Europe’s largest trafficker of human beings.
  
  Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Portugal’s colony of Brazil, and sugar was the primary export from 1600 to 1650. Gold and diamond deposits were discovered in Brazil in 1690, which sparked an increase in the importation of African slaves to power this newly profitable market.
  
  The large portion of the Brazilian inland where gold was extracted was known as the Minas Gerais (General Mines). Gold mining in this area became the main economic activity of colonial Brazil during the 18th century. In Portugal, the gold was mainly used to pay for industrialized goods such as textiles and weapons, and to build magnificent baroque monuments like the Convent of Mafra.
  
  6) SPAIN
  
  Starting in 1492, Spain was the first European country to colonize the New World, where they established an economic monopoly in the territories of Florida and other parts of North America, Mexico, Trinidad, Cuba and other Caribbean islands. The native populations of these colonies were mostly dying from disease or enslavement, so the Spanish were forced to increasingly rely on African slave labor to run their colonies.
  
  The money generated from these settlements created great wealth for the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties throughout Spain’s hold on the area. But it also attracted Spain’s European rivals, prompting Spanish rulers to spend the riches from the Americas to fuel successive European wars.
  
  Spanish treasure fleets were used to protect the cargo transported across the Atlantic Ocean. The ships’ cargo included lumber, manufactured goods, various metal resources and expensive luxury goods including silver, gold, gems, pearls, spices, sugar, tobacco leaf and silk.
  
  Port cities in Spain flourished. Seville, which had a royal monopoly on New World trade, was transformed from a provincial port into a major city and political center. Since the Spanish colonists were not yet producing their own staples such as wine, oil, flour, arms and leather, and had large financial reserves to pay for them, prices in Castile and Andalusia rose sharply as traders bought up goods to ship out.
  
  Prices of oil, wine and wheat tripled between 1511 and 1539. The great vineyards of Jerez, the olive groves of Jaén, and the arms and leather industry of Toledo were established on their present scale during these years.
  
  
  (b) Title: “15 MAJOR CORPORATIONS YOU NEVER KNEW BENEFITTED FROM SLAVERY” (Visit the websites of Occupy Wall Street and Black Atlantic Star for more information)
  
  The enslavement of African people in the Americas by the nations and peoples of Western Europe, created the economic engine that funded modern capitalism. Therefore it comes as no surprise that most of the major corporations that were founded by Western European and American merchants prior to roughly 100 years ago, benefited directly from slavery.
  
  Lehman Brothers, whose business empire started in the slave trade, recently admitted their part in the business of slavery. According to the Sun Times, the financial services firm acknowledged recently that its founding partners owned not one, but several enslaved Africans during the Civil War era and that, “in all likelihood,” it “profited significantly” from slavery. “This is a sad part of our heritage …We’re deeply apologetic … It was a terrible thing … There’s no one sitting in the United States in the year 2005, hopefully, who would ever, in a million years, defend the practice,” said Joe Polizzotto, general counsel of Lehman Brothers.
  
  Aetna, Inc., the United States’ largest health insurer, apologized for selling policies in the 1850s that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when the enslaved Africans they owned died. “Aetna has long acknowledged that for several years shortly after its founding in 1853 that the company may have insured the lives of slaves,” said Aetna spokesman Fred Laberge in 2002. “We express our deep regret over any participation at all in this deplorable practice.”
  
  JPMorgan Chase recently admitted their company’s links to slavery. “Today, we are reporting that this research found that, between 1831 and 1865, two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans,” the company wrote in a statement.
  
  New York Life Insurance Company is the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States. They also took part in slavery by selling insurance policies on enslaved Africans. According to USA Today, evidence of 10 more New York Life slave policies comes from an 1847 account book kept by the company’s Natchez, Miss. agent, W.A. Britton. The book, part of a collection at Louisiana State University, contains Britton’s notes on slave policies he wrote for amounts ranging from $375 to $600. A 1906 history of New York Life says 339 of the company’s first 1,000 policies were written on the lives of slaves.
  
  USA Today reported that Wachovia Corporation (now owned by Wells Fargo) has apologized for its ties to slavery after disclosing that two of its historical predecessors owned enslaved Africans and accepted them as payment. “On behalf of Wachovia Corporation, I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent,” said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and chief executive officer, in the statement released late Wednesday. “We are deeply saddened by these findings.”
  
  N M Rothschild & Sons Bank in London was linked to slavery. The company that was one of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies. Documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed that Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking family’s 19th-century patriarch, made his first personal gains by using enslaved Africans as collateral in dealings with a slave owner.
  
  Norfolk Southern also has a history in the slave trade. The Mobile & Girard Company, which is now part of Norfolk Southern, offered slaveholders $180 ($3,379 today) apiece for enslaved Africans they would rent to the railroad for one year, according to the records. The Central of Georgia, another company aligned with Norfolk Southern Line today, valued its slaves at $31,303 ($663,033 today) on record.
  
  USA Today has found that their own parent company, E.W. Scripps and Gannett, has had links to the slave trade.
  
  There is evidence that FleetBoston evolved from an earlier financial institution, Providence Bank, founded by John Brown who was a slave trader and owned ships used to transport enslaved Africans. The bank financed Brown’s slave voyages and profited from them. Brown even reportedly helped charter what became Brown University.
  
  CSX used slave labor to construct portions of some U.S. rail lines under the political and legal system that was in place more than a century ago. Two enslaved Africans who the company rented were identified as John Henry and Reuben. The record states, “they were to be returned clothed when they arrived to work for the company.” Individual enslaved Africans cost up to $200 – the equivalent of $3,800 today - to rent for a season and CSX took full advantage.
  
  The Canadian National Railway Company is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and southern United States. The company also has a history in which it benefited from slavery. The Mobile & Ohio, now part of Canadian National, valued their slaves lost to the war and emancipation at $199,691 on record. That amount is currently worth $2.2 million.
  
  Brown Brothers Harriman is the oldest and largest private investment bank and securities firm in the United States, founded in 1818. USA Today found that the New York merchant bank of James and William Brown, currently known as Brown Bros. Harriman owned hundreds of enslaved Africans and financed the cotton economy by lending millions to southern planters, merchants and cotton brokers.
  
  Brooks Brothers, the high end suit retailer got their start selling slave clothing to various slave traders back in the 1800s. What a way to get rich in the immoral slave industry!
  
  Barclays, the British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom has now conceded that companies it bought over the years may have been involved in the slave trade.
  
  USA Today reported that New York-based AIG completed the purchase of American General Financial Group, a Houston-based insurer that owns U.S. Life Insurance Company. A U.S. Life policy on an enslaved African living in Kentucky was reprinted in a 1935 article about slave insurance in The American Conservationist magazine. AIG says it has “found documentation indicating” U.S. Life insured enslaved Africans.

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• Philip Kobina Baidoo 10 years ago

  What a d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n. I thought you said I am Mr Nobody, and I should not be taken seriously. My point is if I am Mr Nobody why do you worry so much about what I write. This piece was posted very late yesterday; I did ...
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  What a d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n. I thought you said I am Mr Nobody, and I should not be taken seriously. My point is if I am Mr Nobody why do you worry so much about what I write. This piece was posted very late yesterday; I did not even see it until this morning. And because it was so late the usual suspects did not get the chance to comment. I have never such desperation in my life on this celestial body. J-e-s-u-s C-h-r-i-s-t! You need to see a shrink; I am not joking. This is absolute madness. Though I have said it somewhere I don’t want to see you mad, please.

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• francis kwarteng 10 years ago

  Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
  
  Come up with an intelligent response to contradict all the facts I have presented and stop beating about the bush.
  
  Remember what I have presented here (in both comments) by way of academ ...
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  Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
  
  Come up with an intelligent response to contradict all the facts I have presented and stop beating about the bush.
  
  Remember what I have presented here (in both comments) by way of academic texts merely scratches the surface. I will provide more if the need arises.
  
  All in all, get us the "scientific" facts (data, statistics, archival materials, historical records (by slavery institutions and slave-master merchant capitalists, etc) and put a stop to your emotional waywardness.
  
  That lame strategy defeats the purpose of "rational" intellectualism. The texts I provide in my My second comment take you and your unsuspecting readership through some of the most profound scholarship and primary sources you can ever find on the planet.
  
  In fact, they make your arguments look like middle-school writing assignments. Hahahahaha...But your unsuspecting readership stand to benefit from them should they access them.
  
  I am done for this article. I leave the rest to raeders.
  
  Thanks Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian.

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• Philip Kobina Baidoo 10 years ago

  What a d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n. I thought you said I am Mr Nobody, and I should not be taken seriously. My point is if I am Mr Nobody why do you worry so much about what I write. This piece was posted very late yesterday; I did ...
  read full comment

  What a d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n. I thought you said I am Mr Nobody, and I should not be taken seriously. My point is if I am Mr Nobody why do you worry so much about what I write. This piece was posted very late yesterday; I did not even see it until this morning. And because it was so late the usual suspects did not get the chance to comment. I have never seen such desperation in my life on this celestial body. J-e-s-u-s C-h-r-i-s-t! You need to see a shrink; I am not joking. This is absolute madness. Though I have said it somewhere I don’t want to see you mad, please.

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• francis kwarteng 10 years ago

  Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
  
  Hahahahahaha...Do you see yourself as a Nobody? Are you okay? Are you that desperate to read my posted comments? Oh no!
  
  And are you one of those clueless Jesus-Christ Civil Libertarians ...
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  Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian,
  
  Hahahahahaha...Do you see yourself as a Nobody? Are you okay? Are you that desperate to read my posted comments? Oh no!
  
  And are you one of those clueless Jesus-Christ Civil Libertarians who insult and insult and insult and say "socialism is the lifeblood of Ghanaian tribalism"?...Could you give me just one quotion from your Jesus Christ Bible where he insutled anyone!
  
  Well, that is your cup of tea. These comments are not necessarily for you. They are for readers. That is why I did not say "Dear Baidoo" or "Baidoo."
  
  And by saying you Nobody, are you referring to the commentator who said you have some good "high-school" ideas? Well, I never said that. One of those better informed Ghanaweb readers may have made this comment.
  
  Besides I want readers to appreciate current scholarship on the subject rather than your childish, clueless and uninformed arguments.
  
  That said, you can characterize yourself anyhow you want but, please, don't misquote me. Have you ever seen a normal civil libertarian in your entire life (the FBI is after your fellow civil libertarian Rand Paul)?
  
  Have you ever seen any normal guy who talk about paper capitalism they way you do? Where does that paper capitalism ever existed in human history? This is why you need to see a shrink.
  
  And if you think it is desperation, ask those who know me and they well tell you that I am against people who like to lie, distort facts, and try to present to know what they are talking about when they are not.
  
  Hahahahaha...you need to see a shrink yourself to let you know how you are so clueless about basic facts and ideas. Anyway prove to your readers why you think you any intelligent to say about this subject (as opposed to what these experts have to say. I say this because you have not demonstrated a single intlligent response to these subject matters as far as I am concerned. All you have done is a mere display of sentimentalism rather demonstrating than rational and historicist dicussions).
  
  Thus it is your desperation to sentmentalize, distort, fabricate, and misrepresent facts that I want to expose. Remember every single topic you have touched on so far is what I discuss and debate for pleasure.
  
  So if you think you are Nobody, that is your cup of tea. After you know yourself better. Please continue to read and you might one day catch up (Not just any material. Try and read as much primary material as you could possibly get).
  
  Don't worry. You have just see a little of me by way of information. And like I have said over and over to you, you have not made a single intelligent, well-informed, and rational argument yet and your unsuspecting readership need to be better informed.
  
  Baidoo, read and read and read and get better informed and one day you might say one intelligent article someday. All the "scientific" facts are against you, Mr. Oxymoron Civil Libertarian! Get better informed.
  
  Thanks.

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