Slave-backed bonds generated revenue for investors from enslavers repayments of mortgages on enslaved people, Baptist writes. This meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by hands in the field. Thus, in effect, even as Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire, a British bank could now sell an investor a completely commodified slave: not a particular individual who could die or run away, but a bond that was the right to a one-slave-sized slice of a pie made from the income of thousands of slaves. ---- This is very important. Because I think this means that a bond backed by slaves is one which is actually guaranteed in some way by the slave OWNER, possibly in return for credit. But I wonder, could it work out in such a way that a person buying a bond backed by slaves, but guaranteed by a slave owner, might not be doing the equivalent of assuming ownership of the SLAVE OWNER and all his slaves? But, if I, as a bond holder, own a 1/10 portion of the value of a slave owners slaves, and he has ten slaves at first, I want his slaves to have many children, as once those children grow up, I own 1/10 of the product/value of his original slaves AND ANY CHILDREN THEY HAD. In ten years, if a slave owners children have two children each, an initial investment in 1/10 of ten slaves turns into a realization of the profits 30 slaves can bring in. But the moment a bank has invested in a slave owners business, that puts pressures on the slave owners to do whatever it will take to ensure their slave owning business increases in profitability. The investors pressure the slave owners and in some way perhaps turn them into slaves themselves in their own right. What I wonder is, what happened to all of those slave bonds AFTER the civil war? Did investors lose their shirts? Or might the banking system have figured out some elaborate way to participate in various schemes allowing some investors to get rich off slave bonds in some way, simply by shipping off former slaves to work in politically favored factories, even while racist Jim Crow laws were passed allowing for such factories to exploit them as super cheap labor, cheap enough so as to be more efficient than slavery, thus causing former slave bonds to increase in value, now that theyve been assigned to a corporation (think Rockefeller, Henry Ford) that profits off of de facto slave labor in all but name?
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 09:41:31 +0000