the economist loves slavery: No wonder The Economist worried in September 1861, when Union General John C. Frémont emancipated slaves in Missouri, that such a fearful measure might spread to other slaveholding states, inflict[ing] utter ruin and universal desolation on those fertile territories—and on the merchants of Boston and New York, whose prosperity … has always been derived to a large extent from those territories. During its heyday, however, slavery was seen as essential to the economy of the Western world. No wonder The Economist worried in September 1861, when Union General John C. Frémont emancipated slaves in Missouri, that such a fearful measure might spread to other slaveholding states, inflict[ing] utter ruin and universal desolation on those fertile territories—and on the merchants of Boston and New York, whose prosperity … has always been derived to a large extent from those territories. Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction. It died because of violent struggle, because enslaved workers continually challenged the people who held them in bondage—nowhere more successfully than in the 1790s in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti, site of the first free nation of color in the New World), and because a courageous group of abolitionists struggled against some of the dominant economic interests of their time. chronicle/article/SlaveryCapitalism/150787/
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 19:15:55 +0000
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