Ancestors

Written by Mr Salteena is not quite a gentleman on 2025-01-30 at 08:02

I'm reading Eric WIlliams Capitalism and Slavery, having read C L R James The Black Jacobins earlier, and a thing which has finally sunk in is this: abolition in the UK only succeeded because the American Revolution and the exhausted soil of the West Indies meant that slave owners of Jamaica and Barbadoes lost their economic, and therefore their political power. The change of British policy was because those slave fortunes no longer dominated and it suited the British Empire to try and kneecap the Americans and the French, who still relied on slavery. Morality had nothing to do with it, or at least it had nothing to do with abolition's eventual success as policy. This great crime against humanity

was tolerated and celebrated as long as it was useful, and then it was not. Sometimes by the same people.

This has gloomy implications for climate action: the vast fortunes of oil will continue to work against change, until oil is no longer the source of wealth it is now. But maybe the ever increasing cheapness of solar, and the growing power of countries that don't have oil (China? India?) might help.

Incidentally Williams and James, both West Indian slave descendants, writing decades ago, have wonderful prose styles. Dry, acerbic, arch, ironic, finely turned. Horrible subject matter, great reads.

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Toot

Written by Mr Salteena is not quite a gentleman on 2025-01-30 at 08:08

The article on Eric Williams I stumbled on that made me track down the book: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/eighty-years-late-groundbreaking-work-on-slave-economy-is-finally-published-in-uk

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Descendants

Written by Mr Salteena is not quite a gentleman on 2025-01-30 at 08:13

Can't vouch for the copyright legitimacy but there are downloadable versions of The Black Jacobins linked here https://libcom.org/article/black-jacobins-toussaint-louverture-and-san-domingo-revolution-clr-james

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