300 years of atlantic Slave trade - Animated

[Peter R]

Interesting docu-drama...anybody here name "Beckford"? i's about yu backra masters... story centres on one planter family, the Beckfords, and how they enriched themselves on the back of slaves. The slaves appear more as the "extras" in the story, though it points out how the slaves were brought to Jamaica and subsequently bought; imagine the planters fighting each other to grab a slave they fancied?! I would have thought there was bidding process... imagine Englishman who nah line up fi get nutten but a fight over African fi get di pick of the "crop"
The video also outlines how slaves were (mis)treated, the hierarchy among the slaves, their work hours (12 hour days (longer if needed) and Sunday off), conditions (whippings and beatings) and so we do get a good picture of life as a slave. African women gave birth without the aid of a midwife for example, and of course the overseers and "masters" sexually abused many of the female slaves. The life of a slave was not highly valued as apologists might have us believe...

[Don1]

What I find peculiar (well except in the case of Cornell West and few others)is how people naively recall the history of atrocity against our race with the start of slavery and abruptly ending when it was so-called abolished.
Immediately after slavery ended(on the books),the prison popoulation disproportionately changed with an exponential increase in the number of people from my race.If you have abusiness and wanted to pay slave wages without having to be bothered by workers rights etc,all you had to do is tap into the prisoner workforce made available by the system.In slavery,the piece of ***** slave owner saw slaves as an investment,he would,mistreat you but rather not kill you.That was not the case with the freed slaves that were targeted for the prisoner workforce,they could die because they are easily replaceable.How did we get to where we are today,we did not get anywhere,we re trapped in a time capsule!

Yuh ah tawk bout dem prison shitstem an dem traps wi fall inna.. dat ah one ah di most damaging of all Babylon Games dem run pon wi..

Mi all ah si di Forum's very own Uncle Booker Tom ah advocate fi man invest inna Babylon's private prison complex like 'ow "returns are guaranteed" (Yes many of Babylon's prisons are investment vehicles...dats 'ow mentally ill di Babylon Vampiyas are )

Mi nuh know if ah joke Uncle T dida mek....but even iffah suh dat ah one sick mentality puppa...Head Gone tings dat

[Islandman]

All was that valued was their productivity and market price, just like any other commercial asset that one owns.

[Peter R]

Those slaves must have been more expensive than those from West Africa...that would have been one long journey... and many of those dots ended up in the Caribbean and North, not Brazil which might have been the logical destination given the length of the journey. One ship, "The African" under a British flag transported 268 Africans to Kingston in 1764.
The African
Great Britain

This ship left Malembo, in present-day Sudan, with 294 enslaved people and arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, with 268. It made five journeys between 1677 and 1764 and transported a total of 1,255 Africans. MORE INFO »

All of the dots (about ten) I clicked on BTW, said the ships left from Malembo, in present day Sudan (see bolded above). I cannot find such a place on the map, in Sudan. There are several "Malembos" I found, Uganda, Angola, Malawi but none in Sudan. Strange...

[Islandman]

I wonder what was the motivation to transport them from way over there?

[Peter R]

My speculation, and this is a guess, is that Europeans probably ended up in Sudan seeking riches (as usual), gold or other precious cargo. They then ended up taking slaves back with them as part of whatever their "haul" was, but...

[Rockman]

I do not know Bolt but based on the things said about him(such as insisting on infomercials be filmed on local soil),I am pretty he is more than willing.
Very good proposal,Don 1.

[Sir X]

Curious as to what you think about slaverys role on the industrail revolution i.e capitalism,how you tried to seperate the two , as i said slavery was the foundation of 19th,20th and 21st capitalism, the term factory came out of slavery,empires came out of slavery,Britain basically financed its growth through it ,where commoners like Beckford added new blood ,new money to the aristocratic shitstem of Britain.Thats just Jamaica, a small part of the british empire,then you have the americas under British rule and southern rule.Cotton financied a civil war.

Firm foottage for capitalism.One Jamaican planter rose from being a commoner to being one of the richest men in Europe because of ther factory shitstem called slavery.You see how this Beckford man broke down the economics of slave labour and the financing,how it bought a man his MP status.


Any thoughts Island ?

[Don1]

Bolt is Jamaica's greatest patriot at the moment, a worldwide icon...and a great lover of football.

Brazil is the site of the next Olympics...and the greatest football brand....and as backward in track as we are in football

People just have to connect the obvious dots

[Islandman]

The slave economy certainly was a big part of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century.

However I certainly don't see any evidence that slavery was what resulted in the success of capitalism, or that without capitalism there would have been no slavery. Slavery preceded capitalism in its modern form,we all know that. Also, there was capitalist-led innovation going on which supported the slave economy, and there were innovations going on that disrupted the slave economy and made it inefficient.

A good example of this: slavery was one the wane in North America in the late 1700s , it was not a good fit for many of the newer industries. That is, until the cotton gin was invented. Then suddenly cotton was a very lucrative crop and slaves were in great demand again in the South. The North did not grow cotton and developed a more modern wage-based industrial economy, also due to capitalism. So you have capitalism generating wealth in a slave based southern economy, and generating even greater wealth in a wage based Northern economy.

How can the success of capitalism as an economic model be due to slavery, when capitalism has had its greatest success and generated its greatest innovation in the decades since slavery? Doesn't make sense.

Without a doubt capitalism in a certain era benefitted from slavery but it surely has also thrived in the absence of slavery. Communism on the other hand, has never thrived.

[Sir X]

The slave economy certainly was a big part of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century.

However I certainly don't see any evidence that slavery was what resulted in the success of capitalism....Oxymoron ...so can you honestly say without the big part that you say slavery played,would we have these capitalist empires that we have now ?


I will leave it alone with your 1st sentence , and say we agree

[Islandman]

None of us can say, we can only speculate.

My personal view is that perhaps the timeline would have been different and it would have taken longer, but I have little doubt that free market capitalism would have ultimately been successful. Unless of course something better was invented in the absence of slavery.

The big ideas that Adam Smith prescribes in the Wealth of Nations, for example the concept of the invisible hand which guides free market economies, is not based on the existence of slavery or serfdom. Instead it is based on human self-interest and the quest to keep doing better than yesterday.

[Sir X]

Yuh good thats all i gotta say,we argued the merits before this was just refreshing our points,but i will say , you have moved in my direction,there is a book on slavery that i found cant remember it ,but it broke down in numbers the attrition involed in slavery in the colonies,ghastly good book, will try and find.

[Islandman]

Also you seem to forget that the capitalist-driven industrial revolution replaced countless workers and slaves with machines. Who needs slaves when you have machines that can do the job better?

Why you think the Luddites were ****ed? It wasn't slaves taking their jobs! It was human innovation, just like it has done since the invention of the wheel and probably before that.

[Mosiah]

The thing that struck me most was the difference in numbers between those humans transported to the Caribbean and South America vs those who went to the America.