Modern slavery quiz: would you prosecute? This would prove to be a great enrichment of cultural life and would contribute to the global culture of modern times. Save for a few intermittent news headlines and the 2013 John Cusack movie, “The Numbers Station,” popular culture hasn’t really attached many conspiracy theories to these strange transmissions. British economic advance was made possible by many other factors, including the progress of agriculture, the advance of technology, the stability of political institutions, the local availability of materials such as coal, and a culture that was conducive to innovation and enterprise. During the eighteenth century, Britain became the first country in the world to “industrialise”, in terms of an unprecedented economic shift towards manufacturing and commerce, and the progress of technology. Instead, in the decades that followed, industrialisation marched on, spreading to new parts of Europe, and experiencing new waves of technological progress. However, as we have seen, the actions of Europeans were having an impact on other parts of the world.
However, historians of European industrialisation have often given little attention to the contribution of the slave trade, although there are exceptions. However, this is a long way from saying that the slave trade was the main cause of Britain’s “industrialisation”. This is Part One in a series of how I’m cutting ties with this Information giant, with explanation and alternatives for each step along the way. In “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” a shocking piece of information was revealed – Kylo Ren was actually Ben Solo, the son of Leia and Han. “Say NO to paying for something that happened 100s of years ago,” screamed one meme that was doing the rounds on social media around the time tabloids began to claim that Caribbean nations were “suing” for reparations. It implies, wrongly, that historical events of such vast reach as slavery have no discernible material impact on our present, as though what happened to or was done by our ancestors doesn’t filter down and impact our present. The benefits of slavery have accrued down the generations, so why are we so nervous about the responsibility for the slave trade doing the same? The fact is most forms of labor have an equivalent cost in the salaries and benefits accorded to the people working at a particular form of business, for the agricultural industry the perceived cost of operations without slaves would increase exponentially if they were to hire their own fellow citizens to work in the fields thus increasing the overall cost of the finished product.
The divide was reinforced by the determination to segregate black and white communities and discourage intermarriage, and by the reluctance to liberate black people from slavery from one generation to the next. The long-term economic exploitation of millions of black slaves was to have a profound effect on the New World’s history. First, had the slave trade been the “magic bullet” that led to industrialisation, Portugal should have been a leading industrial power, in view of its long engagement in the trade. Ironically, the very strategy that made IBM the darling of Wall Street almost led to its demise. Crowley’s experiments with the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs led him into this abyss. I had no way of knowing what Google uses these addresses for, but it was highly unlikely that they were leased directly to customers. Google is one of several search-engines that index and support microformats. One key to success is to identify strategies that win more money than they lose. Assuming construction, accidents, and stalled vehicles aren’t to blame, it’s likely due to more cars entering the highway than leaving it. More slaves in the colonies meant more consumption of sugar, coffee and chocolate in Europe, and thus also meant even more demand minimum deposit for olymp trade slaves.
But from its inception, it used slaves; and when plantations were set up in the Americas, black slaves became the backbone of the workforce. This contrasted with the experiences of African slaves who were sent to the Middle East, where both inter-marriage and slave liberation were more common. And yet, in spite of the trauma experienced over the course of generations, there was the creativity with which, gradually, the black communities of the Americas developed new identities, drawing on a combination of African tradition, encounters with European culture, and experiences in the New World. Most fundamentally, it produced deep social divides between the rich white and poor black communities, the consequences of which still haunt American societies now, many years after emancipation. On this basis, might one conclude that the most significant and grave consequences of the Europeans’ involvement in the slave trade lay in Africa and the Americas, rather than in Europe itself? It is from this point that an infinity of gates open, each one a gateway to a mode of being.