Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought

Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought PDF Author: Simona Pisanelli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040109071
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Atlantic slavery represents one of the blackest pages of human history. European powers not only colonised American lands but also brought African men and women to work as slaves on plantations. Intellectuals did not remain indifferent to this practice and – from the second half of the 18th century – criticised the institution of slavery from an ethical, legal, and economic point of view. This book aims to briefly illustrate the colonisation process implemented by France and Great Britain in the Caribbean and to reconstruct the debate on colonialism and slavery that developed in these two countries, approaching the issue from the standpoint of the History of Economic Thought. The decisive phase in this debate took place in the second half of the 18th century, when some classical economists belonging to the cultural movement of the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the critique of a production system based on slavery. On the same basis, some economists of the first half of the 19th century continued to express their critical attitude towards slavery and colonialism. The ideas of the Enlightenment, although of European origin, are also useful in analysing the different levels of development that the former American colonies achieved following independence, choosing to invest in either industry or agriculture. This book provides the reader with the critical tools to understand that opting for slavery was not only an unforgivable sin in human history but also an economically irrational choice.

Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought

Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought PDF Author: Simona Pisanelli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040109071
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
Atlantic slavery represents one of the blackest pages of human history. European powers not only colonised American lands but also brought African men and women to work as slaves on plantations. Intellectuals did not remain indifferent to this practice and – from the second half of the 18th century – criticised the institution of slavery from an ethical, legal, and economic point of view. This book aims to briefly illustrate the colonisation process implemented by France and Great Britain in the Caribbean and to reconstruct the debate on colonialism and slavery that developed in these two countries, approaching the issue from the standpoint of the History of Economic Thought. The decisive phase in this debate took place in the second half of the 18th century, when some classical economists belonging to the cultural movement of the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the critique of a production system based on slavery. On the same basis, some economists of the first half of the 19th century continued to express their critical attitude towards slavery and colonialism. The ideas of the Enlightenment, although of European origin, are also useful in analysing the different levels of development that the former American colonies achieved following independence, choosing to invest in either industry or agriculture. This book provides the reader with the critical tools to understand that opting for slavery was not only an unforgivable sin in human history but also an economically irrational choice.

Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism and Slavery PDF Author: Eric Williams
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Capital and Imperialism

Capital and Imperialism PDF Author: Utsa Patnaik
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
ISBN: 1583678905
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A comprehensive survey of capitalism's colonialist roots and uncertain future Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Even after the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism,” neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic “austerity” measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see—finally—the transcendence of the capitalist system.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries PDF Author: Sean D. Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

The Economic History of Colonialism

The Economic History of Colonialism PDF Author: Leigh Gardner
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529207665
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Asia and Africa, this book: • critically reviews the literature on colonialism and economic growth; • covers a range of different methods of analysis; • offers a comparative approach, as opposed to a collection of regional histories, deftly weaving together different themes. With debates around globalization, migration, global finance and environmental change intensifying, this authoritative account of the relationship between colonialism and economic development makes an invaluable contribution to several distinct literatures in economic history.

Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought

Slavery and Colonialism in the History of Economic Thought PDF Author: Simona Pisanelli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032192413
Category : Colonization
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Atlantic slavery represents one of the blackest pages of human history. European powers not only colonised American lands, but also brought African men and women to work as slaves on plantations. Intellectuals did not remain indifferent to this practice and - from the second half of the eighteenth century - criticised the institution of slavery from an ethical, legal and economic point of view. This book aims to briefly illustrate the colonisation process implemented by France and Great Britain in the Caribbean and to reconstruct the debate on colonialism and slavery that developed in these two countries, approaching the issue from the standpoint of the History of Economic Thought. The decisive phase in this debate took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, when some classical economists belonging to the cultural movement of the Enlightenment, laid the foundations for the critique of a production system based on slavery. On the same basis, some economists of the first half of the nineteenth century continued to express their critical attitude towards slavery and colonialism. The ideas of the Enlightenment, although of European origin, are also useful in analysing the different levels of development that the former American colonies achieved following independence, choosing to invest in either industry or agriculture. The book provides the reader with the critical tools to understand that opting for slavery was not only an unforgivable sin in human history, but also an economically irrational choice"--

The Half Has Never Been Told

The Half Has Never Been Told PDF Author: Edward E Baptist
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Colonialism and Slavery in Performance

Colonialism and Slavery in Performance PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Leichman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781800348042
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony, illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore the enduring legacy of the Old Regime in contemporary Antillean stage culture, illustrating how performance traditions continue to structure the understanding of what it means to be French in France's former Atlantic slave colonies.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa PDF Author: Walter Rodney
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788731204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Analyzing Oppression

Analyzing Oppression PDF Author: Ann E. Cudd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195187431
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Analyzing Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates through oppressed persons' own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief appears to absolve society from responsibility. While on Cudd's view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical deprivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression. She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve freedom for all others.