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Remains of First African Slaves Found
An anonymous reader writes to tell us LiveScience is reporting that Archaeologists may have found the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World. From the article: "The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land. The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
But possibly not the first.
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"The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land.
Was it a gold tooth? Part of a platinum grille?
How do they know they were slaves?
The remains, in a colonial era graveyard in one of the oldest European cities in Mexico, date between the late-16th century and the mid-17th century, not long after Columbus first set foot in the Americas.
100 years is "not long after"? Has the length of the year changed since then or what?
The city was founded in 1540 by Spanish conquistadores as San Francisco de Campeche atop the preexisting Maya city of Canpech or Kimpech.
Now we know that the Cortes expedition had some African slaves in it. Here is a question on the subject, while research is done on the many aspects of European Slavery, how much research is done on inter-African slavery or Islamic slavery in regards to Africa? I know we hear a bunch about slavery in the United States, but how about the United Kingdom or French slavery?
Heck, what about trans-tribal slavery in the Americas? While working on a paper about the Cortes expedition there were references in many texts and documents about the Aztecs having slaves, but much more time and space devoted to the few slaves the expedition had with them.
'It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales.'
Unless, of course, you fill your water barrels at that location, and then everyone on board drinks from that 'unique' source for a given period of time, in which case you'd easily detect false-positives and mistakenly believe the entire crew was borne in one location.
Reminds me of when some researchers found WWII supply caches buried in the Sahara by Rommel's forces...the first thing they did was to release a study claiming they could better define modern pollution, as Rommel's water had been carefully sealed, buried and protected. That study I can buy...this one, on slave origins, I'm less inclined, sorry.
Americans have been blamed for slavery yet this first group were obviously brought by the Spanish. A number of Europeon countries were involved in the slave trade. I'm not aware of American ships involved in the slave trade itself. Wealthy landowners in this country were buyers but the trade was actually Europeon in origin. Just find it odd that the US gets all the blame when the slavers were African and Europeon. Kind of like saying the drug addicts were responsible for making, transporting and selling the drugs. Rich Americans back in the 1700s and 1800s were at fault but they were hardly the only ones involved. And an FYI most Americans at the time didn't own slaves or support slavery. Many in fact actively worked against the practice.
Well, since the Spanish continued to have slaves, and write a lot about them, and leave lots of artifacts, and the Aztecs *mysteriously* disappeared, I think it's safe to assume that the relative lack of knowledge about the topic might have contributed to the paucity of writing about Aztec slavery vs. well-documented European slavery.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Now we know that the Cortes expedition had some African slaves in it. Here is a question on the subject, while research is done on the many aspects of European Slavery, how much research is done on inter-African slavery or Islamic slavery in regards to Africa? I know we hear a bunch about slavery in the United States, but how about the United Kingdom or French slavery?
Perhaps, first North American African Slavery? Until 1776, of course, slavery in the Colonies was United Kingdom slavery anyway.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's odd.
I always assumed the first African Slaves were in Africa.
But, maybe that's because they were.
Paleeze africans made slave of other africans well before any white man did so in the new world.
"The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
That said, I wonder what the results of the same testing would show on individuals that reside in current industrialized first world nations. It occurs to me that a good portion of the food we eat is produced abroad.
I pity the anthropologists of tommorow.
false. consider new amsterdam, aka new york.
There's a large body of knowledge on the Islamic slave trade and intra-African trading.
1 01101a.htm
http://africanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa
Just about everyone was guilty when it came to the slave trade. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and most everyone in between.
That's just the (unfortunate) way things were
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually the United Kingdom didn't exist until the Act of Union of 1800. Between 1707 and 1800 it was called the Kingdom of Great Britain. Before that England and Scotland were considered separate kingdoms despite them having the same monarch since 1603.
Blog
You think that's bad? What till this question of yours is marked to be the flamebait it is. The article is very important because now we know almost exactly how long slavery lasted in the New World. Your vocabulary implies to me why you do not care.
On a slow news day, I would prefer /. share such things with me instead of dupes.
Open Source Sushi
I'm happy to see any science-related stories on slashdot - if you're not interested, don't read it.
They'll want to suck us up. Hopefully the combustion engine will be re-invented by then.
cheerio
Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.
And then there was the smallpox epidemic (and other diseases) that the Spanish brought from Europe and for which the native population had no defenses. In fact, Cuitláhuac died of smallpox and his nephew Cuauhtémoc then became the last Aztec emperor. The Spanish captured him, tortured him, kept him prisoner a few years and then hanged him.
But even though the Aztec population was significantly reduced and scattered, their descendants are still around. There's been just a bit of foreign immigration to Mexico the last 484 years, mostly from Spain. Want to guess why modern Mexicans look a bit different than Aztecs and other locals did? : ) And finally, their language (Náhuatl) is still spoken in several states in central Mexico.
Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords. Talk about the devil you know, huh?
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I'll answer your first questions, despite you making yourself seem more like trollbait with your second post. Finding ancient human remains is dating to a period of early settlement in an area as significant as North America is certainly a nerdy enough topic.
I can rest easy now. I've been sitting on the edge of my seat just waiting for them to find those remains. 'Bout time! [/sarcasm]
I actually agree with you, partly. Although I am happy to see more science-related issues on Slashdot, comments like yours prove that clearly some nerds here are not intelligent enough to handle them.
There isn't much mentioned about Islam in that article. Yes, Islam allowed slaves, as did the Bible supposedly. However, if the American slavemasters were any indication, Islam's rules on slavery were much fairer. For example, Muslims couldn't forcibly convert a slave, but the American slavemasters did it to a strong extent (nearly a third of the slaves brought over to America were Muslim, but many were forcibly converted to Christianity and Islam vanished for a time.)
ahem... what I meant to say is: I'll answer your first questions, despite you making yourself seem more like trollbait with your second post. Finding ancient human remains dating to a period of early settlement in an area as significant as North America is certainly a nerdy enough topic.
They'll have all those cryo people they unthawed to tell them all about us.
It took the "middle passage" and other horrors to really turn large-scale African slavery into the worst atrocity of the past two-thousand years.
Stalin? The Nazis and Khmer Rouge? Small potatoes to these horrors, which continued for almost two-hundred years. The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal, with human beings reduced to a level of treatment beneath that of animals.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This stuff is fascinating because like every ingorant Joe out there I thought stuff (good and bad) started happening on the North American continent mostly after the Europeans settled. And such things as colonies, slavery and celestial observations would not have existed here before.
Yeah on paper Islam says certain things, but Islam practiced for real is a different thing. Need an example? Islam says for Muslims to be tolerant of other religions. Yet go to Saudi Arabia, and find out if can you practice your non-Islamic religion in public? Can you build a church, temple or synagogue? Can you be a citizen without being a Muslim? Can you even walk around Mecca if you so desired, without being a Muslim? Let me know if the answer to any of these questions is no longer "no"?
Paper Islam and real Islam are two mutually exculsive things, my naive and sheltered techie.
The Muslims were kicked out of Spain about the same time Columbus discovered America. It is quite possible that someone living in Spain as a free person had been born in Africa.
TFA obviously doesn't contain all the evidence the archeologists found, so maybe there is some evidence we don't know about. TFA doesn't prove conclusively that the skeletons belonged to slaves. The statement that slavery was an important part of the local economy seems to be a bit of a stretch.
I'm not aware of American ships involved in the slave trade itself.
Um, basic economics please? If there wasn't a demand in the colonies for the slaves, you think the slavers would have bothered making the trip?
There are many kinds of nerds ok? This is interesting to our anthropological nerd brethren. Nerds need to learn to respect each other.
No Sigs!
"Now we know that the Cortes expedition had some African slaves in it. Here is a question on the subject, while research is done on the many aspects of European Slavery, how much research is done on inter-African slavery or Islamic slavery in regards to Africa? I know we hear a bunch about slavery in the United States, but how about the United Kingdom or French slavery?" This is a classic example of "whataboutery". You've been presented with facts and information about the AMERICAN, trans-Atlantic slave trade. Your immediate reaction is to start talking about anything OTHER than the American, trans-Atlantic slave trade: "What about Arabia?" "What about France?" "What about this?" "What about that?" All the while you're waving a Confederate flag and jerking off to pictures of lynchings.
I think you mean "Enslavement" - implying active participation versus "slavery" - the weakest way to describe an atrocity.
The "b.lacks" should learn from the "ashkenazi jews" and get their language straight.
Check out http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm.
While I agree that the slave trade was bad, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao far outstrip it.
That page is kinda freaky.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
So, it looks like someone has been sitting on this story until black history month started. Looks like /. got it posted 27 minutes into it.
The slaves were not good workers. They were dishonest and had to be watched constantly and didn't do good work. For the quality of workers, it was just not worth it. Washington started to realize that his slaves were a ball and chain. He couldn't keep them because it wasn't working and it was just wrong anyway. He couldn't free them, because they had been raised with such a terrible work ethic that working for a living was simply alien to them.
If someone has better knowledge of this than I do, please let me know.
I guess that my point is that in the battle of "morality versus wealth" as you put it, the slave holders were losing both ways.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
When the white use of African slaves began, Europe was largely free of any other kind of slavery. There's an image in the collective cultural consciousness of how slavery began. This image seems to be that Europeans showed up and just started whipping the black people into submission from horseback, then taking them off and selling them. It's like Planet of the Apes.
The idea of selling the Africans as slaves wasn't spontaneous. There were already African slave markets. A few scumbag Europeans bought slaves. People noticed how much cheaper it was to have a slave than a servant, and how much more reliable. Their skin became a permanent uniform, so there was no way they could steal property and run off with it. That made them trustworthy, in a sense.
Gradually, the economic benefits made using the African slave market to get labour the only way to stay competitive. Yes, the people involved in the trade were bastards, but the people who didn't participate were economically culled. It's the kind of situation in which only government interference can stop the process. No matter how many high minded individuals refuse to be a part the crime won't stop until there's a law.
Passing a law like that takes time. It takes people fighting and writing great essays and changing the minds of their countrymen one at a time. It isn't good enough to convince the populace that slavery is probably pretty bad. They have to be convinced that it's a crime.
In this way, the atrocities of Europe trading slaves were pretty much unavoidable, just like most of the Native American deaths were unavoidable once smallpox started to spread. Individuals did horrible things, true, but individuals are always doing horrible things. Even now.
As a culture we need to understand that historical forces take time to work. The response to this kind of guilt should be to work ever harder on ending similar situations now, not endless hand-wringing about how unpleasant past atrocities were. Today's atrocities, by sheer number, are ten times worse. They just don't have a united brand name.
This guy had a website in 1502? That's pretty advanced, at least for a slave.
.. And the Zulus held Xhosa as slaves for over 7000 years.
a ves/
Actually, there were substantial numbers of white slaves taken by Arab traders around Europe aswell (maybe I should sue for compensation?).
Or howabout some white slaves in the US?
http://www.salon.com/books/it/2000/06/15/white_sl
http://multiracial.com/content/view/460/27/
a "Slave" is just a very recent label for an ancient behaviour. Trying to project our modern day values onto older civilisations is rather ridiculous.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there. The area was significantly depopulated by Cortes' time; I believe there are several examples of cities whose population size wouldn't be matched again until early 19th century, being virtually deserted, long before any invaders looking for a "New World".
As far as I know, the reasons for this are still unknown - doesn't necessarily make it "mysterious", we just don't have the info.
sic transit gloria mundi
shouldn't they be suing the Mexican government?
They know because they found the words "First slave!" etched into their tooth enamel.
Thanks, I know everyone was involved but even in Middle Eastern Studies when it comes to Islamic Slave Trade the most you see or hear is, "they had slaves" or "and these people are decended from slaves". And if pressed a professor or speaker will say, "Yes but the United States was worse."
When it's American History slavery gets alot of attention, when it's the Middle East it's brushed aside.
And, slavery is called for in the Bible and Koran
Sura 2 Verse 178
2.178: O you who believe! retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain, the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female, but if any remission is made to any one by his (aggrieved) brother, then prosecution (for the bloodwit) should be made according to usage, and payment should be made to him in a good manner; this is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy; so whoever exceeds the limit after this he shall have a painful chastisement."
"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids" (Leviticus 25:44)
"Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever" (Leviticus 25:44-46)
Yea, I got two quotes from the Bible, I'm not as up on my Koran as I am on my Old Testament.
I have a hard time classifyfing a trade pattern over several centuries as a single event like that. Why not proclaim "murder" or "war" the worst atrocity ever, by summing up everyone who's fallen victim to them over all human history?
And I'd be really interested to hear about some treatment of slaves that was actually beneath how farm animals were treated. I have a hard time imagining what that could possibly be.
"Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords."
/. somebody always gets up and says "hey their my relatives!".
This is one of the reasons I like
Traditionally people have concentrated on the fact that a handfull of Spanish soldiers overpowered a native civilization of millions. Sure the Spanish were ruthlessly violent and were assisted by smallpox, horses, etc. I doubt it would have been possible without the help of their native allies. I belive Cortés was spectacularly sucessfull because he manipulated the existing local politics and had a large serving of dumb luck.
I think the lack of artifacts contributes to this lobsided account. More often than not, Cortés and his soldiers have been used by commentators to paint a picture of European superiority and/or moral degradation depending on your outlook. I also don't think it is peculiar to Aztecs, the influence of local politics was regularly ignored by colonial Europeans when relating their stories. The winners write history, it stays intact mainly because local accounts are quickly destroyed by the rightoeus, the locals at best are left with verbal accounts.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm a military historian working on my Masters and one of my areas of study is the American West 1865-1890 and from that I've looked alot at the Cortes Expedition, in fact I just spent a term working on a paper comparing and contrasting the militaries of the Aztecs to the Spanish.
The Expedition did kill alot of nobles and military leaders, once in a, maybe, unprovoked attack on the Temple of the Moon during a High Holy day and then alot of others were killed during the following responses at the Palace of Axayactl, Cortes's relief and escape and the Battle of Otumba in 1520 and then in the fighting of 1521.
Since the leadership of the Aztecs and other nations in the region lead from the front so to speak, the decapitation of the ruling families and thier destruction largely came about on the field of battle in 1520 and 1521. The sack of Tenochtitlán in 1521 really was the only time there was torturing and murder by the Spanish and thier allies in the conflict. Most of the Aztec, Tepeacan and other allied leaders were lost in the field before the illnesses and murders during the sack.
Recall that during the period following the retreat of the Spanish and Tlaxcalan from Tenochtitlán envoys from the Aztecs tried to pull the Tlaxcalan leaders into an alliance, however the severity of the Aztec relations with their neighbors trumped the Aztec called for unity in the face of invasion by outsiders even though the Tlaxcalan and Aztecs shared ancestry and gods. The Aztecs apparently treated others in the region so poorly that the Tlaxcalans would not come to thier aid even though they had a history togeather.
Didn't your parents give you enough attention?
Grow up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
By whom?
And when did the concept change?
(...) and the Aztecs *mysteriously* disappeared (...) I guess you're confusing them with the Mayans.
But before you hit those mod buttons, at least finish reading. I finished my above post by complaining the this forum is spending all its time talking about slavery and virtually none of it talking about nerdy stuff, like the tech involved or even light science like atropology -- what does this "discovery" mean to that field?
... Oh no, that's Politics. Sorry)
Well, it brings up my disgust after over eight years of reading Slashdot, and the story choice these days. From the various sections:
Apple Today: 0 Yesterday: 1
Ask Slashdot Today: 1 (about energy drinks, FGS) Yesterday: 4 (I generally avoid Asks unless I think I can answer the submitter's question or have the same problem myself)
Developers Today: 0 Yesterday: 4 (One was an Ask and 2 were product releases)
Games Today: 8 Yesterday: 15 (Since when did Slash become a gaming site. People used to brag about Nethack!)
Hardware: Today: 1 Yesterday: 6 (2 were really Games)
Interview: Today: 0 Yesterday: 0 (Not surprising, really)
IT: Today: 3 Yesterday: 6
Linux Today: 0 Yesterday: 0 (You have to be kidding me! NO Linux stories on Slash in the last two days?)
Politics: Today: 3 (1 is YRO) Yesterday: 1
Science: Today: 4 Yesterday: 5 (1 was YRO) -- These were almost all really puff stories like this one.
YRO: Today: 3 Yesterday: 7 (This has to be the worst section in Slash
I guess that the readership demographic has changed significantly in the last couple of years. I would move on, but I can't find anywhere better. I had originally hoped that Bruce's website would pan out, but it didn't, and Kuro5hin and Digg just dont have the tech that I'm looking for. Any suggestions?
Put identity in the browser.
Ignoring the fact that the United Kingdom didn't exist yet this still wouldn't be true. The colonies were considered to be just that, colonies. British owned foreign soil was not legaly the same as British soil - diffferent laws applied and people born there were not automaticly eligible for british citizenship.
James P. Barrett
I wonder: Shouldn't the headline read "Remains of First American Slaves Found"? Or are we talking about the first slaves in America that were of African origin rather from some other place?
How else is everyone supposed to regard your saying that Stalin's killing of 10 to 50 million of people or Hitler's Holocaust and extermination of 6+ million of Jews is just "small potatoes". How can one even compare genocides and call some insignificant and others very important.
I am not critisizing just you, I am just ranting in general, I have heard other do it, and the school system does it too. For example, everyone in US schools is taught about the Holocaust and every child has to write an essay on it, but not much is said about Stalin's killings, not much is said about the African genocides, (not just slavery but even the recent cases such as Darfur), and many others. In other words there is this implicit judgement -- these peoples' deaths are more important to talk about than those peoples' deaths. There is something wrong with that I think.
I don't know what would be so interesting about that. People have done it and do it all the time. There is nothing interesting in attrocities, they are all horrible but also boring. The fact that people can treat each less than animals is not a surprise. It seems that along with human capacity for thought, kindness, compassion and love comes the capacity to commit attrocities. There are many Hitlers, Stalins and Maos out there, even among your neighbours and friends. We just don't notice them because they don't have the power to commit evil on a large scale. Even "little Billy", the neighbourhood kid that likes to torture cats for pleasure and fun could, potentially become a Hitler given the circumstances.
IIRC Washington was banned from becoming a regular British officer and resigned his commission in the colonial militia in protest.
Blog
Perhaps you are talking about the Mayans.
The Aztecs did not disappear misteriously, but they were decimated by the conquerors voluntarily (through war) and involuntarily (through diseases).
My other post is a First.
Good point. One theory I've heard is based on the patterns of natural resource consumption and climate change over time. The amounts of rainfall and river flow had an immediate effect on many native American populations, and as their crops declined and or failed they sometimes had to relocate their population centers and sometimes even just disperse into smaller population groups to survive. There were also other factors like disease and war.
Going back to the Aztecs, their approach to conquest was based on defeating another tribe's army and offering to leave the ruling family in power if the Aztecs' demands were met. They specified a yearly payment in the form of harvests, raw materials, goods, and people (slaves). Failure to pay made the U.S. Internal Revenue Service look like Girl Scouts. It's been estimated that if the Spanish hadn't come when they did and defeated the Aztecs, their empire would have fallen eventually. Between an unsustainable economy and the general discontent, something would break sooner or later.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Hey, they're all my relatives. :) When I said most of my ancestry was Totonac, I meant that the remainder was Spanish, most recently my great grandfather who moved to Mexico in the late 1800s. And this breakdown is true for most of Mexico's modern population. There's this cultural/historical sense that one side of the family screwed over the other side. Both included brutal invaders and innocent victims just trying to survive. I'm sure many slashdotters can relate in terms of the British/US expansion westward from the 13 colonies and the native American tribes they encountered. This story has been repeated throughout history all over the world, of course. We humans are funny that way and we haven't changed much.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
This is great news for national security and counterterrorism activities. From now on the, we do not need to rely on mere fingerprints of foreigners, but we can ask for a tooth, grind it up, and check the real nationality.
-- Imperial units must die --
So why is the American (and British) system currently so geared to benefiting oligarchs and making things using cheap labor? Why are our education systems increasingly failing? Is it because our leaders are becoming like the backwards oligarchs of the South, interested solely in lining their own pockets to the detriment of our long term prospects?
What makes this especially interesting is the rise in prominence of people like McKain in the US and now Cameron in the UK, who are emphasising traditional middle class values against the corporatism of the respective governments. Time for an educated middle class backlash, perhaps.
Pining for the fjords
At the time that these people lived, neither the United States nor the United Kingdom existed.
I would suggest that the reason we hear more about slavery in the US is partly because it is still felt. The grandchildren of slaves are still living. The impact of slavery on the sociopolitics of the African American is a paramount concern.
Of course research is done on African and Islamic slavery. The real question is, how aware are you of ANY historical research from those regions ?
The ethnocentrism of the west is by no means limited to the subject of slavery. I don't think that it is necessarily a conspiracy to paint the US in the worst possible light.
The Persians is one of the few races that never took part in the slave trade in that region.
This is one of the reasons I like /. somebody always gets up and says "hey their my relatives!".
same here! either that, or someone says "...there my relatives!", but so rarely does someone get up on the table proclaiming "they're my relatives!". And then some other @$$ says something (that one could expect such an @$$ to say) completely off topic regarding some completely banal mistake made in a previous comment, pointing out - in a humorous (and usually unintentional) way - that we are only reading opinions here, and opinions of people with little expertise for that matter. It makes reading the news almost stomachable... reminding us that our lives won't change drastically for having learned these things, and that we therefore have very little reason to get as worked up about it; after all, to whom does "Anonymous Coward" pose a threat? It keeps things relaxed... for Anonymous Cowards like me, at least...
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour. So is land. The fact is that the slave owning south had most of the capital on the United States, and it was distributed more widely among the (white) population. Certainly not all white familes owned slaves (mine did). However, practically all of them owned land. and after the introduction of the cotton gin, which made slavery even more profitable, there was an economic boom in the south. it wasn't particularly industrial, but it fed the industrial revolution in Britian. Further, property values skyrocketted at that time, and not just the plantations. even the small family farms dodubled in value in a rather short time. And again, this was a more widely distributed boom than ever happened in the North with free labour and capitalism. Frankly, free labour and capitalism are more evil than slavery in that they foster the conditions necessary to create to so-called Proletariate that liberals like to whinge about, and even Marx wrote so (that it was worse than slavery; proletarianes having no gurantee of existance, unlike sharecroppers, serfs, or slaves): http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/pri n-com.htm , and not just Marx, but Hilaire Belloc, too, in "The Servile State." My economic assertions on the South can be found in this book entitled "Confederate States of America: What if the South Had won the Civil War?" it's in the first couple of chapters covering the history priort to the conflict. I can't find where I layed it just this second or i'd give further information.
There is a gerat book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (I cannot remember the name of the author) that talks about certain documented facts that are never taught in history classes. One is that Columbus knew that there was a new world to the west. He had been to Iceland a few times, and there were still Norsemen in Greenland (who would visit Canada for timber, etc, and had had dealings with the "natives"). On top of this, Columbus had been to "the Gold Coast" of Africa (aka The Slave Coast aka The Ivory Coast) and had met the representatives of the king of Mauritania, if not the king himself, at the time probably the wealthiest man in the world. They had had a few colonies "a few days to the west" in a new land, but they had abandoned them year before, because the locals kept attacking them. So Columbus knew he was sailing to new lands, not India, because he had data from the Norse and the Mauritanians about western lands over the sea.
Fast forward a decade or three. The Aztecs were found to have carvings of men, some of the carvings having definite African facial features. (The book has pictures of these carvings, and yep, they do, whatever the politically correct police might say.) The Aztecs were also growing cotton that was the same type grown in Egypt. On top of this, when Spaniards first landed in South America, near what is now Venezuala, they were talking to a local chieftain and noticed a bunch of African-descended slaves being led through a coastal village. The Spaniards were surprised at this, and asked where the slaves had come from. The chieftain said that they had raided their village a few generations ago and had enslaved them.
So the first African slaves weren't brought here by the Spaniards. Hell, they may well have been brought here by other Africans (the Mauritanians).
Just putting in my $.05 (inflation, taxes, and all that).
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
But they sure did get a boost in business when Europeans joined the trade!
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Ok, I can't comment on the veracity of that statement (too lazy to look it up) but FYI Persians = Iraquis, Iranians, etc (if there are more), i.e. not Arabs.
So the poster is drawing our attention to the fact that the race currently under the greatest threat from the West is the one with the best history of "humane" behaviour.
This doesn't mean that they are incapable of atrocious behaviour (Sadaam Hussein, etc., are good examples, and the current Iranian present isn't very reassuring), just that, er, under normal circumstances the crud probably wouldn't float to the top.
People don't tend to accept assholes as leaders unless they feel that they are under threat. For example, the people of the USA didn't actually elect Bush as leader until after 9/11...
Are numerous, alive and well in any American ghetto!
Might have been Kingdom of Benin, Onitsha, Nri or Arochukwu, among others.
What useful invention or discovery can be attributed to any of the huge number of sub-saharan Africans?
Didn't one of the Bantu empires make steel before the Europeans?
But yes, there's a lot of good stuff about the influence of environment on the society that arises there; check out Guns, Germs, and Steel if you haven't already.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think he's not saying that the slaves lived better over here, but rather that their descendants here live better than the descendants of those who weren't taken as slaves, over in Africa. Which is arguably true. Anyone who tries to assign nobility to the slavers for this, of course, deserves a cod-slap. It's irony.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Parent's not a troll... that's a JOKE! Get a life who ever got offended by that.
Sorry, but a book like that is not where I look for moral guidance. Nor do I treat it as a historical record of what was going on at the time. It's had more edits that A New Hope. David probably shot Goliath first in the original...
If it wasn't for the "we are superiour and divine" attitude preached by these books, slavery would likely never have happened. In order to support slavery, you must be able to see the slave as a lesser-person. The bible, the koran and the talmud all do that. Religion and nationalism are the foremost causes of slavery.
Most mature cultures go back thousands of years.
In intelligible form? Sorry, but no European culture goes back "thousands of years". If you go back two thousand, you're at the dawn of Christianity, which bore only a passing resemblance to today's versions. The Romans had switched over to imperial rule. While I can understand how Western culture takes a lot from Romans and Greeks, to imply that we're all part of the same culture is plainly bullshit--we don't do human sacrifice, giant statues of our gods in the town square, gladiator fights, Legions forbidden from coming home, or the divine right of kings. Or humping little boys.
You'd have as much luck fitting into Roman society as you would into a Bantu empire of the same period. Living in Europe may mean you live near some old buildings, but it doesn't mean you live in the same culture that built them.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition.
No, those are the dates when enslaving white people became unacceptable. The British were quite involved with African slavery from 1562 until 1803, when they started discouraging it, and 1833, when it was actually abolished by the Brits.
Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
It's disingenuous for you to compare the time when Brits stopped enslaving fellow whites to the time when Americans ended legal discrimination against blacks.
And also, what persisted in the South until the Civil Rights era wasn't slavery so much as it was Jim Crow--segregation, much like the Apartheid that South Africa had until relatively recently. Racist, certainly--but comparing it to the end of whites-as-slaves in Viking culture? Give me a break.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
before ANY black slaves were here in America, there were WHITE slaves here from the british isles.
THey were often called "indentured servants," but that was a social fiction designed to cover up the truth. There is much evidence on this. I am making a documentary/book dealing with elite influence on American culture, and I cover some of this topic. See my sig url for more...
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The Inquisition was a way to separate people from their property, and get some good old-fashioned torturin' in at the same time. It wasn't even supposedly meant to appease any gods--the only soul supposedly in danger was the one of the guy about to get set on fire to save said soul.
But I suppose it would have gotten in the way of a cute rhetorical point.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A black slave cost 200-800 dollars at a time when the media annual income for a white family was $150. That means a black slave cost $100K-200K in today's dollars. No credit to buy slaves. So ONLY THE UPPER CLASS COULD BUY SLAVES.
The vast majority of whites never owned black slaves. In fact, most Americans from 1600-1870 were the descendants of indentured servants, most of whom were in actuality defacto WHITE SLAVES.
See my sig url for more
eat shiat and bark at the moon
And the Southern Democrats were the slave owners. Oh, and the abolitionists like John Brown? They were like the Religious Right. Read some history, moron.
It is well known that domestic slavery in Africa, as well as the slave trade to the "old world", was alive and well long before slaves were transported to the new world. Thus, the headline "Remains of First African Slaves Found" is incorrect and misleading. There are no doubt innumerable remains of African slaves on the continent of Africa and elsewhere that predate by hundreds and even thousands of years those remains mentioned in TFA.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" might have some good answers. The National Geographic miniseries was spotty at points, but contains some good visual demonstrations of precision horseback riding and rapier fighting. (It's talking about Pizarro and the Inca, but it's the same idea.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
From Tom Sawyer:
Tom and Huck are out late at night, and are scared, and hear a dog howl...
"Oh, lordy, I'm thankful!" whispered Tom. "I know his voice. It's Bull Harbison." *
[* If Mr. Harbison owned a slave named Bull, Tom would have spoken of him as "Harbison's Bull," but a son or a dog of that name was "Bull Harbison."]
Whether Clemens put that in for subtle social commentary (not beyond his skill or habits), or just to help his readers to understand the local way of speaking, I can't say. Either way, this excerpt makes it clear that the dog was more a part of the family than the slave.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I find it absolutely amazing that the people or person who writes these little racial snippets is so concerned about hiding behind an "Anonymous Coward" moniker. Reminds me of Klan members who want to hide under white sheets and hoods.
/. public to see, it's always posted as Anonymous Coward, much like the verbal sewage above.
I think the oddest part is that someone who so seems to want to jump onto the bandwagon and type in bold and caps to draw attention to their ideas is also ashamed to be associated with them. If you feel your message is important, or that you have something, or in this case anything, of importance to add to a discussion, you should be able to stand proudly behind your thoughts and ideas and identify yourself. Allowing unregistered users, or giving registered users the option to post anonymously has got to be one of the poorest ideas I've seen in quite some time. It seems that each time any verbal sewage is plopped forth in a putrid mass for the
I don't want to wish any ill will on anyone, but I hope their kindergarten teacher sees what they're writing during class time and takes their computer priveleges away until after their nap. That'd show 'em.
Evil Walrus >83=
My point is that "man is a bad animal" wherever and whenever he is. We'll kill our own kind, crap where we eat, and take more than we need and then use our wonderful rational mind to justify it all.
Just because we civilized westerners have stopped keeping slaves doesn't mean that slavery does not exist. It still exists in places like sub-Saharan Africa.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
"They were dishonest and had to be watched constantly and didn't do good work."
That makes perfect sense to me.
In lots of workplaces if there isn't constant supervision not much gets done and a lot gets stolen. An aquaintance of mine works in a call center where everyone is kicked out and they building is locked during lunchtime, because of employee theft/vandalism problems. It makes sense that slavery would have those problems even more.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
You do realise that Strom Thurmond was a Democrat when he ran on a segregationist platform? That Republicans were the ones behind civil rights in the 50s/60s? And that "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" was said by Alabama Gov. George Wallace a Democrat?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
You don't hear about trans-tribal slavery here in the Americas because there aren't ANY of those major tribes/civilizations that still exist. When a major percentile of the Native population is wiped out, and these civilizations weren't "paper" civilizations, you're not going to hear anything.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
Uh, but you have to feed them, clothe them and house them. In other words, "pay" them. How is that not a form of labour?
If the slaves added more (net) value in productivity than they consumed in the form of expenses (training, food etc.), then overall the slaves contributed to the economy. If the slaves cost more than the value they added, then overall they burdened the economy.
In a free and non-ideologized labour market if slavery were less economically efficient slavery than a system without slavery, it would be naturally self-correcting in the long run, because the slave owners would tend towards whatever labour increased their productivity most for the least expense. I.e. it seems logical to say "well, if the slaves cost more than they contributed, surely their owners would not have kept or wanted them", and hence, because the owners did keep their slaves, they must have been net contributors to economic growth.
But this implies intelligent 'rational' owners that know what's good for them. When you throw racism and other blind ideologies into the mix then you aren't necessarily talking about rational owners anymore. In Apartheid South Africa, the racist ideology of "separate development" overshadowed rationality and common sense, and attempts to create large pools of cheap unskilled labour (presuambly under the idea that this would be good for the economy) was a macroeconomic disaster - large pools of unskilled (and hence unproductive) people became a burden on society, because they cost money (to feed, house, clothe etc.) but could(/can) not produce anything of much value themselves. Slavery can be viewed in a similar light, but this does not necessarily imply that slavery had a negative effect on the economy --- slavery may have contributed to growth but simply in smaller amounts than might have happened without slavery. If that's the case, one could still say that part of the US's success was due to slavery, which I am inclined to believe, as the importers of slaves obviously saw reasons not only to keep slaves but keep importing new ones and fight against the abolition of slavery ... these are not things you do for something that isn't helping you.
I think that by allowing freedom and allowing people to fully develop themeselves, net economic productivity can be maximised. E.g. some of those slaves might have become great doctors or inventors had they been allowed to develop themselves and choose their own desired paths in life. By not allowing some sub-group of people opportunities (e.g. women or black people or gays or whatever) you will inherently have a smaller pool from which to draw 'productive people'.
I'm glad you can see a bigger picture in your own family. I don't think humans will change any time soon but I have noticed that the internet has given the historically ignorant (like me) a place to easily check out the stuff seen on TV.
Thirty-odd years ago, high schools in Australia taught very little about anything historical outside of what the white guys did during the first 100yrs or so of settlement. Sheep and the welcome stranger, (a gold nugget about the size of a washing machine) made up a large part of the curiculum, the same thing year after year got extremely boring. It created a very one sided view amoungst a generation of people who were shown history was boring.
Also some people around here get very upset about typo's, especially they're vs their, thanks for not going there.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Back then, they said slavery was a "property right" as they participated brutal oppression and controll. Today they say patents are a "property right" - as they lock out things like AIDS medication as millions needlessly die arround the world. So how is the first form of controll any less brutal than the other.
...", "it's a property" ,"nobody will do ABC without it...", we've herd all this poor logic before. I wonder, how many dead people will it take this time to change peoples minds? For those who can still accept patents, think carefully about that answer.
"the wealth of America is built on this...", "I have no incentive
I don't know if folks are aware of it, but I'd like to point out that slavery is alive and well today in the New World.
Particularly here in Georgia, the deep south and heart of the confederacy.
While Lincoln may have freed the slaves for private ownership, he didn't go far enough. Slavery is still legal by the state, in just every state, in the form of the use of prisoners.
I went to prison for 2 years in 2002 of a 12 year sentence on a crime I didn't commit. Basically someone made an accusation about me, and then hysteria and greed set in, and then the slander game began. It was a witchhunt and I was the witch. I estimate in the end they made about $120,000 off of me in billing the taxpayer; myself losing another $60,000 in lawyer fees and lost wages other damages. I don't know about you, but thats a whole hell of a lot of money in a recession. If I would of served the full 12 years, they would of probably made almost a half a million dollars off of me, billing you the taxpayer $35,000 a year. Let me tell you, I'm about the most harmless guy in the world, I don't bother anybody, and I don't break any laws. The justice system isn't about justice. Its all a scam and a slander game. Its about greed and profit.
For two years I was kept in the most heinous of conditions, and was forced to work for which I received no compensation.
I won my appeal by fighting back. Which was very hard to do, because I was mentally and physically exhausted, being kept in the most inhumane of conditions, lacking of nutrition, and my situation was grossly exacerbated because I was hypoglycemic and yet receiving no treatment whatsoever. A hypoglycemic, if not eating something every 2 hours, suffers and appauling roster of symptoms, the most painful and difficult being being confused all the time, unable to concentrate, unable to focus.
So for those two years, basically, I was a slave.
Since I tested out with a slashdot level IQ and actually hit a bit of precious luck, I was put to work in the library, just like Andy in the movie Shawshank Redemption. For prison and someone smart, it was a good job because you had access to books in a way the general population didn't at all. Let me say it was luck I got this job, most people had nighmarish jobs. Laundry, caffeteria work, swinging a bush ax, etc.
Even though I worked in the library, I fought back. I wrote slogans throughout the books and anarchy symbols on the inside, slamming the system.
When nobody was looking, I wrote slogans from Animal Farm on the prison walls outside. Nobody understood them but me, since the average grade level in prison is about sixth grade (I tested out 13th, the highest the tests go). Prison is a big sensory deprivation chamber. The constant noise, the inhuman conditions, the constant stupidity, the poor food, it will wear your mind down. Prison doesn't do anything but make people stupid and vilent and insane.
Once some 'robocop' as I called him saw my slogans, and wrote them down on his little notepad. I'm sure he took them straight back to the warden. If I would of been caught, I would of surely been beaten to death out of site for defacing state property. I've been out a year now but still I chuckle, I wonder what they made of "Four legs good, two legs bad!". I'm not joking. For real.
I wrote some notes of what I would post to slashdot if I ever got out. I still have them somewhere, they are in a tired and exhausted script that looks a lot to me like chicken scratch now, I was so fading away then. It doesn't matter. My mind is full of things to say now. Totally.
One seredipitious thing did happen. Four doors down from my cell they put an RFDI engineer in. An old guy, in his 50's. I nicknamed him "Marconi".
You can check him out here (punch in 1141126 in the GDC field on the page and NEXT your way through):
http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/GDC/O
The remains may or may not have been a slave, just because a person is a slave doesn't mean they were a black person from the continent of Africa. Not all black persons of African heritage were slaves, anyone can be a slave.
A black African in the New World doesn't automatically mean they were a slave, maybe the person was great inventor or an adventurer and sailed over on a boat he made. Maybe he was one of the first few people to reach the New World (Vikings in ~1000AD). Maybe there were hundreds like him and not recorded in history.
Not all people from Africa are black either, Arab people in the Northern part and (since the 1650's) Dutch in Southern end of Africa.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there
If the earlier post had said that the Mayas or Toltecs had mysteriously disappeared, it'd be a reasonable point. Fpr the Aztecs, it's not.
The Aztec Empire was not in a sharp decline before the Spanish got there; indeed, it had reached it's largest size ever at some point after 1500 AD. The Spanish arrived in 1519 AD.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Good post!
:)
But you are such a Nerd, to be thinking like that.
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
And your sig "assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump" is not nerdy? LOL
No Sigs!
Riiiggghhhttt. Because a funny screen name, registered to a throw away free email account, obviously ties people to their comments.
Shake your head. The site admins can resolve an AC posting address as easily as a named users address. And general users can not resolve your named account to you any easier that they can resolve an AC post to me.
Not that I agree with anythinig else in this thread, but I really hate you pompus cretins with user names who think they are somehow more accountable for their postings.
Just like any other forum, multiple email accounts = multiple user names. You can be "JoePC" for this post, and "Johhny'burn the darkies'Reb" next post. Get over yourself.
"The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital"
Might I remind you that a person CAN be owned -- if they believe (or are forced to think) they are owned.
Reminds me of Eddie Murphy in one of his standup routines:
"I am sure the first slaves got off the boat and said, 'bail that hay?'. Fuck you masta. You bail the hay. And then about 20 MF's with whips showed up and the rest of the slaves said 'nevermind, we'll bail the shit'".
Intentions are great until you are facing down the barrel of a gun. Then, for some reason (obvious), most men don't take such a pricipled stand.
Amazing how this reply was made by an anonymous coward.
Anyway, back to the real world, I'm an administrator on a Wiki and a couple of forums and one of the most common problems we used to have was people registering with hotmail, aim, yahoo, etc accounts which offered free accounts to anyone, then causing problems with their free accounts. All we had to do was to block these registrations. Many people still use these free accounts if there is no other alternative, however it only takes a short email to any of the core administrators to create an account with that email address and send the information back to the user.
I also hate to burst your anonymous bubble, but unless you're stealing bandwidth from your neighbor, or you do all of your postings and emailing from web-based interfaces in your public library, you're not as anonymous as you think. Even then you're not truly anonymous, however it takes quite a bit more coding and bouncing to gain any real anonimity. Much more than some racially motivated substandard wanna-be kiddie h4XX0r would be willing to put forth in order to spew his hate garbage at the general public anyway.
*sits back and waits for another anonymous asswipe, er, I mean coward to respond*
Evil Walrus >83=
I think it also says something about killing Soviet prisoners, non-Jewish holocaust, etc. There are numbers for Stalin's non-war dead as well. The most sickening to me are the numbers for Mao. Those figures are for regime, not war.
The real point of this is made just below your post, here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175839&cid=146 16243.
What does it matter? We stop what we can, fix what we can, mourn, then move on, trying to stop it from happening again.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
and targetted at another flamebaiter
They're inbreeding!
Yup.
Rick James, Bitch!
Negro props to all the brothers. Celebrate our rich African Heritage.
A more detailed, accurate version of this story can be found at the national science foundation I saw this yesterday and thought of posting to slashdot, but it didn't seem nerdy/techno-related. Ah well.
Sig: I stole this sig.
"I'm not sure where the need to proclaim American slavery the worst atrocity in all history comes from"
Let's cut to it, there was NO American slavery, there was European slavery that was inherited by Americans.
Place the blame where it belongs.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
If I recall, China had domesticated animals (pigs, chickens, horses) whereas subequatorial Africa didn't--the jungle killed them. Also, China had rice and wheat; I don't think they grew those in subequatorial Africa. Without animals and good crops, the Africans were at a disadvantage.
Alas, the book was pretty skimpy on the history of pre-European African empires, but I remember two bits: (1) the invention of steel, and (2) the Zulu were nearly a match for the (Dutch?) Europeans who landed there; the invaders advanced at an average of (roughly) one mile per year against them, despite possessing firearms, horses and a professional military. Especially impressive compared to the Europeans' successes in the Americas.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"By the same argument there is no theft, lying and cheating, it is all inherited from the parents."
A society is not an individual. Why use such a terrible example?
Europeans created a society in the US that relied on slavery. That fault is theirs, and no amount of stupid, erroneous analogies will ever change that.
If you force an individual to be addicted to heroin, you don't get to question their morality if they leave you but don't quit on a schedule you agree with.
And now you see the difference between a good analogy (mine) and a very, very dumb one (yours).
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
That's the context I was quoting it in regards to Slavery. As documents which illustrate folks attitudes towards slavery in societies that aren't the United States from 1789-1865.
As for your comment, "If it wasn't for the "we are superiour and divine" attitude preached by these books, slavery would likely never have happened." I don't think that is true nor can it be defended nor can it be blamed on Religion. Look at the Romans, they kept slaves for economic reasons, not religious or "nationalistic" reasons. Same with the Spartans, other Greek states, Persians, Aztecs, Mayan, etc.
Religion simply codified the rules for keeping slaves in the Middle East from oh, 3000 BCE to say 1900 CE*
*Not sure when slavery in the Ottoman Empire, Middle East or North Africa really ended.
It wasn't the first slave at all. It was Bill Frist's slave!
Slavery is, in essence, taking the benefits of a person's labor by force. Your opposition to patents has much more in common with slavery than its opposition.
You want to receive the benefits of these company's and researchers' labor and their investors' risk of capital? Then you should pay for them. How much? Whatever amount you and the provider can agree on. If you can't come to an agreement? You're out of luck. If you believe you have the right to *force* them to give you what you want, then you have thrown in with the slave drivers.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
Remains of First African Slaves Found Don't they mean the first African slaves in America. It's not like there was no slavery in Africa before Columbus found America.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Wait, now your culture stops being a culture if you migrate? Shit, someone tell the Han Chinese and the Vietnamese that their culture is way younger than they thought.
Because the dominant cultures in the US are descendant from European cultures; they don't go back *in North America* for thousands of years.
And British culture doesn't go back *in Britain* for thousands of years; nearly everything cultural--language, dress, religion, ethnicity--filtered in relatively recently from Germany, France, Rome, Greece, Jerusalem, and so on.
So, are you claiming that this new theory of "cultural descent" or whatever works only over contiguous land-masses? Or perhaps there's a maximum velocity a culture can travel at?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I believe it's because Americans liked to say something endearing like, "We consider it self evident before god that all men are created equal," while building their infrastructure on the backs of slaves where possible.
It's also because of the non-stop blathering about how 'Merica is the symbol of liberty, freedom, and democracy ("life, liberty, persuit of happines") while owning slaves, or at the very least officially treating black citizens like crap.
It's called gross hypocrisy, but only because I cannot think of a more negative term right now.
The USA abolished slavery well ahead of most of the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia, for example, only abolished slavery (officially) in the 1960s.
Most of the rest of the world? Not the British Empire, if that counts. But congratulations, America beat Saudi Arabia, and hmmm... a couple African dictatorships. Hooray America.
I wonder what Rosa Parks et al think (thought) of their freedom to not sit at the front of a bus, for example? That's liberty, American style, I guess: "Hey Rosa, at least you're not a slave!"
Indians (people from India) have a very strong idea of capitalism and private business ownership. They are largely a merchant culture believing that they have to generate wealth by owning a business and increasing volume.
Why do you think so many Indians that live in America own 7-11 gas stations? It is ingrained in their culture and their mindset to succed on their own. In fact it is personally shameful for them to work for someone else.
The business owning middle-class truly is the core of any capitalistic and democratic society.
Libertas in infinitum
This isn't that "hose from the '56 Chevy thing, is it?"
Ridiculous semantics! The fact is that ownership itself is not a "natural" state in any sense of the word. In pre-agrarian societies, and relatively contemporary foraging societies, the concept of ownership in the modern sense was completely unknown. Conversely, through 99% of recorded "civilized" history, slavery has been the norm. Hell, in many places of the world, it still is. Ownership of any kind is a social construction and only exists inasmuch as there is a social consensus that property, inanimate or human, can exist.
Of course, distinguishing capital from labor itself is probably a false construction anyway. One cannot exist without the other. Using Marxian terms would probably work best here ( and no, I'm not a Marxist): Slavery as a social arrangement represents the most total form of individual alienation of labor. I.E. fairly absolute removal of political power from the hands of the laborers.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~c016003a/mapslavetrade.gif
Saudis Import Slaves to America by Daniel Pipes (New York Sun June 16, 2005)
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2687
"Although slavery was abolished in the kingdom in 1962, the practice still flourishes there. Ranking Saudi religious authorities endorse slavery; for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan insisted recently that "Slavery is a part of Islam" and whoever wants it abolished is 'an infidel.'"
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
As an example, consider the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin, and the ongoing expulsion of white farmers by Mugabe. The expulsion of the Ugandan Asians resulted in a loss of educated people to the Ugandan economy from which, given its subsequent disastrous history, it has not yet recovered. Recent studies in the UK show that those same Asians have been one of the most economically successful waves of UK immigration ever (one of the few things I am proud of about the UK is that the government ignored that ghastly monster Enoch Powell and let them in.) The expulsion of white farmers in Zimbabwe, far from bringing agrarian reform, is impoverishing the countryside.
Meanwhile, educated Kenyans and Nigerians head for foreign countries as soon as they can. (There are Africans teaching in British schools, and many working in the National Health Service. They are as good at their jobs as anybody else, but they should not be here when their own continent needs them so badly.) The loss of educated people is damaging to African economies and we in the West just stand by and do nothing.
We let Rwandans have a civil war in which, particularly, educated people are targeted; we have an Aids pandemic which disproportionately affects the more economically active in cultures where relatively wealth brings mobility and access to prostitutes; we continue to let Somalia disrupt economic activity in its region. But we can spend billions and thousands of lives failing to guarantee oil supplies.
Africa is a disgrace, and it is our disgrace.
Pining for the fjords
There is a big difference between stealing posessions vs stealing a sale from a granted monopoly. I'm not foring anyone to invent anything, but now since they did - they say that it's their property and as such are entitled to control how others apply that knowledge. Like salvery, it is not about property, but control using thinly veiled justifications.
Is this PC code for used as fodder for endless human sacrafice? I also hear the Japanese "were a little rough" an their Chinese captives during WWII...