I mean we only know about the Zong Massacre because after the murderers returned home their employers claimed insurance payments on their lost property, i.e. the people they threw overboard. https://twitter.com/mrianleslie/status/1362020123503177731

During the ensuing court case between the underwriters and the owners of the Zong, the systematic dehumanisation and commodification of African people at the heart of British colonial and capitalist expansion was laid bare for all to see.

Solicitor General John Lee: "What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods...Blacks are goods and property...the case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard."

Racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery was a capitalist innovation. It sought to convert human beings into property so that they could be exploited from the cradle to the grave, without restriction, for profit.

In the 17th century enslaved Africans built the wall for which Wall Street is named. They were owned by the Dutch West India Company, itself funded by investor capital. In the 18th century Wall Street was the location of the largest slave market in New York.

The rapid expansion of slavery in the U.S. South post-independence was financed by capital investment. By 1860 slave property had “surpassed the assessed value of real estate within the slaveholding states.” (Deyle)

Joseph Inikori: "It is clear from the evidence that the rise, by the mid-nineteenth century, of the major capitalist economies of the Atlantic world [depended] greatly on the growth of the Atlantic economy that was largely the product of the labor of enslaved Africans."

Btw everyone should read Inikori's book Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002).

This “conservative realism” is indistinguishable from far-right social darwinism where life is permanent warfare between different groups. Racism but an “evolutionary instinct.” https://twitter.com/mrianleslie/status/1361970082117804032

Cf. to far-right propagandist Stefan Molyneux: “...people have this idea that human groups somehow live in harmony together...but the sum total of human history is endless warfare between competing groups...one will always displace the other...”

“and this idea [diversity], it’s a complete naive reading of history…”

I think if you end up in a corner sounding like Molyneux it’s a sign that it’s maybe time to revise the argument, the article, the ideology, everything.

History *coughs politely*: The U.S. govt suppressed a slaveholders rebellion and abolished property (in people) which was approx three times greater than the total amount of capital invested in manufacturing, three times the amount in railroads, & seven times in banks. https://twitter.com/mrianleslie/status/1362027015868710914

“The rise of capitalism coincided with the abolition of slavery...”

The abolition of racial slavery was the most socialist political endeavour that its govt ever accomplished. This is also how antebellum pro-slavery forces perceived the abolitionist movement.

The Charleston Courier claimed that many abolitionists "were disciples of Proudhon, or enemies of property” while the New York Journal of Commerce believed that socialism and abolitionism were based on “the same principles.”

The Southern Literary Messenger, in its eulogy to a certain John C. Calhoun, claimed that he had spent most of his career fighting against socialism, which it defined as "centralised democracy."

Michael F. Conlin: "Antebellum conservatives saw socialism in every reform and feared its menace in every place.”

“....the decline of racism.”

Where do you even begin with that canard? Abolition-democracy was quickly overthrown in the former slave-holding states by white supremacist paramilitaries. While white rule was maintained through racial terrorism and thousands of lynchings.

This sort of counterfactual about the demise of American slavery, which is very popular with libertarians, is one of the deepest denialisms and whitewashing of American history that’s out there. Not a coincidence that it includes a pseudo-religious exaltation of capitalism.

It should be remembered that Confederate imperialists were hoping to expand their slave empire into Latin America. Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, &c. The Invisible Hand was busy making plans.

John C. Breckinridge: “Southern states cannot afford to be shut off from all possibility of expansion towards the tropics by the hostile action of the federal government."

It's also worth challenging the shift from specific and contextualised history to blanket 'human nature' assumptions. Not only because it makes for *really bad* history but because, as I've mentioned here many times before, this sort of rhetoric was used to defend racial slavery.

Finkelstein: "....racism exists in all political systems."

Governor of Barbados James Leith after executing rebel slaves in the field (1816): “Slavery is not the institution of an particular Colour, Age, or Country; it has ever existed...”

The aim of such logic was to remove power, politics and responsibility from the equation. And so they attempted to placate the enslaved by telling them that this is just how things are. Whereas the modern conservative is trying to tell us that this is just how things were.

By flattening out the specific to the general, the how and why of the matter vanish, and its consequences and ongoing legacies become opaque. European colonialism in the Americas included their development of a form of racial slavery that really has no parallel.

Hilary Beckles: "The early modern world witnessed various forms of slavery and servitude as systems of labour, but neither in Europe nor in Africa did this subservience involve the branding of persons as chattel."

"This developed in the Caribbean as a special and specific European practice that targeted Africans. No other racial or ethnic group that entered the English colonial Caribbean received this legal classification."

"This invented brand of property was developed by the Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century and perfected by the English in the seventeenth century."

"It was a moral and legal break from any African or European tradition of labour. It constituted, furthermore, the most dehumanising, violent, socially regressive form of human exploitation known to human kind.”

In conclusion, the transatlantic slave trade condemned over one million African people to the bottom of the Atlantic, mere collateral, because its investors wanted to maximize profits from the sale of consumer goods that no one needed. Capitalism 101.