Wednesday, March 5, 2014

How Our Modern Way of Life Is Built on a Long Legacy of Slavery

Our series on Conservatism and racism is coming to an end with an article at by Greg Grandin, with the introduction by Adam Hochschild, "How Our Modern Way of Life Is Built on a Long Legacy of Slavery," or "How the bodies of slaves became something on which our world was built — the advance of modern medicine":

"When Americans think about slavery, we think about the Civil War, cotton plantations in Georgia, and the legacy that those centuries of bondage left in the United States. But we forget that, 200 years ago, the institution in various forms extended throughout the world: hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian peasants were in debt bondage to landowners, indigenous slavery was widespread in Africa, and most people in Russia were serfs.

"No slaves suffered more, however, than those who were force-marched to the African coast and, if they survived, transported in the packed, suffocating holds of sailing vessels across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Here, too, we forget that it was not just to the United States that these ships brought their human cargo. Far greater numbers of captive Africans in chains were shipped to the West Indies and to Latin America, especially Brazil. There, and in the Caribbean, the tropical climate and its diseases made field labor particularly harsh and the death rate especially high. At one time or another, however, slaves could be found almost everywhere in the Americas where Europeans had settled, from Quebec to Chile.

"Slavery was the cornerstone of the modern world in more ways than we can imagine today. The structure of banking, insurance, and credit that underlies international commerce, for instance, has its origins, at least in part, in the “triangle trade”: slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas; slave-cultivated products like cotton and sugar traveling from the Americas to Europe; and trading goods meant to buy yet more slaves moving from Europe to Africa. Because a voyage on any leg of that triangle might last months and risked shipwreck, bankers, merchants, and ship owners wanted systems that both guaranteed payment for losses and protected their investments.

"Historian Greg Grandin is the author of remarkable -- and highly readable -- books like National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Fordlandia and his most recent work, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. Today, he vividly suggests just how the bodies of slaves became something on which our world was built, zeroing in on one connection that we seldom think about -- the development of modern medicine.—Adam Hochschild

"The Bleached Bones of the Dead
By Greg Grandin

"Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble -- as many as 300,000 died -- when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been 'under the heel of the French' but they 'got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.'


"Haitian slaves began to throw off the 'heel of the French' in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property -- their slaves (that is, themselves) -- or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80% of the government budget was still going to service this debt.


"Advocates of reparations -- made to the descendants of enslaved peoples, not to their owners -- tend to calculate the amount due based on the negative impact of slavery. They want to redress either unpaid wages during the slave period or injustices that took place after formal abolition (including debt servitude and exclusion from the benefits extended to the white working class by the New Deal). According to one estimate, for instance, 222,505,049 hours of forced labor were performed by slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended. Compounded at interest and calculated in today’s currency, this adds up to trillions of dollars.


"Voyage of the Blind



"Corps of doctors tended to slave ports up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Some of them were committed to relieving suffering; others were simply looking for ways to make the slave system more profitable. In either case, they identified types of fevers, learned how to decrease mortality and increase fertility, experimented with how much water was needed for optimum numbers of slaves to survive on a diet of salted fish and beef jerky, and identified the best ratio of caloric intake to labor hours. Priceless epidemiological information on a range of diseases -- malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and so on -- was gleaned from the bodies of the dying and the dead.

"When slaves couldn’t be kept alive, their autopsied bodies still provided useful information. Of course, as the writer Harriet Washington has demonstrated in her stunning Medical Apartheid, such experimentation continued long after slavery ended: in the 1940s, one doctor said that the 'future of the Negro lies more in the research laboratory than in the schools.' As late as the 1960s, another researcher, reminiscing in a speech given at Tulane Medical School, said that it was 'cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.'


"The disease first appeared on the Rôdeur not long after it set sail, initially in the hold among the slaves and then on deck. In the end, it blinded all the voyagers except one member of the crew. According to a passenger’s account, sightless sailors worked under the direction of that single man 'like machines' tied to the captain with a thick rope. 'We were blind -- stone blind, drifting like a wreck upon the ocean,' he recalled. Some of the sailors went mad and tried to drink themselves to death. Others retired to their hammocks, immobilized. Each 'lived in a little dark world of his own, peopled by shadows and phantasms. We did not see the ship, nor the heavens, nor the sea, nor the faces of our comrades.'

"But they could still hear the cries of the blinded slaves in the hold.

"This went on for 10 days, through storms and calms, until the voyagers heard the sound of another ship. The Spanish slaver San León had drifted alongside the Rôdeur. But the entire crew and all the slaves of that ship, too, had been blinded. When the sailors of each vessel realized this 'horrible coincidence,' they fell into a silence 'like that of death.' Eventually, the San León drifted away and was never heard from again.


"Events on the Rôdeur caught the attention of Sébastien Guillié, chief of medicine at Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth. He wrote up his findings -- which included a discussion of the disease’s symptoms, the manner in which it spread, and best treatment options -- and published them in Bibliothèque Ophtalmologique, which was then cited in other medical journals as well as in an 1846 U.S. textbook, A Manual of the Diseases of the Eye.


"Slavery’s Great Schism

Slave Ship, the film.

"In 1945, Allied troops marched into the first of the Nazi death camps. What they saw inside, many have remarked, forced a radical break in the West’s moral imagination. The Nazi genocide of Jews, one scholar has written, is history’s 'black hole,' swallowing up all the theological, ethical, and philosophical certainties that had earlier existed.



"City officials convened a commission of inquiry to explain the deaths of the other 270 slaves, calling on the expertise of five surgeons -- two British doctors, a Spaniard, a Swiss Italian, and one from the United States. The doctors testified that before boarding the Joaquín, the captives would have felt extreme anguish, having already been forced to survive on roots and bugs until arriving on the African coast emaciated and with their stomachs distended. Then, once on the ocean, crowded into a dark hold with no ventilation, they would have had nothing to do other than listen to the cries of their companions and the clanking of their chains. Many would have gone mad trying to make sense of their situation, trying to ponder 'the imponderable.' The surgeons decided that the East Africans had died from dehydration and chronic diarrhea, aggravated by the physical and psychological hardships of slavery -- from, that is, what they called 'nostalgia,' 'melancholia,' and 'cisma,' a Spanish word that loosely means brooding or mourning.

"The collective opinion of the five surgeons -- who represented the state of medical knowledge in the U.S., Great Britain, and Spain -- reveals the way slavery helped in what might be called the disenchanting of medicine. In it you can see how doctors dealing with the slave trade began taking concepts like melancholia out of the hands of priests, poets, and philosophers and giving them actual medical meaning.


"Two decades after the incident involving the Joaquín, the Spanish medical profession no longer thought melancholia to be caused by an incubus, but considered it a type of delirium, often related to seasickness. Medical dictionaries would later describe the condition in terms similar to those used by critics of the Middle Passage -- as caused by rancid food, too close contact, extreme weather, and above all the 'isolation' and 'uniform and monotonous life' one experiences at sea. As to nostalgia, one Spanish dictionary came to define it as 'a violent desire compelling those taken out of their country to return home.'


"In the case of the Joaquín, however, the doctors didn’t extend the logic of their own reasoning to the slave trade and condemn it. Instead, they focused on the hardships of the Middle Passage as a technical concern. 'It is in the interests of commerce and humanity,' said the Connecticut-born, Edinburgh-educated John Redhead, 'to get slaves off their ships as soon as possible.'

"Follow the Money


"In the realm of economics, the importance of slaves went well beyond the wealth generated from their uncompensated labor. Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned -- not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.




"In the United States, scholars have demonstrated that profit wasn’t made just from southerners selling the cotton that slaves picked or the cane they cut. Slavery was central to the establishment of the industries that today dominate the U.S. economy: finance, insurance, and real estate. And historian Caitlan Rosenthal has shown how Caribbean slave plantations helped pioneer 'accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics, to manage their land and their slaves' -- techniques that were then used in northern factories.

"Slavery, as the historian Lorenzo Green argued half a century ago, 'formed the very basis of the economic life of New England: about it revolved, and on it depended, most of her other industries.' Fathers grew wealthy building slave ships or selling fish, clothing, and shoes to slave islands in the Caribbean; when they died, they left their money to sons who 'built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.' In due course, they donated to build libraries, lecture halls, botanical gardens, and universities, as Craig Steven Wilder has revealed in his new book, Ebony and Ivy.

"In Great Britain, historians have demonstrated how the 'reparations' paid to slave-owning families 'fuelled industry and the development of merchant banks and marine insurance, and how it was used to build country houses and to amass art collections.'


"Fever Dreams and the Bleached Bones of the Dead

"In the United States, the reparations debate faded away with the 2008 election of Barack Obama -- except as an idea that continues to haunt the fever dreams of the right-wing imagination. A significant part of the backlash against the president is driven by the fantasy that he is presiding over a radical redistribution of wealth -- think of all those free cell phones that the Drudge Report says he’s handing out to African Americans! -- part of a stealth plan to carry out reparations by any means possible.

"'What they don't know,' said Rush Limbaugh shortly after Obama’s inauguration, 'is that Obama's entire economic program is reparations.' The conservative National Legal Policy Center recently raised the specter of 'slavery reparations courts' -- Black Jacobin tribunals presided over by the likes of Jessie Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Russell Simmons and empowered to levy a $50,000 tax on every white 'man, woman, and child in this country.' It’s time to rescue the discussion of reparations from the swamp of talk radio and the comment sections of the conservative blogosphere.


"How would we calculate the value of what we today would call the intellectual property -- in medicine and other fields -- generated by slavery’s suffering? I’m not sure. But a revival of efforts to do so would be a step toward reckoning with slavery’s true legacy: our modern world."


The "New South?"

From the beginning of the article with the quote from Pat Robertson, to the end with ("...the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead," you're only human if you're not sickened.

If you're not, you're probably a Conservative.

"The modern world owes its very existence to slavery."  Think about it for a minute, and if that thrills you, you're probably a Conservative.

The point of our short series on Conservatism and racism is that there is no such thing as the "New South."  The election of Barack Obama to the White House released the dormant feelings of racism that typlifies the Southern States, and with the advent of the "Tea Party," the disgusting disease of bigotry and racism has been observed in Conservative Sheeplets as far north as the Mississippi of the North, Indiana.

To call the Tea Party Conservative Sheeplets racist usually sets them off, screaming that someone is "pulling the race card."

That the "modern world owes its very existence to slavery," they care not; in their hearts they know that racism and democracy don't go together in the eyes of the civilized world -- racism and crime goes together.


"My opponents are] following me. They follow me home at night. I make sure that I
bushes and check all the cars to make sure that—they follow me. … That’s what’s
hours of the night. They’re hiding in the bushes when I’m at candidate forums."

Christine O’Donnell, conservative activist in the Tea Party movement best known for
her failed GOP candidacy in 2010 for the U.S. Senate seat from Delaware vacated by
Vice President Joe Biden.  September 2, 2010, The Weekly Standard.