Dialogues: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

the brits outlawed slavery itself in 1833 or 1834. but if you broaden the concept of slavery for a moment, and consider the lives of peasants displaced by the enclosure acts, forced to migrate to the cities where they lived in worse conditions than in the middle ages, and went to work at institutions like factories, lived in misery and disease and died young, their lives without choice were a replacement for slavery, or were, in reality, enslavement. the reforms of the 1830s might have saved capitalism, but really it saved the ownership of enterprises for the rich and powerful.

the story of capitalism since its beginnings in the 19th century is a variant of this, with conditions going up and down, but the top 1% or 10% living radically better than the working class not to mention the lumpenproletariat.

slavery was always relative in history, and my favorite example of this is the word for slave in ancient biblical terxts, "abd", which is the same as that for servant. ditto in arabic.

and indentured servants in the u.s. or africa in the 17th century were just slaves for fixed terms.

i supposed fixed term faculty feel like that nowadays, and with good reason.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 4:07:59 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

The Brits outlawed it in 1807. I guess that was 400 years late, if we date the first documented

evidence of human trafficking in its Euro-African context, to 1441 with the Portuguese

Antao Goncalves.

Agreed. Max Weber got it wrong - and Marx got it right, in his Communist Manifesto.

I suspect that many started to hate Marx from the moment he talked about "primitive accumulation"

and the "turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skins."

Some never forgave him for that statement.

Williams, Rodney and also Inikori (and Braudel) helped us to put names, places and data to it all.

We are now on to the European and American universities and museums that benefitted

and the scientific disciplines and institutions that thrived from it.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net

http://web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html

Chief Editor- "Africa Update"

www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali

Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries

2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies

University of Texas at Austin

2019 Distinguished Africanist Award

New York African Studies Association

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 3:31 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

Slave trade was actually outlawed by many states in the US from the 17th Century onwards out of fear that the trafficking of more Africans would lead to more insurrections long before the abolition by Britain. W.E.B. Du Bois argued in his doctoral dissertation that the African Slave Trade was suppressed by law in America from the start and so it could not have been as legal as historians want us to believe. Gloria is right that it was not a trade. Walter Rodney called it kidnapping, warfare, deceit and he demonstrated how science and technology developed in Europe based on the huge profits from trafficking Africans. Eric Williams argued the same thesis in his doctoral dissertation, Capitalism and Slavery. In ignorance, Max Weber argued that it was The Protestant Ethic that produced the Spirit of Capitalism. No be so.

Biko

On Sunday, 7 April 2019, 14:07:04 GMT-4, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:

Gloria,
Was "the despicable slave trade" illegal at the time of its practice?

CAO.

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Sunday, April 7, 2019

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Article: "Science's Debt to the Slave Trade"

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