Swarthout > Recent Status Updates

"'In total, then, close to $600 million – equivalent to a third of total ordinary revenues over the period – can be seen as a reasonable low estimate for the Federal Government’s expenditure on western expansion'"

"'slavery retarded regional economic growth by absorbing the savings of slave owners, “crowding out” investment in physical capital – including the forms of capital formation represented by improvements in the value of land'"

"Credit promoted crop specialization within the South, as well as the opening of new areas and a shift from tobacco and rice to cotton, sugar and wheat. Slave-holdings supplied collateral and the slaves themselves were – quite literally – a mobile asset playing their onerous part in the slaveholders capitalism"

mortality rates for Brazilian slaves were high, but not much higher than for slaves in the United States. Thus the Brazilian slave aged ten had a life expectancy of between thirty-four and thirty-eight years, while the US slave had a life expectancy of forty years. Similarly, the Brazilian slave had a life expectancy of twenty-three to twenty-six years, while the US slave had a life expectancy of twenty-seven years.

"The Cuban Slave Code of 1842, widely opposed and ignored by mill owners, stipulated that slaves should work for no more than sixteen hours a day. In fact, eighteen- or even twenty-hour days are frequently referred to as the norm."

cuba: "In 1865 the tobacco workers won the right to employ public readers – lectores – to inform and entertain the cigar rollers while they worked. The workers made their own selection of newspaper articles, short stories, novels by Guy de Maupassant or Charles Dickens."

"For the slave-holders, the most vital alliance was with non-slave-owning whites in the South, who not only had to be kept from rebelling against slave-owner rule, but also represented the first line of defence against slave and Indian revolt."

They had great political influence, and could have offered credit only to yeoman farmers, who could have used family labour to cultivate cotton, coffee and sugar....they did none of these things because slave-less farms were not a good credit prospect – they lacked ‘collateral’. Slave-holding planters, on the other hand, had liquid assets at their disposal.

The Second Slavery was increasingly dragged by the Industrial Revolution under way in Europe, creating an intense demand for raw cotton, as European finance transformed the relationship between slave owner and merchant. To understand the Second Slavery it is necessary to see it as the prodigious counterpart to the rise of capitalism in Europe

There was something fetishistic about the preoccupation with whiteness. White sheets, white petticoats, white shirts and blouses, white sugar, white bread, white rice, white ‘icing’ on the cake, white milk and so-called white or ‘blonde’ coffee helped to create a magical world of purity and closure.

Once able to mobilize a subjected labour force to cultivate cotton on the stolen ‘ghost acreage’ of the US South, the cotton capitalists were on their way to achieving a global commercial ascendancy, opening the global "great divergence" between rich and poor countries.

It was calculated that the average annual output of a slave on a plantation was 850 kilos of sugar; at the going rate of duty each slave thus contributed 420 francs to the Treasury per annum, enough to entitle them to vote or stand for the Chamber had they been free citizens of France.