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"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.

Rise like Lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep hath fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few

The General Assembly of the new state voted to give Bolivar a million dollars in recognition of his services. He would only accept the money on condition that it was used to purchase the freedom of 1,000 slaves. The money was never paid.

Slaves proved, in fact, less dangerous than free or semi-free laborers. They had none of the rising expectations that have so often prompted rebellion in human history. They were not armed and did not have to be armed. They were without hope and did not have to be given hope.

"The slaves on Barbados plantations had to be replaced at the rate of about 6 percent a year. It is estimated that between 1640 and 1700 264,000 slaves were imported into the British West Indies. The total black population in 1700 was about 100,000."

The life-worlds of the online are the primary environment for this sort of deinstitutionalized, impermanent engagement, offering repertoires of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation. Atomization and acceleration go hand in hand: people are lonelier in the new century, but also more agitated; more atomized, but also more connected; angrier, yet more disoriented.

"In contrast to the “high” politics of the years 1918 to 1989, hyperpolitics is an abidingly “low” form—low-commitment, low-cost, and all too often, low-value"