Monday, January 15, 2007

Ian Smart on Slavery

"William's work shows that the British moved early in the nineteenth century to abolish first the slave trade and then the hateful institution itself not for humanitarian considerations but purely for economic reasons. The British mercantile capitalists, who had generated immense wealth through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the triangular trade, and the plantation economy, had fallen from grace at home. The new power brokers were the capitalists who controlled the Indian subcontinent. There was no need for slavery in that region of the globe, where dirt cheap and very expendable 'free' labour abounded."

from 'Willie Lynch to the World Trade Center'

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