A Mendacious Triangular Trade (Part III)
The original triangle trade produced profits at each of its three angles. The English and French profitted from selling guns and ammunition to the petit-potentates and slave hunters of West Africa. Those worthies profitted from highway robbery and the selling of slaves. The slave traders, burdened by the oldest of economic scourges -- "never invest in anything that has to be fed" -- perhaps profitted less than the other players, but the good ones must have managed, else the triangle would have collapsed of its own accord long before slaves were declared contraband. In the Americas the purchasers of slaves, blessed by an abundance of good crop land, by the reproductive capacities of bought-and-paid-for labor, and by a cleverly rationalized version of Christian morality, eventually developed a system that was so profitable they could live without actually working. The mollasses and sugar they sold to the traders of the final leg of the triangle, when transported back to the original ports of call, produced the highest profit of all. Land might be farmed to exhaustion. The supply of healthy slaves might diminish to an unprofitable level, and highway robbers might eventually be forced to rob each other, but the thirst of the European peasantry for the titillating distillates of sugary substances would never die. Demon rum would always be in demand.
The side effects of the consuming triangle make for interesting economic analysis. Competition worked wonders. Armorers produced the bigger and better guns demanded by the potentates and robbers (as they began to kill each other). Slave traders found more efficient ways to deliver live cargo. And plantationers liberally deployed the beneficence of Christianity among their human property to enhance and sustain its productivity. Perhaps if the northern climes of the American continent had been as commodious to agriculture as its southern parts, the great triangle could have endured forever.
But alas, nature bestows her mercies where she will. The northerners, in order to survive as equals of the southern aristocracy, were driven to question the justifying slants put upon Christian doctrine by the pious slave-owning southerners and to take arms against their good fortune. Martial deeds of honor, still reenacted in some parts of the south, paved the way for great cemeteries to be dug and for the manufactories of the deeply Christian north to substitute the profits of child labor and Land Baron robberies for the slaveries of the south. Thus ended the original triangle trade.
We may leap over the abortive attempts of America's interim governments to emulate the colonial empires of the sea-faring Europeans, thus brushing aside, as of little interest, the slaughter of "miniscule" pockets of innocent Filipinoes and recalcitrant Cubans, while paying only tip-of-the-tongue service to the plantation-like regimentation of Central American banana "savages" left destitute by the collapse of the old triangle. Nature does indeed bestow mercies, and she had ladled masses of entrepreneurial spirit upon the flesh of the North American inheritors of the southern kingdoms. That phase passed too quickly to be of enduring interest. We may note, however, that the so-called "liberation theology" that has led to the the turmoil in Central and South America has its intellectual roots in the ideas of the New Englanders who used it to work their greed upon the destruction of the south. They are now merely inheriting their own wind.
To be continued.
The side effects of the consuming triangle make for interesting economic analysis. Competition worked wonders. Armorers produced the bigger and better guns demanded by the potentates and robbers (as they began to kill each other). Slave traders found more efficient ways to deliver live cargo. And plantationers liberally deployed the beneficence of Christianity among their human property to enhance and sustain its productivity. Perhaps if the northern climes of the American continent had been as commodious to agriculture as its southern parts, the great triangle could have endured forever.
But alas, nature bestows her mercies where she will. The northerners, in order to survive as equals of the southern aristocracy, were driven to question the justifying slants put upon Christian doctrine by the pious slave-owning southerners and to take arms against their good fortune. Martial deeds of honor, still reenacted in some parts of the south, paved the way for great cemeteries to be dug and for the manufactories of the deeply Christian north to substitute the profits of child labor and Land Baron robberies for the slaveries of the south. Thus ended the original triangle trade.
We may leap over the abortive attempts of America's interim governments to emulate the colonial empires of the sea-faring Europeans, thus brushing aside, as of little interest, the slaughter of "miniscule" pockets of innocent Filipinoes and recalcitrant Cubans, while paying only tip-of-the-tongue service to the plantation-like regimentation of Central American banana "savages" left destitute by the collapse of the old triangle. Nature does indeed bestow mercies, and she had ladled masses of entrepreneurial spirit upon the flesh of the North American inheritors of the southern kingdoms. That phase passed too quickly to be of enduring interest. We may note, however, that the so-called "liberation theology" that has led to the the turmoil in Central and South America has its intellectual roots in the ideas of the New Englanders who used it to work their greed upon the destruction of the south. They are now merely inheriting their own wind.
To be continued.
posted by Benedict S. at 11:55 AM
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