The Whip that Built America: Slavery's Economic Drivers, Enduring Impacts, and the Need for Truth and Repentance (original) (raw)
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Legacies of Slavery and their Enduring Harms
Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2021
This article provides a much needed inquiry into the legacy of slavery from an interdisciplinary perspective, including the historical, socioeconomic, political, and the epistemic. It makes an important distinction between the legacy of slavery and its persisting damages. By investigating this legacy’s effects on peoples, communities, and societies, it highlights the imperative of situating the pains and sufferings of historical traumas within contemporary structural oppression and institutional discrimination that have perpetuated these harms. The article consists of four sections: it first outlines the legacy of slavery, comprised in instrumentalizing black bodies for economic gains, employing political aggression to colonize both lands and minds, applying racialized discourse to demean and dehumanize, and oppressing people of African descent through structural violence. It then discusses the legacy’s injuries as transgenerational and cultural traumas, and how these wounds are exp...
The Wealth of Nations: How Slavery Built the American Economy
Case Study, 2025
This case study examines the integral role that slavery played in shaping the economic foundation of the United States, particularly through industries such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco. It explores how enslaved labor not only fueled the Southern economy but also contributed to the growth of the industrial revolution in the U.S. and Europe. The study delves into the immense wealth generated by slavery, which extended beyond plantation owners to include financial institutions, corporations, and universities. It highlights the role of banks and insurance companies that profited from slavery and the long-term economic consequences for Black Americans, particularly in terms of generational wealth and systemic inequality. The case study also investigates how modern corporations and universities are addressing their historical ties to slavery, and the ongoing economic disparities that continue to affect Black communities today. By understanding the economic impact of slavery, this study emphasizes the importance of reparative actions to address the legacy of economic exploitation and work toward a more equitable future.
After slavery: strange fruits of aftermath
As my entry points to the ''strange fruits of aftermaths' in the title, I examine three documents, each written approximately 50 years apart. In reverse chronological order, they are a 1958 description of the funeral of a former family servant; a review of George Spring Merriam's 1906 volume, 'The Negro and the Nation'; and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address of 1865. Together, these three documents illustrate different but interconnected strands of aftermath: 1) the construction of a nostalgic view of slavery which helped perpetuate notions of white supremacy; 2) the impact of scientific racism on the struggle for racial justice and 3) the construction of what Saidya Hartman has called the 'fiction of debt'. This paper is based on a chapter from my doctoral thesis, and is not currently published. Therefore, please do not cite it without my permission.
Shadows of Slavery. Refractions of the past, challenges of the present
Open Democracy, BST, 2018
This collection brings together five years worth of research into how the legacies of 19th-century enslavement interact with contemporary bondage and exploitation. Download the pdf at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-7ETObmmI0MVbdCt2AXtMuOKQQVhbtOo/view
Hist/SBS 242: America in the Era of Slavery (DRAFT for F2024)
This introductory course places the US in global and hemispheric contexts. It asks students to evaluate the centrality of slavery to the history of the Americas and the United States. We examine how the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of the continent affected the development of capitalism, governments, and cultures. We identify a nascent global system, comparing the US with selected locations in South America, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Students make comparisons of the past and the present, seeking to understand how the era of slavery constructed race formations and other legacies for the contemporary world. Throughout, students gain an introductory narrative of American economic and political history and acquire an introduction to empirical methods, critical theory, and current scholarship.
This special issue explores how enslaved workers of African descent were punished in the Americas. It studies punishment inside and beyond the criminal justice system, investigating its legitimation and implementation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the Americas.
Is slavery history? Slavery in historic and contemporary societies
2006
2007 marks the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, While it was a landmark act, it did not bring an end to the institution of slavery which continued to flourish in the Americas for another half-century. This article gives an overview of historical slavery, from the slavery of ancient societies to the commerce in enslaved Africans that contributed to European prosperity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It examines the role of Ireland and the Irish in this trade and looks at the development of the abolitionist movement. The persistence of slavery as part of today's globalised economy is discussed and some suggestions are made to facilitate the exploration of this topic with students.
University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2019
The publication of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist was a mouthwatering development that significantly impacted the discourse analysis of America’s antebellum history. This book examines the macro-economics of slavery in United States history from a profoundly revisionist approach. It argues that the expansion of the institution of slavery created the wealth that financed the industrialization and modernization of the United States from 1783 to 1865. This challenges conventional interpretations that often portray slavery as a premodern economic institution largely isolated in time and detached from America’s socio-economic and political ideals and development that characterized the post-independence republic. This paper closely examines the methodological approaches and main arguments raised in chapters three, four and five of Baptist’s book. It argues that the full integration of the grim realities of the institution of slavery in these chapters is a sad tale of folly, a half that has now been told but that should be taken with a grain of salt.