Slave Trade Transparency
The Economist Feb 24 issue had an intriguing article (by subscription) on how pervasive the slave trade industry was in Britain and other European countries during the late 1700's:
So integral to the British economy was the slave business that there
were few men and institutions of wealth who did not want to invest in
it, from the royal family and the Church of England downwards. Slavers
could count on the Archbishop of Canterbury to defend them before God...
I
was surprised to read that the slave trade, that is the "shipment" of
slaves, was run by the Europeans... I had somehow thought Americans,
the users of the slaves, were dealing direct with Africa.“triangular trade” as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European
ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to
exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to
sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee,
also fueled the first great wave of economic globalisation...
Here's
the intriguing point: the whole slave trade was utterly hidden from the
British populace by the merchant class. After all, there were no slaves
evident in England, and no slave traders were talking about their
golden goose. The loggerjam broke by the oldest road to transparency -
a contrite trader outed the details of a morally corrupt and cruel
practice, the Quakers began to publicize it, William Wilberforce (the movie about him just opened this week) petitioned for abolition, and finally Britain abolished slavery 200 years ago this week.A pervasive internet makes the world transparent... systemic travesties are hard to hide. Even North Korea has a pervasive internet (also care of the Economist ), but not connected to the outside world. Online dating is apparently popular...
Technorati Tags: transparency, slave trade, economist, internet
Pat - did you write this because most real estate agents are slaves to their cell phones?
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Pat. Nice break from housing. Interestingly, today NPR is covering part 2 of a story about abuse by diplomats of their staff. It seems that despite the transparency of today, even in suburban Washington DC there is slavery. The link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7672967
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It's sad and very odd to say that today's mistreated don't have pc's or cell phones...
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I read news sometime January about a descendant of some British aristocrat [forgot the name]who went to Africa to ask forgiveness on the role of his ancestors in slave holding activities in that part of the world. Such act is quite debatable.
Looks like there are other forms of slavery though. I believe it still exist guised with a different name.
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Your blog is a worldly one... it's probably easier to see injustices from parts of the world where there is desperation to move.
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Pat, modern slavery is a topic heavy on my mind these days. Forgive the link, I have been writing feverishly at StopChildSlavery.com. The Internet makes the world transparent, but that doesn't mean we're all willing to look through the transparency to really see the problems and act on them.
Thanks for this post.
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