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lelianadelrey.bsky.social
Flying Chaucer
@lelianadelrey.bsky.social
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Everything is anti-poverty ☭🇩🇴🌇
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lelianadelrey.bsky.social
The problem we are discussing is not restricted to some individual figures. The increase of the slave population marked the classical age of liberalism. As Robin Blackburn notes in The Making of New World Slavery, “The total slave population in the Americas reached around 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, and finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s.” In the mid-eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (870,000). The fact is unexpected. Although its empire was far more extensive, Spain came well behind. Second place was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi-colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London. As for the United States, it was one of the last nations in the Americas to abolish slavery. Slavery played a very important role in the history of the country born out of the liberal American Revolution. For thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of existence of the United States, slave owners occupied the position of president, including George Washington (the great military and political protagonist of the anti-British revolt), as well as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (authors, respectively, of the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution of 1787). In brief, the thesis according to which liberalism is synonymous with liberty and defense of liberty doesn’t hold water. While reconstructing the history of the two liberal revolutions, we see a tangle of the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of Black slavery.
July 2, 2023 at 7:39 PM
lelianadelrey.bsky.social
Like opening the gates of Constantinople in 1204
July 2, 2023 at 6:54 PM