Dr Cassandra Gooptar makes an excellent point in the video on the Guardian's involvement in slavery that I have already linked today.
She made the point that whenever she arrives in a major city or other place she asks herself the question ‘where did the money come from to make this place?' She's right to do so. History has clearly taught her that, too often, the answer is slavery.
The question she asks resonates with me. I often ask a variant on that question, and I am aware that it reveals my different perspective. I often ask where the money comes from now. Dr Gooptar looks at history. I admit, I look at the present. In both cases I think the question is relevant.
Cassandra Gooptar is looking for past abuse, and rightly so. I am looking for the financial flows that keep places going now.
This habit started in tax havens, I think. I saw abuse of a different sort there. Now I ask the question of anywhere. And too often I see current abuse.
Partly that is of workers. Many are abused, and that systemic abuse is growing as government and central bankers work in unison to crush their well-being.
Partly it is of the environment. To often places make their living by destroying the world on which we are all dependent.
One of the lessons we need to learn from past abuses is that our capacity to create new forms of abuse in pursuit of profit appears untamed.
We need to be aware. Abuse morphs. Its reality does not. Nor, by and large, do its victims. They are always those the rich and powerful think they can exploit for their gain.
To loop back to my first post of this morning, this is why we need a state that will stand up fo and protect people rather than see its role as the enabler of markets. We need a Courageous State, to quote the title of my 2011 book.
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Richard, since you are a railway buff, then the Liverpool – Manchester railway is doubtless familiar – financed almost 100% by those profiting by slavery (btw: Liverpool/UK’s coton exchange was demolished in the 1970s after circa 2 centuries of existence). The construction of most of the Uk’s rail system was funded by the compo given to UK slave owners in the early 1830s. The compo for the slaves being a pat on the head. All history of course. (in mitigation (is that possible?) the current problems in Haiti stem directly from the insistence of France that Haiti compensate French slave owners for a) independence b) loss of slaves – the final payment being made in the 1960s – wonder why Haiti is piss-poor? part of the answer lies there – hope France is proud of this reality – liberty, egality but franternity?).
More worrying: we are all slave owners as this video illustrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfhWhGJOmxg
globalisation or would that be global-slaverisation?
Which circles back to your point: “There are always those the rich and powerful think they can exploit for their gain.” – happening now all the time, in plain view.
Mike
Oddly, that was one of my first thoughts on reading the Guardian material.
I have been reading railway history for 50-plus years and have more than 1,000 books in my collection, and never has this been mentioned
We agree
Richard
I’ve noted the Irish and Chinese navvies in my railway book collection over the years but never saw it as abuse.
Really, it’s all part of a long established attempt by capital to negate working people’s contribution to the creation of wealth – to under value it and make it seem that capital is more generous and rational it what is pays for hard labour.
Agreed
Richard, I wonder if you would enjoy the sentiment, perhaps even the music, of the band Big Big Train playing their song ‘East Coast Racer’, that celebrates the Mallard achieving the still-unbroken world steam speed record of 126mph in 1938? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDN1P77Nm_Q
Lots of A4 action….
Again, if I may, a hat-tip to Clara Mattei (The Capital Order, 2022, p.234) as I could not remember the terminology which is new to me in my earlier post:
Maffeo Pantaleoni (Italian economist with close ties to fascism) created what seems to be an anti-Marxist (class based) theory of ‘complementary commodity’ in so-called ‘pure economics’ (is this another one for your glossary that can be gutted there?):
‘This concept of labour stresses the priority of capital over labour, a priority also reflected in the wage-fund theory (glossary?) – again, an important building block of pure economics.
This theory pre-supposes that wages are always and necessarily paid of the entrepreneurs capital – not as a portion of the surplus he has reaped from workers labour, but rather as something that is made possible only because of the entrepreneur’s virtuous savings.’
It is a model where workers lose their agency and are dependent on a select elite who save/invest.
So in one fell swoop you have a total negation of workers worth or in any such worker claims.
The world of slavery was a further and much worse negation of labour if you think about it – a truly awful way to treat people that must be acknowledged when we know that low wages are bad enough!!
Re the financing & organisation of the early railways – it was it not Quaker business people around Darlington?
Where their money came from I’m less clear.
There had been great debate & struggles earlier in Quaker communities in the American colonies about slavery which implies likely that they had business in the Slave trade.
That was the North Eastern Railway
And the Edmonton ticket company and maybe more
Research has been done on this. I have a book on it, but not at this time of the morning
It was an excellent video – worth highlighting in this blog.
I fear Dr. Gooptar will be a victim of “nominative determinism” – she is (literally) a Cassandra…. so, will anyone listen to her important message? I shudder to think how the rest of the press will cover the Guardian’s mea culpa.
What is true for The Guardian is true for us all; we are all where we are on the backs of other peoples misery – be it slaves, cotton mill workers or soldiers and more. I don’t know what that means we should all do… but we could all start by showing a little humility when we explain whatever good fortune we have.
I’m currently looking at the whole of the United Kingdom and wondering how these two things are possible:
-economy broadly flat over last year based on ONS measured GDP
-wages grew 6-7% which is around 4% below inflation based on the labour force survey
Can they both be true and if so what’s the explanation?
Increased profits
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I was reminded of the Stevie Wonder song “Living for the City”.
Nice little plug for your book at the end. I must check that out.
Thanks
The painful realities of ‘where did the money come from’, both past and present, isn’t ever taught in schools, at least never in any coherent way. The result is the many people I used to meet when canvassing who thought their misery or problems, cued by the media including the BBC and ITV, were all due to dark-skinned people/immigrants/woke lefties/socialism etc. Slavery is an abstract. You may only imagine how rancid some of those opinions were/are.
All those giant neo-classical piles that suddenly started appearing in the British countryside in the 18th Century used to be regarded as part of our national heritage.
I guess that is still true but now, at long last, in a more truthful way.
No surprise that the Tories want to takeover the National Trust and suppress all discussion of the reality.
We used to visit the stately homes of England especially those around Yorkshire, but when you go to more than half a dozen, it dawns on you that the money supporting these Adams pilasters and capability Brown landscapes all came from the exploitation of others be it slaves in the west indies or miners or labourers in the cotton mills. I love the aesthetics of the architecture and art collections but I can’t visit with the same enthusiasm anymore. There are some that even make an exhibit of the local yeomanry soldiers drawn from the estate going off to the First World War to be slaughtered in the trenches and it really is sickening. All these people exploited and kowtowing to the people up at the “Big House”. It seems to me the whole of capitalist society is built on this foundation and I can’t see how to get away from it. Money drives everything.
I recently watched my first ever episode of Upstairs Downstairs.
It was a searing expose of appalling class-based attitudes, snobbery and dishonesty.
Despite it much more resembling today than the time it was made (1970s?) I doubt genuinely if the vice like grip that the rich and powerful constantly try and impose on modern British culture would now allow it to be made.
I was at university in Bristol many years ago and was back there a month or two back. A great city and Clifton is a beautiful part of it. However, seeing it today and knowing what we know now it hits you that all those exceptionally fine houses were funded from the trade of which Bristol was one of the main trading centres. 50 plus years ago we were just not sensitised or educated to appreciate that. At least that discussion is out there now and there was a major exhibition in the cathedral on the history and impact of the slave trade that did not pull punches.
If the Guardian uses its power and pulpit to educate and inform as it seems to be doing, that would be an important contribution and probably the best way for them to contribute. So far its a good start.
There is a rather grumpy discussion about slavery and railways here
https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/even-steam-engines-are-racist-it-seems.1420289/
At the bottom of P7 D1039’s post #140 has a list of railways and the number of shareholders who received compensation for the abolition of slavery
Wow…someone has done the research
“She made the point that whenever she arrives in a major city or other place she asks herself the question ‘where did the money come from to make this place?”
Exhibit No 4b: Birkenhead (my home town).
The town expanded massively from 1815 through to the late 19th century. Its expansion matched, almost exactly the expansion of the UK-USA cotton trade (itself driven by the “internal export” of black slaves from North to South in the USA).
Birkenhead Park: built by public subscription – & where did that money come from – I wonder. 1861 – Cammel-Lairds and … the Alabama – a Confederate raider. However, these are the more obvious examples of slave money. I used to deliver newspapers (morning & evening for 5 years up to the age of 16). My route took me along Bidston Road – which sits on a large sandstone ridge. Most of the housing was 9 to 12 bedroom mansions (you cycled up to the front door – it was too bloody far to walk). All driven by the cotton trade. There was no bus route on Bidston Road until the mid to late 1970s – no need – if you lived there you did not need a bus. One mansion (demolished in the 1960s) occupied a rectangle 1km on a side – own greenhouses, tennis courts (note the plural) etc. The big 18th century mansions built on Carribean slave labour are obvious, but there are less obvious places, such as Birkenhead (in fairness its slums where many people lived were up to the usual 19th century standards).
Don’t forget the ”100 years of humiliation” of China by the west and the forced trade of opium which financed the industrial revolution, the opening up of the USA., the creation of some of our largest institutions e.g. banks, universities etc.
I read a lot the work of the US Transcendentalists in the 1960s, a major formative experience. Here’s a bit from Henry Thoreau:
“Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.”
How true
> Cassandra Gooptar is looking for past abuse, and rightly so. I am looking for the financial flows that keep places going now.
And they *are* one and the same, where money is from shapes where it flows.