Mastodon Feed
Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
RadicalAnthro@c.im ("Radical Anthropology") wrote:
'Pettigrew has led a group of nine academic historians identifying all the known investors – about 13,000 of them – who financed Britain’s brutal trafficking of 3.3 million enslaved Africans, of whom about half a million died during the Atlantic crossing....
...
'hardly an event in this period of British history – the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland – wasn’t impacted directly or indirectly by the slave trade. Slave gain funded the physical structures, from docks to canals, that helped make Britain a global force. The conventions of mercantile philanthropy also meant that it greatly improved the lives of the sick and poor, mainly through huge endowments to London’s hospitals. Institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Music were founded with the help of slave traders’ donations. The Royal Society was not only a pioneer institutional investor in the slave trade but developed the racist “science” that perpetuated its inhuman practices.'