We are slowly but sure fed up with the garbage from the insane Francis Kwarteng. Ghanaweb must end publishing the nonsense.
We are slowly but sure fed up with the garbage from the insane Francis Kwarteng. Ghanaweb must end publishing the nonsense.
Amanfo 10 years ago
I don't think anyone is putting gun on your head to read from here or coercing you to do what you don't believe in. You can decides to indulge in your personal illusions or learn something from others. Thank you
I don't think anyone is putting gun on your head to read from here or coercing you to do what you don't believe in. You can decides to indulge in your personal illusions or learn something from others. Thank you
Prof Lungu 10 years ago
Amanfo,
We can tell
....that is an impersonation of the real owner of that moniker.
Most likely by a weaker mind and person with nothing useful to say.
Greetings!
Amanfo,
We can tell
....that is an impersonation of the real owner of that moniker.
Most likely by a weaker mind and person with nothing useful to say.
Greetings!
GORGORDUTOR 10 years ago
ALAKPATOR NEH NYE!! FOLKS THIS IS A COWARDLY IMPOSTOR, WITHOUT THE COURAGE TO POST IN THEIR OWN NAME!!! THE IDEA THAT ANY REGULAR AFICIONADO OF GHANAWEB WILL FALL FOR THIS IDIOTIC GAMBIT CAN ONLY BE THE PRODUCT OF AN INFANTIL ... read full comment
ALAKPATOR NEH NYE!! FOLKS THIS IS A COWARDLY IMPOSTOR, WITHOUT THE COURAGE TO POST IN THEIR OWN NAME!!! THE IDEA THAT ANY REGULAR AFICIONADO OF GHANAWEB WILL FALL FOR THIS IDIOTIC GAMBIT CAN ONLY BE THE PRODUCT OF AN INFANTILE MIND WITH AN AXE TO GRIND!!! THIS IS NOT CY- ANDY-K
francis kwarteng 10 years ago
(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The ... read full comment
(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The exploitation of black people for free labor made the South the richest and most politically powerful region in the country. British demand for American cotton made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era, boasting the single largest concentration of the nation’s millionaires.
But slavery was a national enterprise. Many firms on Wall Street such as JPMorgan Chase, New York Life and now-defunct Lehman Brothers made fortunes from investing in the slave trade the most profitable economic activity in New York’s 350 year history. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one of the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.
According to Harper’s magazine (November 2000), the United States stole an estimated $100 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6 percent.
2) ENGLAND
Between 1761 and 1808, British traders hauled 1,428,000 African captives across the Atlantic and pocketed $96.5 million – about $13 billion in value today – from selling them as slaves.
From 1500 to 1860, by very modest estimations, around 12 million Africans were traded into slavery in the Americas. In British vessels alone, 3.25 million Africans were shipped. These voyages were often very profitable. For instance, in the 17th century, the Royal Africa Company could buy an enslaved African with trade goods worth $5 and sell that person in the Americas for $32, making an average net profit of 38 percent per voyage.
Slave-owning planters and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain, but many other British citizens benefited from the human trafficking industry.
Profits from slavery were used to endow All Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library; to build a score of banks, including the Bank of London and Barclays; and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first efficient steam engine.
As the primary catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade provided factory owners who dealt in textiles, iron, glass and gun-making a mega-market in West Africa, where their goods were traded for slaves. Birmingham had over 4,000 gun-makers, with 100,000 guns a year going to slave-traders. The boom in manufacturing provided many jobs for ordinary people in Britain who, in addition to working in factories, could be employed to build roads and bridges, and in whaling, mining, etc.
3) FRANCE
With over 1,600,000 enslaved Africans transported to the West Indies, France was clearly a major player in the trade. Its slave ports were a major contributor to the country’s economic advancements in the 18th century. Many of its cities on the west coast, such as Nantes, Lorient, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, built their wealth through the major profits of triangular slave trade.
Between 1738 and 1745, from Nantes, France’s leading slave port, 55,000 slaves were taken to the New World in 180 ships. From 1713 to 1775, nearly 800 vessels in the slave trade sailed from Nantes.
By the late 1780s, French Saint Domingue, which is modern-day Haiti, became the richest and most prosperous colony in the West Indies, cementing its status as a vital port in the Americas for goods and products flowing to and from France and Europe.
The income and taxes from slave-based sugar production became a major source of the French national budget. Each year over 600 vessels visited the ports of Haiti to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers.
4) NETHERLANDS
The Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of Dutch merchants, was established in 1621 as a monopoly over the African slave trade to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.
WIC had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, but one-fourth of Africans transported across the Atlantic by the company were moved in slave ships from Amsterdam. Almost all of the money that financed slave plantations in Suriname and the Antilles came from bankers in Amsterdam, just as many of the ships used to transport slaves were built there.
Many of the raw materials that were turned into finished goods in Amsterdam, such as sugar and coffee, were grown in the colonies using slave labor and then refined in factories in the Jordaan neighborhood.
Revenue from the goods produced with slave labor funded much of The Netherlands’ golden age in the 17th century, a period renowned for its artistic, literary, scientific, and philosophical achievements.
Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for the Dutch in the form of precious metals, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee and cotton and other goods, and helped to fund the creation of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals and city center.
5) PORTUGAL
Portugal was the first of all European countries to become involved in the Atlantic slave trade. From the 15th to 19th century, the Portuguese exported 4.5 million Africans as slaves to the Americas, making it Europe’s largest trafficker of human beings.
Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Portugal’s colony of Brazil, and sugar was the primary export from 1600 to 1650. Gold and diamond deposits were discovered in Brazil in 1690, which sparked an increase in the importation of African slaves to power this newly profitable market.
The large portion of the Brazilian inland where gold was extracted was known as the Minas Gerais (General Mines). Gold mining in this area became the main economic activity of colonial Brazil during the 18th century. In Portugal, the gold was mainly used to pay for industrialized goods such as textiles and weapons, and to build magnificent baroque monuments like the Convent of Mafra.
6) SPAIN
Starting in 1492, Spain was the first European country to colonize the New World, where they established an economic monopoly in the territories of Florida and other parts of North America, Mexico, Trinidad, Cuba and other Caribbean islands. The native populations of these colonies were mostly dying from disease or enslavement, so the Spanish were forced to increasingly rely on African slave labor to run their colonies.
The money generated from these settlements created great wealth for the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties throughout Spain’s hold on the area. But it also attracted Spain’s European rivals, prompting Spanish rulers to spend the riches from the Americas to fuel successive European wars.
Spanish treasure fleets were used to protect the cargo transported across the Atlantic Ocean. The ships’ cargo included lumber, manufactured goods, various metal resources and expensive luxury goods including silver, gold, gems, pearls, spices, sugar, tobacco leaf and silk.
Port cities in Spain flourished. Seville, which had a royal monopoly on New World trade, was transformed from a provincial port into a major city and political center. Since the Spanish colonists were not yet producing their own staples such as wine, oil, flour, arms and leather, and had large financial reserves to pay for them, prices in Castile and Andalusia rose sharply as traders bought up goods to ship out.
Prices of oil, wine and wheat tripled between 1511 and 1539. The great vineyards of Jerez, the olive groves of Jaén, and the arms and leather industry of Toledo were established on their present scale during these years.
(b) Title: “15 MAJOR CORPORATIONS YOU NEVER KNEW BENEFITTED FROM SLAVERY” (Visit the websites of Occupy Wall Street and Black Atlantic Star for more information)
The enslavement of African people in the Americas by the nations and peoples of Western Europe, created the economic engine that funded modern capitalism. Therefore it comes as no surprise that most of the major corporations that were founded by Western European and American merchants prior to roughly 100 years ago, benefited directly from slavery.
Lehman Brothers, whose business empire started in the slave trade, recently admitted their part in the business of slavery. According to the Sun Times, the financial services firm acknowledged recently that its founding partners owned not one, but several enslaved Africans during the Civil War era and that, “in all likelihood,” it “profited significantly” from slavery. “This is a sad part of our heritage …We’re deeply apologetic … It was a terrible thing … There’s no one sitting in the United States in the year 2005, hopefully, who would ever, in a million years, defend the practice,” said Joe Polizzotto, general counsel of Lehman Brothers.
Aetna, Inc., the United States’ largest health insurer, apologized for selling policies in the 1850s that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when the enslaved Africans they owned died. “Aetna has long acknowledged that for several years shortly after its founding in 1853 that the company may have insured the lives of slaves,” said Aetna spokesman Fred Laberge in 2002. “We express our deep regret over any participation at all in this deplorable practice.”
JPMorgan Chase recently admitted their company’s links to slavery. “Today, we are reporting that this research found that, between 1831 and 1865, two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans,” the company wrote in a statement.
New York Life Insurance Company is the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States. They also took part in slavery by selling insurance policies on enslaved Africans. According to USA Today, evidence of 10 more New York Life slave policies comes from an 1847 account book kept by the company’s Natchez, Miss. agent, W.A. Britton. The book, part of a collection at Louisiana State University, contains Britton’s notes on slave policies he wrote for amounts ranging from $375 to $600. A 1906 history of New York Life says 339 of the company’s first 1,000 policies were written on the lives of slaves.
USA Today reported that Wachovia Corporation (now owned by Wells Fargo) has apologized for its ties to slavery after disclosing that two of its historical predecessors owned enslaved Africans and accepted them as payment. “On behalf of Wachovia Corporation, I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent,” said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and chief executive officer, in the statement released late Wednesday. “We are deeply saddened by these findings.”
N M Rothschild & Sons Bank in London was linked to slavery. The company that was one of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies. Documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed that Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking family’s 19th-century patriarch, made his first personal gains by using enslaved Africans as collateral in dealings with a slave owner.
Norfolk Southern also has a history in the slave trade. The Mobile & Girard Company, which is now part of Norfolk Southern, offered slaveholders $180 ($3,379 today) apiece for enslaved Africans they would rent to the railroad for one year, according to the records. The Central of Georgia, another company aligned with Norfolk Southern Line today, valued its slaves at $31,303 ($663,033 today) on record.
USA Today has found that their own parent company, E.W. Scripps and Gannett, has had links to the slave trade.
There is evidence that FleetBoston evolved from an earlier financial institution, Providence Bank, founded by John Brown who was a slave trader and owned ships used to transport enslaved Africans. The bank financed Brown’s slave voyages and profited from them. Brown even reportedly helped charter what became Brown University.
CSX used slave labor to construct portions of some U.S. rail lines under the political and legal system that was in place more than a century ago. Two enslaved Africans who the company rented were identified as John Henry and Reuben. The record states, “they were to be returned clothed when they arrived to work for the company.” Individual enslaved Africans cost up to $200 – the equivalent of $3,800 today - to rent for a season and CSX took full advantage.
The Canadian National Railway Company is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and southern United States. The company also has a history in which it benefited from slavery. The Mobile & Ohio, now part of Canadian National, valued their slaves lost to the war and emancipation at $199,691 on record. That amount is currently worth $2.2 million.
Brown Brothers Harriman is the oldest and largest private investment bank and securities firm in the United States, founded in 1818. USA Today found that the New York merchant bank of James and William Brown, currently known as Brown Bros. Harriman owned hundreds of enslaved Africans and financed the cotton economy by lending millions to southern planters, merchants and cotton brokers.
Brooks Brothers, the high end suit retailer got their start selling slave clothing to various slave traders back in the 1800s. What a way to get rich in the immoral slave industry!
Barclays, the British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom has now conceded that companies it bought over the years may have been involved in the slave trade.
USA Today reported that New York-based AIG completed the purchase of American General Financial Group, a Houston-based insurer that owns U.S. Life Insurance Company. A U.S. Life policy on an enslaved African living in Kentucky was reprinted in a 1935 article about slave insurance in The American Conservationist magazine. AIG says it has “found documentation indicating” U.S. Life insured enslaved Africans.
Amanfo 10 years ago
The rejoinders are nice anyway to counter falsehoods and naked rape of factual facts but, it seems we have been at the defensive for long always waiting for Mr. Baidoo, to write before we countered them with the bare facts. T ... read full comment
The rejoinders are nice anyway to counter falsehoods and naked rape of factual facts but, it seems we have been at the defensive for long always waiting for Mr. Baidoo, to write before we countered them with the bare facts. The truth must be presented no matter how and allow others to produce contrary claim/s. No doubt, others want to win souls for capitalism and justify other weird acts that undermine the existence of another race but, we can't present our cases at the shoulders of what others write. Thank you
MARCUS AMPADU 10 years ago
Imperceptibly, this Can of Worms I Opened debates have reached what economists refer to as the law of diminishing returns - the point where the benefits of inputs start going down.
So whatever Baidoo writes defending c ... read full comment
Imperceptibly, this Can of Worms I Opened debates have reached what economists refer to as the law of diminishing returns - the point where the benefits of inputs start going down.
So whatever Baidoo writes defending capitalism, and Kwarteng's rejoinders defending socialism & mix economy are making less & less impact on Ghana; considering where our nation is headed currently.
Especially, if one takes into account that the majority of Ghanaians would find it difficult to understand what they are writing about.
Prof Lungu 10 years ago
READ: "...By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton(IN THE SOUTH) was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern busin ... read full comment
READ: "...By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton(IN THE SOUTH) was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern business practices (IN THE NORTH), and at the core of its first modern manufacturing industry. As John Brown, a fugitive slave, observed in 1854: "When the price [of cotton] rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going."
WE SAY: Could we say the African slave was harder whipped/driven in America, than the African slave in Brazil, Peru, etc.!
THEN THIS: “...When we apply a global perspective, we develop a new appreciation for the centrality of slavery, in the United States and elsewhere, in the emergence of modern capitalism. We can also understand how that dependence on slavery was eventually overcome later in the 19th century. We come to understand that the ability of European merchants to secure ever-greater quantities of cotton cloth from South Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries was crucial to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as cloth came to be the core commodity exchanged for slaves on the western coast of Africa. We grasp that the rapidly expanding markets for South Asian cloth in Europe and elsewhere motivated Europeans to enter the cotton-manufacturing industry, which had flourished elsewhere in the world for millennia....“And a global perspective allows us to comprehend in new ways how slavery became central to the Industrial Revolution..."
WE SAY: Point well made!
ITEM: For Trans-Atlantic slave traders and owners, and the societies in which they lived, operated, and profited, an African was only as good as a slave. Africans did not have a "soul" or humanity, except when they were raping the African, to the flesh!
We are guessing that is all that Phillip Kobina Baidoo knows as "CONSUMPTION". But, that is an ahistorical mind, Baidoo's.
Fact is, the enslaved and raped African, far from being "consumed", procreated and multiplied, even by the hands and loins of the same Trans-Atlantic Slave Traders, Owners, and Masters.
So, we note again the abject depravity of that language:
Brazil consumed slaves!
Even Peru consumed slave!
America consumed slave!
They must have "CONSUMED SLAVES" like they "CONSUMED COAL", in the mind of Phillip Kobina Baidoo!
"CONSUMPTION", even of slaves, must come real easy for the Libertarian Capitalist from West Africa.
ITEM: WE will say that no dictionary definition of "CONSUMPTION" will ever become acceptable, standard, and/or appropriate for chattel slavery and the degradation of the humanity of the African it accomplished.
We are slowly but sure fed up with the garbage from the insane Francis Kwarteng. Ghanaweb must end publishing the nonsense.
I don't think anyone is putting gun on your head to read from here or coercing you to do what you don't believe in. You can decides to indulge in your personal illusions or learn something from others. Thank you
Amanfo,
We can tell
....that is an impersonation of the real owner of that moniker.
Most likely by a weaker mind and person with nothing useful to say.
Greetings!
ALAKPATOR NEH NYE!! FOLKS THIS IS A COWARDLY IMPOSTOR, WITHOUT THE COURAGE TO POST IN THEIR OWN NAME!!! THE IDEA THAT ANY REGULAR AFICIONADO OF GHANAWEB WILL FALL FOR THIS IDIOTIC GAMBIT CAN ONLY BE THE PRODUCT OF AN INFANTIL ...
read full comment
(a) Title: “TOP 6 COUNTRIES THAT GREW FILTHY RICH FROM ENSLAVING BLACK PEOPLE” (Visit the website of Black Atlantic Star)
1) The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)
Slavery transformed America into an economic power. The ...
read full comment
The rejoinders are nice anyway to counter falsehoods and naked rape of factual facts but, it seems we have been at the defensive for long always waiting for Mr. Baidoo, to write before we countered them with the bare facts. T ...
read full comment
Imperceptibly, this Can of Worms I Opened debates have reached what economists refer to as the law of diminishing returns - the point where the benefits of inputs start going down.
So whatever Baidoo writes defending c ...
read full comment
READ: "...By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew cotton. Raw cotton(IN THE SOUTH) was the most important export of the United States, at the center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern busin ...
read full comment
Dear Prof. Lungu,
Thanks for your insightful inputs.