The sugar economy in São Tomé and Príncipe was critical to the construction of a modern world built on Black bondage. As Cruz put it, it’s the “first time that you have slaves who were enslaved Africans. It’s the beginning of the concept of slaves being Black,” though slavery itself is an age-old practice.
The Arab slave trade had been plundering south of the Sahara for 500 years by this point.
Sigh
It wasn’t that they were black, but because they were available, could stand the conditions and were not Christians.
“A modern world built on black bondage”
That’s the self serving fantasy.
Slavery is depraved and disgusting, but, alas, has been part and parcel of humanity since pretty much day one. And still is in much of the world.
As a white man today, I exploit slavery (let’s not get too pedantic about the nature of it) in the form of cheap goods made in various third world shiteholes that have little to no practical concerns for how they treat their people.
But so does “EVERYBODY else.
Just tell them to get royally fucked when they demand “reparations”.
Unless and until this is done, this nauseating faux outrage and grotesque self adopted moral superiority will continue.
The Portuguese settled the island with convicts expelled from the Iberian peninsula, an uncertain number of Jewish children taken from their families
Which is the usual pattern ( apart from the Jewish children which even for 15thC Port. sounds odd ). Convicts first who all die and then slaves who are far hardier.
The Iberians were weird about Jews. Threw them out, lots of forced conversions. And any who reneged on the conversion burnt at the stake. As some were – and the accusations of having reneged were commonplace out of spite, or even commercial competition. Sephardi, if they became rich enough, might move to Holland with its religious toleration. Or the reason there was a big Ladino speaking (roughly, and not accurately, the Jewish version of Spanish, as with Yiddish and German) population in the Balkans in the 1930s – the Sultan had religious toleration. Then the Nazis came, of course.
I charge my smartphone using Black bondage.
Very handy.
The Arab slave trade had been plundering south of the Sahara for 500 years by this point.
Africans were merrily enslaving each other before that and indeed continue to do so today.
It’s the Graun tho, isn’t it? Contributors are either lying shits, thick shits, or thick lying shits.
Wow, you live and learn. I thought Ladino was the argot spoken by the Italian restaurant and coffee shop workers in Sarf Lundun, innit…
‘“São Tomé became an island of experimentation,” said Maria Nazaré de Ceita, a São Toméan university professor…’
Panic over, love. We’ve moved all the really fun experiments to London these days.
“… critical to the construction of a modern world built on Black bondage. “
There is no value in raw materials, the value is in producing a good using the raw materials and perceived to be of value by, and desirable to, consumers.
It was that production know-how, the paid labour, and capital that built the modern World, without which no amount of slaves picking crops would have been created. The industrial Revolution didn’t start (in Britain) due to the availability of slaves overseas.
In any case the modern World was not built on sugar, tobacco and cotton – the three slave crops.
I prefer bondage in classic hemp. Thradhithion and all that..
That modern black cotton stuff is for amateurs.
In any case the modern World was not built on sugar, tobacco and cotton – the three slave crops.
Cotton was pretty important to the British ind rev but then of course ours came from India, where slavery was a very ancient tradition and rather complex geographically.
Studies of ancient DNA show that modest movements of blacks to North Africa – presumably as slaves or soldiers – had gone on for centuries but that there was then a huge acceleration in the phenomenon.
By fluke, presumably, it happened shortly after the Arab Moslem conquest. Funny that. Anyway, it’s the explanation of why the modern Egyptians have more subSaharan ancestry than the ancient Egyptians.
What about the chromosomes? The Arabs liked to castrate the male slaves so that subSaharan y-chromosomes rarely show up from that period. Did the ancients do likewise? I don’t know.
Dearieme
Yeah but this “sub Saharan” DNA, is it Sudanese ? Ethiopian or West African ?
Castration may depend on the origin of the slaves and who the slavers were.
@Otto: from memory, the DNA in question in the first para would have been West African because the paper discussed the routes that the slaves had to march.
For the Egyptian point, I dare say Sudanese and Ethiopian would show up a fair bit. Hell wasn’t there a Nubian dynasty that ruled ancient Egypt at one time? And yet yer ancient Gyppos remained pretty white (in the sense of like Near Easterners).
Addendum: the internet reports ‘Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim, in 1990, wrote that “The Egyptians were not Nubians, and the original Nubians were not black. Nubia gradually became black because black peoples migrated northward out of Central Africa”.’ But how did she know that “the original Nubians were not black” and anyway were they the ones who provided pharaohs? Oh well, you can’t win them all.