tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post2937131677448646360..comments2024-03-28T18:32:05.933-04:00Comments on bensozia: Pondering the 1619 ProjectJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-67554186404176038122020-01-04T09:14:01.612-05:002020-01-04T09:14:01.612-05:00Regardless of whether our white ancestors believed...Regardless of whether our white ancestors believed in their heart of hearts that slavery was wrong, the wealth of the American colonies was built on the forced labor of kidnapped Africans and their descendents, from the underwriters of the Triangle Trade in Massachusetts to the factory farms of South Carolina. Miss Grimkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16627845964264696871noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-12005783873512790512020-01-02T19:30:32.753-05:002020-01-02T19:30:32.753-05:00Oh yes, the Enlightenment was certainly a profound...Oh yes, the Enlightenment was certainly a profound and radical event. I would even say it was in many ways very positive--why would I not, being myself a rootless cosmopolitan semi-rationalist and unbeliever? The Enlightenment created the world where I can be something other than a Hasid. I'm not sure I would say the American Revolution was so radically, radically new or Enlightenment, though; it was, and certainly began, in many ways as a traditional, medieval-style rights-and-privileges, defend-the-charters tax revolt--one that, in important ways, was against Parliament rather than the Crown. In other ways, it was a continuation of traditions that went back to the Roundhead radicalism of the 17th century. For a lot of participants, the evidence I've seen indicates the relevant models were Magna Carta, the Dutch Revolt, and the Glorious Revolution.<br /><br />I would also note that, judging from Wills' Inventing America, the relevant Enlightenment writers were a lot of guys like Francis Hutcheson whom nobody reads anymore--not the Continental authors who are famous now, like Beccaria or Rousseau or even Montesquieu. It may be that Wills has been superseded, however.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14456987412710878404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-45517177887436006612020-01-02T18:21:17.335-05:002020-01-02T18:21:17.335-05:00It is true that I am attached to my belief that th...It is true that I am attached to my belief that the Enlightenment was a profound and radical event. I have lost many of my first historical attachments but after 45 years of pondering the question I have ended up believing that one even more strongly. I have, however, given up my belief that the Enlightenment was entirely a good thing; I would now say that it had many bad effects. I am still on the whole a fan, but I see the price more clearly. Ditto democracy, which I think has been in some circumstances actively pernicious. For example, it may have delayed the end of slavery in the US.<br /><br />I have been very impressed by the evidence that sugar planters, just like the Virginia elite, saw themselves as old-fashioned aristocrats rather than capitalists. They spent their fortunes marrying into the old elites and building big country houses in the home country and so on. I suppose you are right that in fact they were capitalists on a grand scale. They, however, did not agree. And I was impressed in reading up for this post by the fact that in the British slavery debates the old, landed aristocrats mostly allied with the sugar planters to block abolition, while the shippers and manufacturers leaned for it. There seems to have been a major difference of some kind -- style? Culture? between those families that went for tradition and those that opted for modernity and reform. All of the active members of the Lunar Society were anti-slavery. I think this is important but I concede that in business terms the sugar planters were working with the shippers and the mill owners, not the wheat growers.Johnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-84301307370253752242020-01-02T16:57:45.706-05:002020-01-02T16:57:45.706-05:00I agree entirely about the 1619 project. I rememb...I agree entirely about the 1619 project. I remember when I first read about it, I thought, "Hoo boy, I know what this is going to be." I've ignored it since, but everything you say bears out my expectation. In fact I've been disappointed in virtually all those NYT "projects," although "Disunion," about the Civil War, had some good essays in it.<br /><br />That said, it seems to me your critique is a bit more ideological--or, let's say, not as disinterested--as you claim. For example, your devotion to the idea that the American Revolution was a radical break with the past seems more than merely intellectual. Would that not be fair? This is not to prejudice the question of how radical the revolution was, which I'd be happy to debate, but which is separate from how personally, vs. purely academically, one is devoted to one side or the other. Clearly I find the revolution a lot less radical than you, in that I find it very much in harmony with pre-Enlightenment, even medieval, trends in European history, as well as Enlightenment ones. (Of course, there's surely a personal element in my approach too; I *like* thinking that the medieval people I study were cussed and rebellious and not too impressed by majesty from way back and deep inside.)<br /><br />I also think New World slavery, especially after about 1660, has more of the uniquely capitalist in it than you warrant. Sugar especially was a big business of a type and on a scale not much seen before, with elaborate systems of capital investment and insurance, creation of markets (by means of spreading abroad the idea of baking with sugar, for example), and a need to constantly feed in production materials--ie, slaves--given the death rates in both transport and usage in the New World, that all seem new to me. There was indeed something wannabe aristo about New World plantation builders, most famously about the great Virginia families, as both Morgan and Fisher show. But if a capitalist like Josiah Wedgwood was on the abolitionist side of the debate, the sugar growers and slave traders were surely capitalists on the other. I'm no socialist--I love my comfortable bourgeois life and its plentiful cookies and donuts--but there's more to the idea that New World slavery represents an epoch-making marker in the history of capitalism than you allow.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14456987412710878404noreply@blogger.com