Prisoner of Mother England. It is derogatory or self-deprecating depending on your view. Might have originally applied to British prisoners exiled to Aussie land.
When everybody is in a jocular mood, this is what you call your bud from the UK.
There is great ugliness behind us. It's appropriate to look back now and again, even if we don't like what we see, if only to remind ourselves which way we ought to be going. We need moral purpose more than myth-making. .....
Yes.
What could be useful is a collective vision that all adhere to voluntarily and with enthusiasm. What could be useful is a recognition that some problems are tough — structural unemployment, deep substance abuse problems, social breakdown, community insecurity — and will not be resolved overnight with slogans or vacuous finger-pointing.
It is also probably a good idea to avoid the kind of self-loathing historical resentment that keeps places like Bolivia perpetually backwards. Note to the Aymara: Spanish colonialism occurred over half a millennia ago. Get over it! Grow up! Seize the day! Para la gente, por el pueblo.
Take British soldiers. They are tough little ________. You would think that given history, these mostly folks of working class origin would want to have nothing to do with the British Crown or state. Well, guess what? Fast forward a hundred years or so and these soldiers love being POMEs. Just ask the Argentinians.
On a similar theme, check out the contemporary success of the British Commonwealth which, with the exception of Great Britain, consists entirely of former colonies, mostly populated by non-white, non-Europeans.
careful there mate, pretty dangerous lingo you're throwing about.
and yes, I totally agree. The trick is getting everyone to sign onto that collective vision yet at the same time making it so resilient and open that it can tolerate a maximum of individual liberty... kind of a squaring the circle kind of exercise..
There is great ugliness behind us. It's appropriate to look back now and again, even if we don't like what we see, if only to remind ourselves which way we ought to be going. We need moral purpose more than myth-making. .....
Yes.
What could be useful is a collective vision that all adhere to voluntarily and with enthusiasm. What could be useful is a recognition that some problems are tough — structural unemployment, deep substance abuse problems, social breakdown, community insecurity — and will not be resolved overnight with slogans or vacuous finger-pointing.
It is also probably a good idea to avoid the kind of self-loathing historical resentment that keeps places like Bolivia perpetually backwards. Note to the Aymara: Spanish colonialism occurred over half a millennia ago. Get over it! Grow up! Seize the day! Para la gente, por el pueblo.
Take British soldiers. They are tough little ________. You would think that given history, these mostly folks of working class origin would want to have nothing to do with the British Crown or state. Well, guess what? Fast forward a hundred years or so and these soldiers love being POMEs. Just ask the Argentinians.
On a similar theme, check out the contemporary success of the British Commonwealth which, with the exception of Great Britain, consists entirely of former colonies, mostly populated by non-white, non-Europeans.
Here we have an established hater of the USA putting this country down over the use of slavery in its early days. Yet the hater in question ignores his own heritage and thus his country's involvement in the slave trading industry during this time. This is a little bit more than throwing rocks in a glass house. To use a sports metaphor ... this is like the crack dealer blaming the user for being in the business of selling crack. They were only supplying a demand for their product ...
So in the interest of defending my country and its founding in the context of the times of the founding, I took on the hater (that no one else here will)* who ignores their own faults on the subject at hand and is thus out of line on this one. While commenting on the current state of affairs of race relations is fair, denigrating this country over its history of slavery while ignoring his own country's history in the same story is out of bounds, imho.
The faults of long-dead Dutch slavers are not the faults of RP, just as the faults of long-dead slave owners aren't the faults of their descendants. Or you.
Our ancestors were not cartoon villains or plaster saints, they were complex, conflicted people struggling to make their ways thru difficult times. They got it wrong in their personal lives even as they got it right in politics or philosophy or law. Or at least as right as the times would allow.
There is great ugliness behind us. It's appropriate to look back now and again, even if we don't like what we see, if only to remind ourselves which way we ought to be going. We need moral purpose more than myth-making.
Historically ignorant. Not clean hands (and a nasty colonial legacy to boot) but nothing like "the bulk" of the slave trade. And the original story is paywalled, but the story of John Jay and slavery is...complicated. Ultimately he played a big part in the abolition of slavery in New York.
Numbers from those days are not as precise as today.
But my point is this:
Here we have an established hater of the USA putting this country down over the use of slavery in its early days. Yet the hater in question ignores his own heritage and thus his country's involvement in the slave trading industry during this time. This is a little bit more than throwing rocks in a glass house. To use a sports metaphor ... this is like the crack dealer blaming the user for being in the business of selling crack. They were only supplying a demand for their product ...
So in the interest of defending my country and its founding in the context of the times of the founding, I took on the hater (that no one else here will) who ignores their own faults on the subject at hand and is thus out of line on this one. While commenting on the current state of affairs of race relations is fair, denigrating this country over its history of slavery while ignoring his own country's history in the same story is out of bounds, imho.
Holland has more shame in this than the USA. While it was legal to engage in the slave trade, it was illegal to have slaves in Holland at the same time. It's OK if we sell them but not if we use them ourselves. Oh, but it's ok if we use them in our colonies. That kind of thing.
Here is some more recent history about Holland trying to live down its own heritage in the biz at hand.
Over the course of the more than 200 years that The Netherlands was involved in the slave trade and the use of slavery in its colonies, historians estimate that more than 500,000 people worked as slaves in the Dutch colonies. Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for the Dutch in the form of precious metals, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee, and cotton.
The Dutch West India Company (WIC), a chartered company of Dutch merchants, was established in 1621 as a trade monopoly with control over the African slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The company had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, among which Amsterdam served an important role as the largest financier. One fourth of the Africans transported across the Atlantic by the WIC were moved in slave ships from Amsterdam.
Following the 1634 capture of Brazil from the Portuguese, The Netherlands became an active player in the transatlantic slave trade. In The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, P.C. Emmer argues that the Dutch played a significant role in the development of slavery during the 17th century partly because of their use of slaves, but also critically because of their promotion of sugar plantations. The labor-intensive harvesting of sugar created an urgent need for slave labor, particularly in the French and English colonies of the Caribbean.
Dr. Leo Balai, a historian and author of the book Slave Ship De Leusden, stresses the importance of Amsterdam in advancing the slave trade, particularly after it became a co-owner of Suriname in 1682. The city of Amsterdam, together with the WIC and the van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family, formed the Society of Suriname to run the country’s plantations, bringing increasing numbers of slaves to work there. The WIC also used the nearby island of Curacao as a place from which to sell slaves to other colonies.
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 of Amsterdam. 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. Yet the direct and indirect links between that lauded epoch and the concurrent use of slavery in Dutch colonies are rarely discussed. While profits made from coffee, sugar, wheat, and other goods helped to fund the creation of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals and city center, there is little representation of that past in the city today, apart from a few plaques that mark the houses of former slave owners.
The lack of visual representation of the Dutch slavery past in conjunction with the lack of adequate education on the topic in Dutch schools results in limited awareness and interest in the issue among a majority of Dutch people today. For instance, Balai’s research into the fate of slaves aboard the ship De Leusden highlights a tragic event and huge loss of life of which few Dutch people are aware. The sinking of De Leusden serves, in Balai’s words, as “horrific proof of how the slaves were seen as cargo or cattle rather than as humans.” In 1738 the Amsterdam-owned De Luesden began to sink in the Marowijne River in Suriname. Of the 716 slaves on board, only 16 survived after members of the crew ordered the slaves below deck and nailed the escape hatches shut before abandoning the sinking ship. De Leusden was one of the last Dutch ships to transport slaves after the WIC lost its prominent position in the slave trade in 1713.
and the big one ... seems they have an even bigger problem dealing with their past issues with slavery than does the USA ...
In discussing the Dutch slavery past, Dr. Cain brings up what he calls the “three D’s”: denial, demands, and distance. Denial typifies how the white Dutch community looks at the slavery history. Ignorance of the past coupled with a lack of interest leads to this group’s generally harsh and often racist views towards the Dutch black community. Demands for justice, reparations, remembrance, and acknowledgement of the past characterize the Dutch Surinamese population. The descendants of Surinamese slaves identify strongly with their past and work diligently to promote awareness in The Netherlands in order to achieve greater acknowledgement from the white Dutch community about the role their ancestors played in the shared slavery history.
Location: Really deep in the heart of South California Gender:
Posted:
Nov 29, 2021 - 4:41pm
westslope wrote:
"In the end, Washington and his fellow founders would push the hard decisions about slavery off onto future generations of Americansâwith explosive consequences."
Gentle folk: I am enjoying the lessons in American history here. Thanks!
If I may, there is nothing to be ashamed about here. The only possible cause for 'shame' would be to ignore, revise or deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent this history.
One small request. Please do not project your understanding of white American slavery of Black Africans and any possible moral outrage on institutions of slavery among North American aboriginals or traditional societies in West Africa.
It is the structure and practice of that slavery that is important to understand and is very different from NA perceptions of slavery.
While I was travelling in Africa, Mauritania officially outlawed slavery. Never got to Mauritania but from what I know of the Sahel and West Africa in general, I would fully expect similar slave-like relationships to persist to this day.
I do not have a serious problem with any of this compared to let's say the US supported demographic flooding of the Western Sahara by Moroccan immigrants.
Those darn Quakers and their rules. Washington didn't actually have to send his slaves back to Mt. Vernon... they just had to cross the Delaware into NJ to restart the clock.
And you thought he only came to NJ to fight with Hessians.
"In the end, Washington and his fellow founders would push the hard decisions about slavery off onto future generations of Americansâwith explosive consequences."
Gentle folk: I am enjoying the lessons in American history here. Thanks!
If I may, there is nothing to be ashamed about here. The only possible cause for 'shame' would be to ignore, revise or deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent this history.
One small request. Please do not project your understanding of white American slavery of Black Africans and any possible moral outrage on institutions of slavery among North American aboriginals or traditional societies in West Africa.
"In the end, Washington and his fellow founders would push the hard decisions about slavery off onto future generations of Americansâwith explosive consequences."
Gentle folk: I am enjoying the lessons in American history here. Thanks!
If I may, there is nothing to be ashamed about here. The only possible cause for 'shame' would be to ignore, revise or deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent this history.
One small request. Please do not project your understanding of white American slavery of Black Africans and any possible moral outrage on institutions of slavery among North American aboriginals or traditional societies in West Africa.
I believe (100% could be wrong) George Washington took slave(s) with him to New York, sending them back to Mount Vernon every 6 months to reset that clock.
Slavery was still not entirely repealed in the state, because the new law offered an exception, allowing nonresidents to enter New York with slaves for up to nine months, and allowing part-time residents to bring their slaves into the state temporarily. Though few took advantage of it, the "nine-months law" remained on the books until its repeal in 1841, when slavery had become the focus of sectional rivalry and the North was re-defining itself as the "free" region.
I believe (100% could be wrong) George Washington took slave(s) with him to New York, sending them back to Mount Vernon every 6 months to reset that clock.
Not clean hands (and a nasty colonial legacy to boot) but nothing like "the bulk" of the slave trade.
And the original story is paywalled, but the story of John Jay and slavery is...complicated. Ultimately he played a big part in the abolition of slavery in New York.
Slavery was still not entirely repealed in the state, because the new law offered an exception, allowing nonresidents to enter New York with slaves for up to nine months, and allowing part-time residents to bring their slaves into the state temporarily. Though few took advantage of it, the "nine-months law" remained on the books until its repeal in 1841, when slavery had become the focus of sectional rivalry and the North was re-defining itself as the "free" region.
The state's slaveholders had seen the writing on the wall after 1785. And part of their response was to sell their slaves south while they still could. As early as the 1780s, after commissions and insurance costs, an able-bodied New York slave could be sold south for a profit of at least �40. Owners avoided the ban on the slave trade by disguising purchases as long-term leases or indentures (one importer brought a "free" black over from New Jersey under a 99-year "indenture"). Free blacks were victimized, too, sold into slavery for debt or under terms of fraudulent contracts or apprenticeships. The New York Manumission Society rescued 33 blacks from such schemes in 1796 alone; uncounted others certainly slipped past their vigilance.
In "A History of Negro Slavery in New York" (1966), Edgar J. McManus writes that an analysis of census figures shows an extremely sharp drop in the growth rate of New York's black population after 1800. Many blacks must have left the state, he writes, and few left voluntarily. "The conclusion is inescapable," McManus writes, "that the exodus was largely the work of kidnapers and illegal traders who dealt in human misery."
As it did elsewhere in the North, freedom in New York, even with the right to vote, opened up a new set of hardships for blacks. Organized pressure from white workers drove them from the skilled and semi-skilled positions they had filled under slavery. Working class mobs harassed them in riots large and small, the largest of the period being the one in July 1834 in New York City that leveled hundreds of black homes.
Blacks voted in New York, and though they were too few to be a political power on their own, they tended to remember the aristocrats who had been the chief backers of emancipation, and they backed the party of Jay and Hamilton. In certain close races, their block votes were credited with victories for the Federalists. This earned them the enmity of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, which made a political issue of the black vote and attempted to discredit the Federalists by marrying them, in the public mind, to the most vicious racist stereotypes of blacks.
As the Federalists faded in the War of 1812, the Democratic-Republicans moved to shut out the black voters. In 1815, they pushed a bill through the legislature that required blacks to get special passes to vote in state elections. Then in 1821 the Democratic-Republicans successfully sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that, while it entirely abolished the property qualification for white voters, raised it for blacks from $100 to $250 — the cost of a modest house in those days. The caste system foreseen with fear by the men of 1785 had come into effect, even without legal sanction.
Not clean hands (and a nasty colonial legacy to boot) but nothing like "the bulk" of the slave trade.
And the original story is paywalled, but the story of John Jay and slavery is...complicated. Ultimately he played a big part in the abolition of slavery in New York.
