On the interpretative plaque for an 1840s building, I’ve just read the sentence ‘sugar was imported from overseas’ which is a great illustration of how you use Heritage to elide some bits of history which should be on the plaque
-
@liamvhogan it's only slavery if it comes from the slavery region of the usa. what you're describing is sparkling servitude
-
Nearly Normal Normreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
I don't think that hair-splitting definitions are helpful at all.
Anyone who hasn't read about Robert Towns, who modestly named the City of Townsville after himself, perhaps should:
Calling "Blackbirding" anything other than slavery is whitewashing.
Rum was not important. Money was.
-
Liam :fnord:replied to Nearly Normal Norm last edited by
@Spoon in one sense the definitions are irrelevant because forced unfree labour is forced unfree labour, but in other senses they’re incredibly important, because in the end the schemes of people like Towns failed—the American ‘peculiar Institution’ remained just that, genuinely different to anywhere else in the world. It was profitable and successful there in a way it never was in Australia.
And my point is that Australian finance markets and growth were absolutely tied into it.
-
There’s a counter-school of Australian history, post Humphrey McQueen, that’s invested in pointing out the aspects of slavery that did exist in the Australian 19th and 20thCs. ‘Blackbirding’ or kidnapping, legal travel restrictions of Aboriginal people and their payment in rations (or nothing), wage theft, again mostly from Aboriginal people, indentured contract labour of Chinese and Indian people. Institutions like boys and girls Homes. Unfree labour has never really disappeared.
And then there was a counter-counter school from the 1990s, the History Wars era, that tried to revise it all back. They’re all invested though in comparing Australian pasts against American ones, as though our past could be scaled in institutions.
-
To me they’re all missing the great big nasty truth about Australian slavery, which was that the moment the little prison colony at the edge of the world made a public choice (in Macquarie’s time) to become more than a squalid British version of Vorkuta, it had to be tied in to networks of capital and trade that could not have existed without enslaved people in the Americas.
-
Why was Australian wool so valuable. Why did Britain have such a huge textiles industry anyway
-
Nearly Normal Normreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan I still think that 'slavery was not the economic success it was in the US' is a better description than 'forced labour was ....etc'.
This is not just semantics.
It wasn't just unfortunate Melanesians.
What would you call the Wave Hill workers (men and women) who went on strike?
What about the thousands of stolen children who were sent to work for the wealthy as a part of a system they really had little notion of.
Let's call it what it is.
Australia is a collonialist, racist society based on slavery.
-
Liam :fnord:replied to Nearly Normal Norm last edited by [email protected]
@Spoon see my later toots. We agree
-
@liamvhogan on a similar note from over here in California https://uncpress.org/book/9781469636061/cattle-colonialism/ colonialism got a lot of reach
-
@puercomal oh that looks super interesting
-
Nearly Normal Normreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
Yes we do agree here.
I think that your most important comments are regarding the English wool and textiles because this shows how global the situation had become.
Blainey is an historian who relies on having his own set of facts and a very large cherry picker.
-
@liamvhogan Separate to the point you are making, your thread encouraged me to do a bit of digging, and I was interested to find that in the early years, the Australian colony got most of its rum from India (Bengal Rum). Not a region that is commonly associated with rum these days! https://blogs.sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/cook/yo-ho-ho-and-45000-gallons-of-rum/index.html