M. Meeropol points out that the southern planter class were the wealthiest Colonials pre-revolution. AFAIK, the fortunes of the great families of England dwarfed those of the southern planters much as the southern planters originally dwarfed the northern merchants and manufacturers. It's typical of the incredible arrogance and hypocrisy of the British ruling classes that they would profit from the exploitation of slaves by the southern planters and yet also look down on those same planters as an inferior class of "drivers of negroes." It seems quite likely that if these upstarts defied the British lion, it would retaliate if it could by destroying the rebels, slave holdings and all, even without abolishing slavery. In other words, the Southerners may have had good reason to regard their colonial masters as enemies of THEIR slaveholding "liberty" even if the British did not actually abolish slavery itself as an institution throughout the Empire. After the abolition of slavery in Britain, when the cotton gin, the steamboat, and railroads made Southern cotton "king" in the textile manufacturing hubs of the world, the British happily consumed Southern cotton by the shipload, slavery be damned.
Surely it goes without saying that whether or not you classify U.S. southern chattel slavery as capitalist or feudal, the slave system throve up to the Civil War as part of a capitalist, not a feudal "world system"-and is it therefore excessively naive to suppose that the allegedly "feudal" or "precapitalist"--or somehow Arcadian and "agrarian" likes of Washington, Jefferson, or Madison--had some inkling of the new developing capitalist (dare one say it) world system, or knew that maintaining and extending THEIR "liberties" included a conscious rejection of colonial rule as a threat to those liberties; in other words, to slavery as they knew it? By 1860, the industrialists of Europe and the developing capitalist North of the US were gladly eating from the hands of the planting class, who would have been completely subjugated to British interests if the Revolution had not succeeded. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#8428): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8428 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82563203/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
