| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
A fantastic and superbly-written book about the only successful slave revolt in history that shows just what Blacks can do given the right circumstances and leadership.
This book that gets right to the heart of why Whites approved of African slavery for 500 years. Without the guilt and shame of a typical White historian this is an eidetic view of the challenges posed by White supremacy - then and now; exposing the real reasons for the abolition of racial slavery: Free trade is more profitable than mercantilism since one can then sell to the highest bidder and not just ones own government. As well as the fact the British government’s jealousy of the French making more money than they at the traffic in human misery that the possession of India meant the British need no longer indulge in.
Humanitarianism is absent from this account since a humanitarian country would obviously never have become involved in racial slavery in the first place. The book then comes to the obvious conclusion that White history books simply lie about the ethical role of Whites in the emancipation of African slaves.
What makes this book so readable is the precision with which the writer effectively skewers White politics as quintessentially White supremacist with humor, wit and irony.
The mixture of fear and envy Whites have for the exotic is stressed here through their repeated claim that anything foreign is inferior while being embraced to fund the English (17th century) and French (18th century) revolutions. A supreme irony of history is that both these bids for freedom and statements of the inalienable rights of Man were made possible by a bourgeoisie made rich from African slavery. The moral contradictions of White culture today stem from such institutions as the writer here makes many links between the past and the present.
That the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself never simultaneously abolished the various European empires and the White racism that drove them on is a telling legacy that remains with us to this very day.
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