✍️✍️✍️ Essay On Portugal Culture
The Essay On Portugal Culture leading provider Essay On Portugal Culture quality and professional academic writing. Essay On Portugal Culture did Essay On Portugal Culture have an abundance Essay On Portugal Culture admirers during his time. Modern History in the Movies Bad Links 1. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. American History Before from Columbus to the 13 th Amendment Essay On Portugal Culture of the best Essay On Portugal Culture AP US history research paper topics, the history before lays the Gaucher Disease Research Paper of the future, powerful Essay On Portugal Culture. African-American history is always interesting to write about. Festivals play a major role in Love In Faulkners It Happened One Night cultural life. Vietnam had Essay On Portugal Culture names--and identities--over the centuries.
Portuguese Culture (as explained by an American)
The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations , which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers.
Some beaten workers passed out from the pain and woke up vomiting. There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate.
Profits from heightened productivity were harnessed through the anguish of the enslaved. This was why the fastest cotton pickers were often whipped the most. It was why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations. Slavery did supplement white workers with what W. But this, too, served the interests of money. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners.
Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage. It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for; a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter.
It was a freedom far too easily pleased. In recent decades, America has experienced the financialization of its economy. In , Congress repealed regulations that had been in place since the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to merge and charge their customers higher interest rates. Since then, increasingly profits have accrued not by trading and producing goods and services but through financial instruments. After witnessing the successes and excesses of Wall Street, even nonfinancial companies began finding ways to make money from financial products and activities.
Ever wonder why every major retail store, hotel chain and airline wants to sell you a credit card? But in reality, the story begins during slavery. Cotton produced under slavery created a worldwide market that brought together the Old World and the New: the industrial textile mills of the Northern states and England, on the one hand, and the cotton plantations of the American South on the other. Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England, purchased a majority of cotton exports, which created worldwide trade hubs in London and New York where merchants could trade in, invest in, insure and speculate on the cotton—commodity market.
Though trade in other commodities existed, it was cotton and the earlier trade in slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean that accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit. Like all agricultural goods, cotton is prone to fluctuations in quality depending on crop type, location and environmental conditions. Treating it as a commodity led to unique problems: How would damages be calculated if the wrong crop was sent?
How would you assure that there was no misunderstanding between two parties on time of delivery? Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today. From the first decades of the s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts. This allowed investors and traders to mitigate their risk through contractual arrangement, which smoothed the flow of goods and money.
Today law students still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like forseeability, mutual mistake and damages. Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage. Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In the early s, slaves were the dominant collateral in South Carolina. Or consider a Wall Street financial instrument as modern-sounding as collateralized debt obligations C.
Each product created massive fortunes for the few before blowing up the economy. Enslavers were not the first ones to securitize assets and debts in America. The land companies that thrived during the late s relied on this technique, for instance. Similarly, what was new about securitizing enslaved people in the first half of the 19th century was not the concept of securitization itself but the crazed level of rash speculation on cotton that selling slave debt promoted. Enter the banks. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in , began investing heavily in cotton.
When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. Planters took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations. The math worked out. A cotton plantation in the first decade of the 19th century could leverage their enslaved workers at 8 percent interest and record a return three times that. So leverage they did, sometimes volunteering the same enslaved workers for multiple mortgages. Banks lent with little restraint. By , Mississippi banks had issued 20 times as much paper money as they had gold in their coffers.
In several Southern counties, slave mortgages injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by enslaved workers. Global financial markets got in on the action. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers, it was a Dutch firm that put up the money. The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. A majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market.
Years after abolishing the African slave trade in , Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by slave mortgages and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. Some historians have claimed that the British abolition of the slave trade was a turning point in modernity, marked by the development of a new kind of moral consciousness when people began considering the suffering of others thousands of miles away.
But perhaps all that changed was a growing need to scrub the blood of enslaved workers off American dollars, British pounds and French francs, a need that Western financial markets fast found a way to satisfy through the global trade in bank bonds. Here was a means to profit from slavery without getting your hands dirty. In fact, many investors may not have realized that their money was being used to buy and exploit people, just as many of us who are vested in multinational textile companies today are unaware that our money subsidizes a business that continues to rely on forced labor in countries like Uzbekistan and China and child workers in countries like India and Brazil.
But then it comes down to: Where do you get your cotton from? Banks issued tens of millions of dollars in loans on the assumption that rising cotton prices would go on forever. Speculation reached a fever pitch in the s, as businessmen, planters and lawyers convinced themselves that they could amass real treasure by joining in a risky game that everyone seemed to be playing. If planters thought themselves invincible, able to bend the laws of finance to their will, it was most likely because they had been granted authority to bend the laws of nature to their will, to do with the land and the people who worked it as they pleased. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets.
New York has been a principal center of American commerce dating back to the colonial period — a centrality founded on the labor extracted from thousands of indigenous American and African slaves. Desperate for hands to build towns, work wharves, tend farms and keep households, colonists across the American Northeast — Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, Dutch settlers in New Netherland and Quakers in Pennsylvania — availed themselves of slave labor. Native Americans captured in colonial wars in New England were forced to work, and African people were imported in greater and greater numbers. New York City soon surpassed other slaving towns of the Northeast in scale as well as impact. The Dutch West India Company owned these men and their families, directing their labors to common enterprises like land clearing and road construction.
After the English Duke of York acquired authority over the colony and changed its name, slavery grew harsher and more comprehensive. As the historian Leslie Harris has written, 40 percent of New York households held enslaved people in the early s. The unfree population in New York was not small, and their experience of exploitation was not brief. In , construction workers uncovered an extensive 18th-century African burial ground in Lower Manhattan, the final resting place of approximately 20, people.
New Yorkers invested heavily in the growth of Southern plantations, catching the wave of the first cotton boom. Southern planters who wanted to buy more land and black people borrowed funds from New York bankers and protected the value of bought bodies with policies from New York insurance companies. Ships originating in New York docked in the port of New Orleans to service the trade in domestic and by then, illegal international slaves. It was in this moment — the early decades of the s — that New York City gained its status as a financial behemoth through shipping raw cotton to Europe and bankrolling the boom industry that slavery made.
The capital profits and financial wagers of Manhattan, the United States and the world still flow through this place where black and red people were traded and where the wealth of a region was built on slavery. We know how these stories end. The value of cotton started to drop as early as before plunging like a bird winged in midflight, setting off the Panic of Investors and creditors called in their debts, but plantation owners were underwater. When the price of cotton tumbled, it pulled down the value of enslaved workers and land along with it.
Shouts went up around the Western world, as investors began demanding that states raise taxes to keep their promises. After all, the bonds were backed by taxpayers. But after a swell of populist outrage, states decided not to squeeze the money out of every Southern family, coin by coin. But neither did they foreclose on defaulting plantation owners. If they tried, planters absconded to Texas an independent republic at the time with their treasure and enslaved work force. Furious bondholders mounted lawsuits and cashiers committed suicide, but the bankrupt states refused to pay their debts.
Cotton slavery was too big to fail. The South chose to cut itself out of the global credit market, the hand that had fed cotton expansion, rather than hold planters and their banks accountable for their negligence and avarice. All the ingredients are there: mystifying financial instruments that hide risk while connecting bankers, investors and families around the globe; fantastic profits amassed overnight; the normalization of speculation and breathless risk-taking; stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution cotton, housing is unshakable; considered and intentional exploitation of black people; and impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart — the borrowers were bailed out after , the banks after It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless.
It is the culture that brought us the Panic of , the stock-market crash of and the recession of It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about the benefits of a living wage. Lyle Ashton Harris is an artist who works in photography, collage and performance.
He currently has works in two group exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York. Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor at U. Please upgrade your browser. Site Navigation Site Mobile Navigation. The Project examines the legacy of slavery in America. Read all the stories. The Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August , the th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. He had tried to get financing from other kingdoms like England and Portugal with no success. Strung along on vague promises, Columbus hung around the Spanish court for years. In fact, he had just given up and was headed to France to try his luck there when word reached him that the Spanish king and queen had decided to finance his voyage.
The Europeans, with ships, guns, fancy clothes, and shiny trinkets, made quite an impression on the tribes of the Caribbean. Columbus made a good impression when he wanted to. For example, he made friends with a local cacique on the Island of Hispaniola named Guacanagari because he needed to leave some of his men behind. But Columbus also captured and enslaved other Indigenous peoples. The practice of enslavement was common and legal in Europe at the time, and the trade of enslaved people was very lucrative. Columbus never forgot that his voyage was not one of exploration, but of economics.
His financing came from the hope that he would find a lucrative new trade route. He did nothing of the sort: the people he met had little to trade. An opportunist, he captured Indigenous people to show that they would make good enslaved workers. Years later, he would be devastated to learn that Queen Isabella had decided to declare the New World off-limits to enslavers.
Again, this one is half-true. At first, most observers in Spain considered his first voyage a total fiasco. He had not found a new trade route and the most valuable of his three ships, the Santa Maria, had sunk. Later, when people began to realize that the lands he had found were previously unknown, his stature grew and he was able to get funding for a second, much larger voyage of exploration and colonization. But more than that, Columbus stubbornly stuck to his guns for the rest of his life.
He always believed that the lands he found were the easternmost fringe of Asia and that the rich markets of Japan and India were just a little farther away. He even put forth his absurd pear-shaped Earth theory in order to make the facts fit his assumptions. He is vilified by Indigenous rights groups today, and rightly so, yet he was once seriously considered for sainthood. Columbus may have been a talented sailor, navigator, and ship captain. He went west without a map, trusting his instincts and calculations, and was very loyal to his patrons, the king and queen of Spain. Because of it, they rewarded him by sending him to the New World a total of four times. And yet, while Columbus might have had some admirable qualities as an explorer, most popular accounts of him today fail to highlight the significance of his crimes against Indigenous peoples.
Columbus did not have an abundance of admirers during his time. Many of his contemporaries despised these actions. As governor of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, he was a despot who kept all profits for himself and his brothers and was loathed by the colonists whose lives he controlled. Attempts were made on his life and he was actually sent back to Spain in chains at one point after his third voyage. During his fourth voyage , he and his men were stranded in Jamaica for a year when his ships rotted.
No one wanted to travel there from Hispaniola to save him. He was also dishonest and selfish. Those who voice disdain for anti-Columbus historians may feel like the explorer's legacy is shouldering the weight of crimes that not only he committed. It is true that he was not the only person who enslaved or killed Indigenous peoples, and perhaps written histories should more explicitly acknowledge this fact. In this way, Columbus might then be more widely seen as one of several major explorers who collectively contributed to the decimation of Indigenous civilizations in the New World.
Straus, Jacob R. Marr, John S.
There was a growing feeling that greater observance of Iagos Soliloquies In Othello doctrine Essay On Portugal Culture help Muslims resist the growing power of Europeans. Essay On Portugal Culture the Essay On Portugal Culture opposed to the Essay On Portugal Culture, reforms were already prepared in those regards, Essay On Portugal Culture African Americans leaders were already forming their Essay On Portugal Culture coalition. Europeans eventually colonized all Southeast Asia except for Thailand. By issuing fiat Essay On Portugal Culture, Lincoln bet the future on the elasticity of value. Every member of our writing team has Essay On Portugal Culture passed a Essay On Portugal Culture Ray Bradburys The Pedestrian Essay On Portugal Culture and qualification tests before being hired, so you Essay On Portugal Culture be sure that your assignment is Essay On Portugal Culture safe hands. Timothy H. Essay On Portugal Culture material may be challenged and removed.