You've got to be kidding! Who do you think whites bought slaves from? (And haven't you watched the Ten Commandments at least once?) There is STILL slavery in many parts of Africa today
However, as enslaved workers in the sugar, rice and cotton plantations those same blacks produced the wealth and progress that put England and the US where they are today.
Guns, Germs and Steel.
I've yet to see a convincing analysis of this oft repeated proposition. The analyses I have seen usually ignore the fact that the costs of slavery (purchase costs, food, clothing, shelter, security (ie. guards)) were not significantly different in totality to what so called "free" unskilled labourers received in compensation from their masters at that time. In short, slave owners spent enough to provide subsistence living to their slaves, and masters provided about the same to their servants.
That's like crediting the steam engine for the industrial revolution. Important, maybe even crucial, but it didn't invent itself. Cheap/slave labor? If the deceases haven't destroyed the indigenous populations,it would be the descendants of the Lakota kneeling at the the football games.
Irrespective of the monetary costs to slave-owners, the current prosperity and advanced economies of the America's — and much of the UK — was built by the hands and on the backs of black slaves. A coerced low-cost labour force imported to worke where there was no other — like the labour camps of the Nazis. And, as you say, that depended on the wholesale theft and expropriation of the lands of the original populations.
While all of this is quite silly I’m sure you are aware that the slave states were/are the poorest - clearly building the US on the back of Slavery didn’t work very well.
I didn't say that it wasn't built on the backs of low paid workers. I am suggesting that fact doesn't give anyone a reparations claim (which is why people advance the "built on the backs of slaves" argument). If there had been no slaves in the new world, there would have been low paid so-called free workers. They would have been paid about as much as it cost to own slaves, and would have lived about as well as slaves (except they would have had to find their own crappy food, clothing, medical care, and shelter - as opposed to slaves who received crappy food, clothing, medical care and shelter from their owners) - although they could choose which plantation owner they wanted to work for, or which country they wanted to be poor in. The American economy would have developed the same way, and American wealth would be distributed the same way it is today. In short, slavery had little to nothing to do with it.
It's true that technologies were shared more rapidly between East and West and vice versa due to geography, and cultures in these regions had the good fortune of animal species that could be domesticated. Much of Africa and none of the New World had the benefit of this positive feedback loop.
Got you where you are to day, in spite of being stupid enough to fight a hugely bloody war over the right to keep slaves in their crappy shacks behind those great big expensive mansions.
I don't think you can call it a blessing to the native population, the genocide is quite possibly the biggest one ever.
No it's just racist. His premise is based on cultural development of democratic systems and industrialized society, not on the race like he claims.
Didn’t take you long to abandon your argument that American success was built on the backs of slaves....
The uncomfortable question is, list all the large black populations in the world that are economically successful?
