16 ms·
The sugar industry was also the main driver of the African slave trade. When you have strong selection bias against morally principled people joining an industr
by tlb 10y ago
The sugar industry was also the main driver of the African slave trade. When you have strong selection bias against morally principled people joining an industry (as there must have been in, say, 1850) it's hard for an industry to ever recover a moral compass.
- r_smart 10y agoMaybe you have a lot of information that I don't (I'm hardly an expert here), but describing it as the main driver seems like a stretch. In the Caribbean, I can see your statement being true. But in the US, as I understand it, it was more general agriculture / cotton. And so far as I know, a huge proportion of slaves were sold into the Middle East, and I assume they didn't have a huge sugar trade there.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]