4 ms·

Tortuous History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa

52 points by Thevet 11y ago

jMyles 11y ago
The middle passage is one of the most awful things anyone can say about humans. Another, sadly, is the current state of the US prison system. I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally. > except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted The drug war and prison state aren't metaphorical continuations of slavery, but the literal legal legacy.
- taphangum 11y ago
  Can't upvote enough. It's sad that more people aren't aware of this.
  - bruant 11y ago
    Absolutely. Free will and ability to differentiate right from wrong are way overrated.
    - shiven 11y ago
      And who decides what is right and what is wrong in each and every case? Is their judgement never wrong? In what percent of cases is it wrong? Have your ever been wrongly convicted of something? Would you think or say the same things if you were?
- joshuapants 11y ago
  The US prison system (and, in conjunction, the justice system as a whole) is appalling by developed-country standards and in need of reform, but I don't think it even ranks on the list of "most awful things anyone can say about humans."
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally. I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past. Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be literal slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other parts of the world. We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily basis[2]. [0] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html [1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs-of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison. [2] https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-realize-made-by-prisoners https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-re...
  - hobbyjogger 11y ago
    Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems, equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S. through the Civil War--is senseless. You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people and shipping them to another continent to live in chains. It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough, "genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.
- bruant 11y ago
  Agreed. We need more funding, research, and articles that remind us about the middle passage and how it relates to the drug war and the current state of the U.S. prison system. I for one, completely fail to see a relevant relationship.
bruant 11y ago
Even more "sad" is the current state of Mozambique.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bruant 11y ago
I think the important thing to remember here - especially for gentrified 21st century software engineers - is that to fully own your guilt for slavery in the Americas, you must first ignore the history of slavery in Africa itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
- historylesson 11y ago
  It is rather sad you have been downvoted, but alas in these PC days, not surprising. You are of course right, the audience here, of all places, should seek further education, and whilst pointing out the horrors of slavery, should not take the simplified modernistic version of suited Westerners sailing over, grabbing a boat load of locals and sailing them back for work. It was and is far more complicated than that. There is a reason it was called the 'Slave Trade' for a reason - the locals were more than happy to sell their bretheren. That is probably the saddest point of it all. Well, sadest is that slavery still exists in most of the world, and yet we seem to consider it a relic from the past.
  - benbreen 11y ago
    No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in pre-colonial Africa. But there's an enormous difference between pre-colonial slavery and the system that began to emerge under the Portuguese, Spanish, and English in the 16th century - both in terms of sheer numbers, and (in many cases) in terms of the severity of conditions for slaves. It's analogous to constantly pointing out that Roman iron forges created air pollution in the 2nd century CE whenever people talk about 20th century environmental issues. I don't disagree that the general public should be educated about the multi-sited nature of slavery of course; as an historian of this period I just wanted to point out that the people who actually study and teach this stuff are not trying to portray it as a solely European phenomenon. However it is inarguably the case that the early modern European empires were responsible for upgrading both the scale and severity of a pre-existing slave system. Anyway, to add something substantive here, I figured I'd link to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which is (from my point of view at least) one of the most significant achievements in historical scholarship in the last few decades: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

52 points by Thevet 11y ago

The middle passage is one of the most awful things anyone can say about humans. Another, sadly, is the current state of the US prison system. I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally. > except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted The drug war and prison state aren't metaphorical continuations of slavery, but the literal legal legacy.

taphangum 11y ago
Can't upvote enough. It's sad that more people aren't aware of this.
- bruant 11y ago
  Absolutely. Free will and ability to differentiate right from wrong are way overrated.
  - shiven 11y ago
    And who decides what is right and what is wrong in each and every case? Is their judgement never wrong? In what percent of cases is it wrong? Have your ever been wrongly convicted of something? Would you think or say the same things if you were?
joshuapants 11y ago
The US prison system (and, in conjunction, the justice system as a whole) is appalling by developed-country standards and in need of reform, but I don't think it even ranks on the list of "most awful things anyone can say about humans."
chimeracoder 11y ago
> I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally. I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past. Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be literal slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other parts of the world. We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily basis[2]. [0] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html [1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs-of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison. [2] https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-realize-made-by-prisoners https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-re...
- hobbyjogger 11y ago
  Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems, equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S. through the Civil War--is senseless. You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people and shipping them to another continent to live in chains. It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough, "genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.
bruant 11y ago
Agreed. We need more funding, research, and articles that remind us about the middle passage and how it relates to the drug war and the current state of the U.S. prison system. I for one, completely fail to see a relevant relationship.

bruant 11y ago

Even more "sad" is the current state of Mozambique.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bruant 11y ago

I think the important thing to remember here - especially for gentrified 21st century software engineers - is that to fully own your guilt for slavery in the Americas, you must first ignore the history of slavery in Africa itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

historylesson 11y ago
It is rather sad you have been downvoted, but alas in these PC days, not surprising. You are of course right, the audience here, of all places, should seek further education, and whilst pointing out the horrors of slavery, should not take the simplified modernistic version of suited Westerners sailing over, grabbing a boat load of locals and sailing them back for work. It was and is far more complicated than that. There is a reason it was called the 'Slave Trade' for a reason - the locals were more than happy to sell their bretheren. That is probably the saddest point of it all. Well, sadest is that slavery still exists in most of the world, and yet we seem to consider it a relic from the past.
- benbreen 11y ago
  No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in pre-colonial Africa. But there's an enormous difference between pre-colonial slavery and the system that began to emerge under the Portuguese, Spanish, and English in the 16th century - both in terms of sheer numbers, and (in many cases) in terms of the severity of conditions for slaves. It's analogous to constantly pointing out that Roman iron forges created air pollution in the 2nd century CE whenever people talk about 20th century environmental issues. I don't disagree that the general public should be educated about the multi-sited nature of slavery of course; as an historian of this period I just wanted to point out that the people who actually study and teach this stuff are not trying to portray it as a solely European phenomenon. However it is inarguably the case that the early modern European empires were responsible for upgrading both the scale and severity of a pre-existing slave system. Anyway, to add something substantive here, I figured I'd link to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which is (from my point of view at least) one of the most significant achievements in historical scholarship in the last few decades: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces