The idea that slavery made the modern world is not new, though it seems that every generation has to rediscover that truth anew. Almost a century ago, in 1915, W.E.B Du Bois wrote, "Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God."
How would we calculate the value of what we today would call the intellectual property -- in medicine and other fields -- generated by slavery's suffering? I'm not sure. But a revival of efforts to do so would be a step toward reckoning with slavery's true legacy: our modern world.
TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin's new book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, has just been published.
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Copyright 2014 Greg Grandin
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