This is outrageous! It's unfair!
This is outrageous! It's unfair!
64 comments
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Same with slavery
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No, not really.
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1)The british did not invent slavery.
2)Americans did not adopt it from the british because they had been practising it since they emerged as a nation.
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Sort of to both, but not really.
Slavery has existed for at least as long as states and kingdoms have, yes. But the specific form slavery took in the Americas (not just the US and North America) was unique. That being race-based chattel slavery. That form had not existed anywhere else in the world previously or since. The closest you could claim were the Helots in ancient Sparta, but even that was closer to serfdom than chattel slavery.
So, no, the British did not "invent slavery", but they (along with the Spanish and French) did pioneer a new form of slavery that was uniquely brutal and inhumane.
And while you're correct that America as a nation did not adopt slavery from the British after the formation of the US since the colonials had already been practicing race-based chattel slavery before the US existed. But where did those colonials get that slavery? From the British who were their overlords and ancestors, who formed the colonies, and who created the economic system that relied on race-based chattel slavery.
So while you might be technically right, it's only due to semantics. The Brits absolutely did create virtually everything about the American system of slavery, which we then continued to perpetrate for another ~century after independence.
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But when that happened, the americans were not a group distinct from the british, they were a part of the state that did that, so it is not the case that they adopted slavery from the brits, like it is not the case they adopted english from the brits for example.
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That's just semantics. Sure, I guess the more proper way to say it is that when the Americans founded the US they continued the practice of race-based chattel slavery which the British had instituted in the colonies prior to the formation of the US. Is that really substantively different than saying the Americans adopted slavery from the British?
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Would you say the americans adopted the ebglish language from the british?
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Like I said, while semantically imprecise, yes, we did get the English language from the English.
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Did Northern Ireland adopt the Irish language from Ireland after the treaty then?
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That's a different situation considering the Irish language was created before there even was a united Ireland. We can trace the history of how English came to America, and it came from the English people. We can't trace the history of how the Irish language spread across Ireland because it predates history.
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64 comments