European capital financed American slavery decades after abolition

Evidence

Global financial markets had powered the slave economy for years. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers in 1796 to build Monticello, it was a Dutch firm that put up most of the money. The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. Most of the credit that powered the sectors of the American economy based on the labor of enslaved Black people came from the London money market. Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by mortgages on enslaved workers and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 563

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing vs. deviation thesis: European (and by extension American) economic development was internally wired to slavery, not a peripheral Southern anomaly.
• SEED: Angle: the 1796 Dutch mortgage on Monticello and Baring Brothers financing the Louisiana Purchase show early-American ‘globalization’ was built on human collateral — a lens on how financial innovation and slavery co-evolved.
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone interested in financial history or Jefferson scholarship: the Monticello mortgage was Dutch money.