New England’s liquor industry depended on the slave trade

Evidence

In 1713, England won the Assiento, the privilege of supplying captives to all those Spanish American colonies, allowing it to soon become the eighteenth century’s greatest slave-trader, following in the footsteps of France, Holland, and the pioneers in Portugal. New England had become the main entryway into the colonies for European and Caribbean goods. Ships setting out from the colonies, mostly from Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, carried the food that fed the British Caribbean’s planters, overseers, and laborers. Ships returned hauling sugar, rum, captives, and molasses, all supplying New England’s largest manufacturing industry before the American Revolution—liquor. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Economic self-interest underwriting slave policy — exactly the materialist driver in Kendi’s causal inversion (policy from self-interest, ideas as cover). — connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766