Nineteenth-century consumers of coffee and cotton were complicit in slavery

Evidence

Every trader who carries on commerce with those countries, from the great house which lends its name and funds to support the credit of the American Bank, down to the Birmingham merchant who makes a shipment of shackles to Cuba or the coast of Africa, is in his own way an upholder of slavery: and I do not see how any consumer who drinks coffee or wears cotton can escape from the same sweeping charge. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 570

Categorization

• CANDY: Merivale’s mid-century formulation anticipates modern ‘everyday complicity’ arguments about supply chains nearly two centuries early.
• XREF: connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766