Plantation wealth fused the commercial bourgeoisie with the state

Evidence

These assertions of Merivale, Marx, and McDonald, and the political economy of Williams’s analysis can be buttressed in a myriad of ways. One writer indicates that quite early “England’s colonies had begun to pay off, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, of a population about five and a half million it is estimated that about fifty thousand were at sea.” Moreover, the wealth of the plantations drew together the commercial bourgeoisie and the state, implicating them in behaviors and institutions entirely dependent on the existence of slavery and long-distance trade. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 573

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s Interest topic of ‘small acts of decorum toward corpses mattering more than practical logic’—here, the practical logic of slavery driving state institutions.