brewster wrote:Bravo Okee!!! An actual thought provoking, coherent, on topic post! I'm not sure I agree with everything, the idea of slaveholders holding the moral High Ground over mercantile industrialists is a bit far-fetched, but it's interesting. Now, the OP, what if Jeff had won? What course would the whole cultural/economic clusterfuck between the North & South have taken? As you lay it out the choice for Jeff is between being the colony of Britain or the North. If you're a agrarian economy beyond subsistence productivity you need a market.
Oh, and yes you should be able to discuss Bismarck and Hindenburg without Hitler.
I said the same shit in my first response,
Okeefenokee wrote:there's a part about industrialization that hamilton and jefferson knew that strangely got left out of this narrative you're pushing, and that's that 18th century industrialization wasn't profitable without the exploitation of sources of raw materials. did we forget about that whole thing where european industrial powers would create colonies, and then squeeze them for resources by force?
hamilton and jefferson were baseball players in 1787, looking around and noticing that all the other players were juicing. hamilton says the US should start juicing too in order to compete. jefferson says, yeah let's not behave like the people we just rebelled against, and for whom we were the same sort of blood vassals that we will have to create for ourselves if we want to be like them.
I didn't bring up one fucking thing new that I didn't bring up in my first response. It simply took you this long to wake up to it.
And fuck you. I never came close to arguing for any moral high ground for slave holders. I simply reminded you that when these debates were going on, the people in them knew that slavery was a thing, and would be a factor in what would be to come.
If we were to have a debate about the morality of enslaving others versus quasi enslaving your own, I would say both are repugnant, but it has to be worse to subject your own people to what you will later call abominable to do to others. and that is exactly what 18th century industrialism meant.
The cultural and ethnic realities ended with the realization that the best people to subject to these schemes were your own. Who better to force to buy the things that your culture wants than member of your own culture? You make teapots, but the natives give zero fucks about your tea. You can implement a scheme to make the natives love tea, or you can jettison that shit and simply make your own tea lovers into colonists. That was 18th century colonialism. Offshore your own people, and then force them to buy the shit your culture normally buys from you at a jacked up price. Top that off with getting them to produce the stuff that makes that shit, and use your military to prevent them from ever making a dime for their efforts.
It's slavery of your own people. Not five minutes after we launched a rebellion against it, hamilton is calling for us to join the club. Jefferson says, nah we got other options, and the war starts.
That's it. There's nothing else to it. Hamilton wanted to make slaves of his own people, and jefferson wanted to make slaves of others. that was the entirety of their differences. both plans relied on the enslavement of others to be productive, but is was hamilton who wanted those slaves to be his own people.
the fucking absurdity of all of this is that what we have now is jeffersonian. who are the slaves we exploit now for the cheap labor and materials we need to make this work? southeast asians. the welfare state of the sons of former slaves at home is propped up with the policies of the people who did the same to their ancestors by doing so to those without. same as it ever fucking was.
