P. 20 The growing territoriality of slavery within the United States gave new meaning to the possibility of slaveholder real estate accumulation. In the early United States, the largest landmass expansion occurred through the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the sixe of the United States by incorporating 828,000 square miles… made possible by European finance. Bonds totallyin $15 million to finance the Louisiana Purchase were issued to the United States by the British merchant bank Barings Bank and the Amsterdam Hope and Company. Thomas Jefferson, president during the acquisition, wrote that the Louisiana Puchase would enable ‘the future spread of our descendants’ with a population that would double or triple the size of the United States. He envisioned the future US as a white racial ethno-state and was committed to Black removal and replacement… For him, Louisiana offered a place to experiment with his vision of Black territorial diffusion – to move enslaved people across the United State to decrease Black population density and therefore the possibility of Black revolution against slaveholders, something he was fearful of in the midst of the Haitian Revolution.”
p. 21 The expansion of US slavery itself was driven in part by the British industrial demand for commodities produced through slavery… By 1841, slavery-produced cotton accounted for 10% of British manufacturing.”
p. 26 Karl Marx thought of immigrating to Texas in 1846, believing that settler access to land pressed “inevitably on to communism”. He also saw the 1846 passage of tariff reduction policies between Britain and the US as momentous, serving as the ‘guiding star’ that heralded the arrival of the millennium. For Marx, these laws heightened the contraditions within capitalism… the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, the US proslavery Walker Tariff, which reduced cotton taxes, and trhe equalization of sugar duties through the British Sugar Duties Act.”
p. 31 Gesturing towards decreased imports between 1844 and 1846, characterized by low sugar yields, the Liverpool sugar refiners Macfie and Sons wrote to Prime Minister Peel that it was “perfectly evident that erelong the refineries will be forced to reduce their workings for want of raw material, unless new sources of supply are opened up”. Here “new sources of supply” served as a euphemism for ex[anded access to sugar produced through slavery in Cuba and Brazil.”
p. 32 “The free trade fundamentalism of Cobden and Hume would prioritise free trade in relation to the demands of slaveholders. Their free trade fundamentalism had a twofold anti-Black character: anti-Black once in perpetuation of slavery and anti-Black again in the ascription of failure to Black freedom in the British Caribeean when freedpeople did not produce sugar in quantities equal to enslaved people in Cuba and Brazil. “
“Emancipation across the British Empire enabled the deepening and extension of colonial capitalist power. In Cape Town, compensation for indebted slaveholders was travsferred to merchants who put these funds into the wool economy. These transformation were simultaneous within an increasingly integrated global economy dominated by the British Empire as linked to US settler slavery.”
p. 35 “While textiles manufactured from cotton produced by enslaved people in the US were exported to Calcutta, along with other Indian cities, to be sold throughout colonial India, raw materials produced in colonial India and imported to the United States included jute and indigo… Jute gunny sacks… were used in the southern plntations economy primarily as cotton bagging but also in some instances as provisions for enslaved people as blankets and clothing.”
p. 52 “Yet until Black emancipation in the United States, Carolina rice dominated England’s market. In general, it met the highest demand, sold in the highest volumes, and commanded the highest prices ,, not the principal staple of English households… In an 1863 survey of working-class households, the surveryor noted that rice was most commonly consumed in winter ‘to supply the place of vegetables’ and that small quanitities were consumed in 58% of cases.”
p. 57 Caroline rice production rested not only upon the labor of enslaved people but also on the knowledge of enslaved cultivators … Black knowledhe and skill about rice cultivation emerged through the African diaspora and pathways that tied the rice-rpoducing South Caroline and Georgia Low Country practices to West African rive production in Upper Guinea… rive planters were often absent, leaving their plntations for up to six-month periods beginning in spring or early summer out of fear of disease and retuning in November after rice harvesting.”
p. 58 “By 1823, the first shipment of rough rice (known as unmilled or paddy rice) was exported from the US to Britain. … By 1850, that transformation was nearly complete, as most rice exported from the the US was paddy rice… One South Carolina rice plabnter noted that continued dependency on slave labor for rice millling would have made it impossible to produce and “prepare for market anything like the number of barrels now produced”.
p. 78 Finnie attempted to introduce the ‘American system’ of cotton cultivation in the North-West Provinces along the Yamuna River, first in Kotra Makrandpur and later in Afra… refettled in southeastern India, where he struggled to grow cotton in Tiruneveli from 1845 until he ultimately left India in 1849 … “The only difference between a Collie and a Negro is this:: the first we can make work out of our sight y operating on his fears, but the latter we must persuade and drive together which answers very well as long as we are present, but has no effect as soon as our acks are turned… a reminder that in some form, psycholpogical terror has always accompanied the whip.”
p. 87 “Visions of slave revolts destroying capitalism and bringing on famine in England reflected deep anxieties about textile mills’ dependence upon US slavery. These ansieties were bound to the perception that the British Empire was incapable of an equivalent system for cotton cultivation. The image of the factory as the apex of social, civilisational and racial development gave way to anxiety over the fragile foundations and convulsive dynamics upon which the factory rested.”
p.89 “By 1859, India formed one third of the total export market for cotton goods and over one quarter of the cotton yarns export market. Within India, the North West Provinces were regarded as trhe most significant outlet for Manchester foods. A circuit of global capital began with the US slave plantations, continued to Lancashire textile factories, and concluded in the North_Western Procinved. The circuit depended simultaneously upon the differential exploitation of Black labor and factor workers and upon what Irfan Habib has called the “colonization of the Indian economy”.
p.95 “individual manufacturing interests in England regarded investment in cotton cultivation outside of the American South as the truly suicidal option. Dependence upon the sale of Manchester foods to India and competition with Indian weaves caused Manchester’s capitalists to exp[ress concern over the competitive advantage India’s handloom industry would gain if cotton were widely cultivated in India, given high carriage costs… what would prevent consumers… from simply purchasing Indian manufacture instead”.
p. 103 “what better proof can you have than that when in the year 1861, when British India exported to the UK alone, at a distance of thousands of miles, more than 3,000,000 cwt of rice … the North West Provinces lost a quarter of a million of lives and immense property by famine…. the economy thrived through the ideological pursuit of free markets that ran through rather than against death from starvation and enslavement.”
p. 133 “This hatred of Surat cotton became tangled with perceptions of the dishonesty of colonial Indian peasant cotton growers and a belieg in their failure to meet the obligations that they as colonial subjects must bear in suporting metropolitan Britain.”
p. 147 Amid the textile industry crisis, white setllers and settling interests examined Queensland and charter a course far removed from that of India’s Nothr-Western Provinces, positing the expanded colonization of Queensland as a solution to capitalist crisis. Many white settlers looked especially towards expanded white settlement through the movement of unemployed English textile workers to the colony. Economic disruptions could be navigated through a reordering of colonial and racial relations and the systematic importation of labor – especially white labour – from England, Scotland and the US to Queensland… Settlers opposed the immigration of Chinese and South Asian labor not on economic but on racial grounds. Factory owners … preferring insyead to constrain and restrict the movemebt of unemployed laborers in order to keep factory wages low… Queensland imagined to be like Louisiana in its capacity to cultivate sugar and rice… Queensland… a site of extreme violence in the constitution of global capitalism… In 1859, Queensland comprised roughly 30,000 settlers and possibly more than 100,000 Aboriginal people… Settlement predicated on a belief that Aboriginal people would not do the work of empire but would instead be dispossessed, a belieg that was informed by white settler interprestations of Aboriginal death in NSW and Tasmania and by knowledge about demographic death in the Americas… Queensland settlers unleashed unmediated colonial violence uncontrolled by Sydney or London.”
p. 155 “WHile Queensland’s planmtations would eventually employ Chinese labor displaced from the gold fields of NSW and Victoria, the basis of the early Queensland plantation system would become rooted in South Sea Island labor, laborers who would at times be described as “South Sea Island coolies” as a way to understand the position of such laborers within an emerging plntation regume.. Such racist descriptions were part of logic defined by the hierarchical organisation of the settler colonial economic order for white planter advancement. Yet the advocacy for the expansion of the plantation system would also be challenged by another white settler interest concerned with making Queensland into acolony that would better white European lives through the transformation of Queensland into a white man’s and white-only settler colony.”
p. 219 What Du Bois characterized as the ‘upheaval of humanity’ that characterized emancipation and Reconstruction … Central to this struggle were freedpeople’s efforts to provide for themselves and their families rather than work for masters, especially in anything that approached the conditions of slavery, and movement to cities was central to this struggle. African American refusal to labor within a plantation system characteriwsed by gang labor ultimately informed the emergence of sharecropping.”
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