How Our Modern Way of Life Is Built on a Long Legacy of Slavery
http://www.alternet.org/books/what-modern-world-owes-slavery
***SNIP
Historian Greg Grandin is the author of remarkable -- and highly readable -- books like National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Fordlandia and his most recent work, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. Today, he vividly suggests just how the bodies of slaves became something on which our world was built, zeroing in on one connection that we seldom think about -- the development of modern medicine. —Adam Hochschild
The Bleached Bones of the Dead
What the Modern World Owes Slavery (It’s More Than Back Wages)
By Greg Grandin
Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble -- as many as 300,000 died -- when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been "under the heel of the French" but they "got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.'"
A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.
Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property -- their slaves (that is, themselves) -- or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80% of the government budget was still going to service this debt.
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the tool of devils. Still the reason for wars and death by the hundreds of thousands. Sad what greed for profit has created since money became 'important' to a certain sector of humans that control the earth.
that Robertson can channel both God and Satan. He can quote their exact words. 
The American workplace is patterned after the southern plantation and in some ways also the realities of indentured servitude. Slavery was so much more horrible than indentured servitude. But somehow the lesser horrors of indentured servitude don't get much attention. They should.
I read that in the beginning the indentured servants and the slaves were treated rather similarly in courts of law and then that suddenly, there was a decision that decided the horrible fate of the slaves, depriving them of any rights at all based on their skin color. Has anyone else read that or is it just a fable?
"Slavery was the most extreme, but not the only form of unfree labor in British North America. Many Europeans and some Africans were held as indentured servants. Neither slaves nor indentured servants were free, but there were important differences. Slavery was involuntary and hereditary. Indentured servants made contracts, often an exchange of labor for passage to America. They served for a limited time, commonly seven years, and generally received "freedom dues," often land and clothing, upon finishing their indenture. Although some slaves gained freedom after a limited term, others served for life, and a second generation inherited the slave status of their mothers. Gradually by the 18th century, colonial laws were consolidated into slave codes providing for perpetual, inherited servitude for Africans who were defined as property to be bought and sold.
"In their day-to-day lives, slaves and servants shared similar grievances and frequently formed alliances. Advertisements seeking the return of slaves and servants who had run away together filled colonial newspapers. When a slave named Charles escaped in 1740, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that two white servants, a "Scotch man" and an Englishman, escaped with him. Sometimes interracial alliances involved violence. During Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, slaves and servants took up arms against Native Americans and the colonial government in Virginia. In 1712 New York officials executed Native Americans and African American slaves for plotting a revolt, and in 1741 four whites were executed and seven banished from colonial New York for participating with slaves in a conspiracy. People in similar circumstances-poor and unfree whites, Native Americans, and blacks-formed alliances throughout the colonial era."
Source:
http://americanrevwar.homestead.com/file...
Slavery and indentured servitude were both systems of hierarchical and very authoritarian master/servant relationships (added on edit
within the workplace.
