Quakers

Someone told me over the weekend that the Quakers were one of the few religions that don’t have blood on their hands. This came up in a weird conversation at 1am on Saturday at the tail-end of a Jewish wedding where the brother of the bride started talking about the Jews in Europe prior to 1000AD, when things started to slowly slide into institutional racism ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. The Jews, of course, had hands deep into white slavery and a host of horrific shenanigans that created a cultural memory of…blah blah blah. Self-hating Jew stuff.

So then he said, of all the world religions, the only ones who have truly practiced peace from the moment of their founding is the Quakers.

I’d had several vodka tonics, so I decided to speak up for a change — despite this person’s status as a paying client and my lowly status as a salary slave fuckshit.

The term “triangular trade,” in the history books, has come to mean something fairly innocuous these days. It’s really just 19th century economic shenanigans if you gloss over the chapters. Scratch a little bit, and you find a curious connection to the Atlantic slave trade. Even then, the description is saccharine.

The best-known triangular trading system is the transatlantic slave trade, that operated from the late 16th to early 19th centuries, carrying slaves, cash crops, and manufactured goods between West Africa, Caribbean or American colonies and the European colonial powers, with the northern colonies of British North America, especially New England, sometimes taking over the role of Europe.

The use of African slaves was fundamental to growing colonial cash crops, which were exported to Europe. European goods, in turn, were used to purchase African slaves, which were then brought on the sea lane west from Africa to the Americas, the so called middle passage.

A classic example would be the trade of sugar (often in its liquid form, molasses) from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe, etc.

Oh. Sounds quite pleasant!

The actual coinage of the term begins with Abraham Darby. 17th/18th Century fuckhead. You and I know him best as the man who figured out how to use coke instead of charcoal to basically pioneer the entire Industrial Revolution. So he built a zillion forges at Coalbrookdale in the UK and he made a fortune.

Do you know how? He made cauldrons. Like witches have. Then he shipped the cauldrons to Africa on his ever-growing fleet. His men would then trade the cauldrons to tribesmen in exchange for — wait for it — people! Slaves. His ships would then take the slaves to the Americas and sell them for a tremendous profit. They would load up on various Made in America products like sugar and tobacco and return to sell those for an even more enormous profit. At which point, more cauldrons would be loaded onto the ships and taken to Africa.

You don’t read about this when you read about Darby. Not a hint of it. But the man who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution also spearheaded the model for the modern slave trade — that is, getting the slaves for nothing and selling them.

Oh, and, instead of horses, he found it cheaper to use men to haul shit out of the Ironbridge Gorge, along the rivers, to the nearest port. A hundred men per barge, under the whip, dragging cauldrons to the port.Estimated casualty rate? About 40% per trip. These weren’t slaves. These were workers. This is why you hear stories of people throwing wooden shoes into machines and why the 1700’s are marked by various democratic revolutions. It also helps put de Loutherbourg’s somewhat apocalyptic “Coalbrookdale at Night” in perspective. That was painted 50 years later, in more sedate and organized times than when Darby was running around turning the world into hell.

Anyway, you know what I’m going to say, right? Abraham Darby was a Quaker. And his little Quaker community reaped the rewards and helped him become who he was, and supported generations of his family. The Quaker-led slave trade became so remarkably inhuman that, eventually, the Quakers in the US condemned their British cousins and, by the time we enter the 19th Century, they attempt to atone for the sins of their church by leading the abolitionist movement.

Today, the history books applaud the Quakers for the fight against slavery and their general do-goodedness over the last 200 years. Which is kind of like if Hitler survived, moved to the suburbs, saw the error of his ways and tried to do good to make up for it, and then we all said in 1960, yeah. Good guy. He’s alright. He’s done great these last 15 years. I’d let him date my daughter.