I was in a discussion group the other day OK, it was a book club, which is more of a "wine and food" club, because, well, you get the idea.
We got onto the topic of the American Indians and the conquering of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans. The matter of smallpox was brought up and the question was asked: "We gave them smallpox, what did they give us?"
My answer: "Tobacco and syphilis." Seems I was right, too.
So here's a question to think about: Without the cultivation of tobacco, would there have been a need for importing huge number of slaves?
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Saturday, January 18, 2014
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It took a lot of slaves to pick cotton, too, but one could conceivably get free workers to do that. Tobacco, no...tobacco cultivation in a pre-mechanical age was the most hellish work one could imagine.
ReplyDeletePlenty slaves were imported to the New World for sugar and cotton production. Cotton is a better fibre for clothes than hemp and flax, while cane sugar was without real competition till the Continental blockade motivated a Frenchman to look into sugar beets in the very early 19th century.
ReplyDeleteYeah, cotton. Until the cotton gin came along, picking cotton and getting the seeds out was horrible work.
ReplyDeleteorigin and antiquity of syphilis revisited...
ReplyDelete"Abstract
For nearly 500 years, scholars have argued about the origin and antiquity of syphilis. Did Columbus bring the disease from the New World to the Old World? Or did syphilis exist in the Old World before 1493? Here, we evaluate all 54 published reports of pre-Columbian, Old World treponemal disease using a standardized, systematic approach. The certainty of diagnosis and dating of each case is considered, and novel information pertinent to the dating of these cases, including radiocarbon dates, is presented. Among the reports, we did not find a single case of Old World treponemal disease that has both a certain diagnosis and a secure pre-Columbian date. We also demonstrate that many of the reports use nonspecific indicators to diagnose treponemal disease, do not provide adequate information about the methods used to date specimens, and do not include high-quality photographs of the lesions of interest. Thus, despite an increasing number of published reports of pre-Columbian treponemal infection, it appears that solid evidence supporting an Old World origin for the disease remains absent.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22101689
For those talking about cotton and slavery, cotton was not a major crop in the United States until after the importation of slaves had been banned by the Constitution, due to lack of a cotton gin capable of handling large amounts of cotton prior to that time. The vast majority of the original African slaves were imported as labor for tobacco plantations. So EBM's question is a good one.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that if not for the tobacco farmers, there would not have been the large number of slaves in the US at the time of independence, and thus cotton plantations would have had to go to a sharecropping system sooner than they did. Tobacco was definitely a game changer in more ways than one.
Deadstick is right. And my mother-in-law informs me that in the 1940's and 50's they were still doing all the nasty work by hand. She got off that farm the minute she could.
ReplyDeleteJoe, they're still doing a lot of the nasty work by hand. And a lot of the new brown slave class are children.
ReplyDelete