Tweet [1]
… is from page 36 of Phil Magness’s excellent 2020 book, The 1619 Project: A Critique [2] (footnote deleted):
Linking historical capitalism to slavery is more of a political exercise for the present day than a scholarly inquiry into the past, and in fact the most virulent defenders of slavery in the mid-19th century actually presented their cause as an expressly anti-capitalist venture.
DBx: Indeed. The notion that modern capitalism’s material abundance is rooted in slavery is even more whackadoodle [3] than are most notions dreamed up by intellectuals – which is quite an achievement.