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The Empire of Necessity

Metadata

  • Author: [[Greg Grandin]]
  • ASIN: B00EGJ7KX6
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EGJ7KX6
  • Kindle link

Highlights

One of the first things the West African asked Cerreño was if there were any “lands of black people in these seas where they could be taken.” — location: 2803 ^ref-48507

In 1801, Bonaparte sent fourteen generals and twenty thousand troops to the island. Less than three years later, they were gone, vanquished by rebels and disease, and the free republic of Haiti was proclaimed. — location: 2821 ^ref-25849

after declaring independence the new nation’s “leaders made it increasingly clear that the ‘land of liberty’ referred to Haiti and not to France.” — location: 2825 ^ref-58392

In 1786, on the Danish slaver Christiansborg sailing from Africa’s Gold Coast, insurgents dragged Paul Erdmann Isert, who was traveling as a passenger to the Caribbean, to the bow, and slashed his face with a razor, barely missing his temple artery. — location: 2845 ^ref-62440

group of Muslim slaves on a Spanish ship called the San Juan Nepomuceno had managed to complete a voyage nearly as audacious, carrying out perhaps the greatest escape in the history of New World slavery. — location: 2899 ^ref-8244

Even many of the most passionate abolitionists didn’t want to make much of Haiti, fearing defenders of slavery would use the savagery that had been unleashed during its revolution to discredit their cause. “That abominable, contemptible Hayti” was how Harriet Beecher Stowe had a sympathetic character describe the country in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But others, despairing that slavery was growing ever stronger, started to celebrate the revolution and praise its founding father, Toussaint Louverture, declaiming poems, giving speeches, and staging plays honoring his memory.2 Throughout the 1850s, for instance, Frederick Douglass’s newspaper reported on this Toussaint revival, — location: 3145 ^ref-15690

Average (insurance): A loss to a shipment of goods that is less than a total loss … and ultimately comes from the Arabic word awarijah, which means “merchandise damaged by sea water.” — location: 3716 ^ref-29821

the commercialization of society made possible by slavery, and the wealth that came with it, helped democratize these “ennobling traits,” letting more and more people imagine themselves autonomous and free. — location: 4451 ^ref-14676

the large degree to which New World slavery was an anonymous genocide. — location: 4540 ^ref-56335

the quantity of information pales in comparison with the scale of slavery. — location: 4542 ^ref-36331

Of the at least 12,500,000 people taken out of Africa and brought to America, historians have identified only about 100,000 original African names, — location: 4547 ^ref-5792

the continent-wide drive that began with Haiti first to wrest more freedom and then for total freedom was unstoppable. — location: 4602 ^ref-1042

due to the work of the following scholars, it is understood to be not just a central event of that age, but, since insurgents insisted on applying the ideal of freedom to really existing slavery, the central event: — location: 4607 ^ref-11158

Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity”) — location: 4764 ^ref-31618