The Black Experience
The ‘Great’ British Empire expanded through the continuation of the institutionalised aristocratic system, now being applied extraordinarily, and aggressively, void of any semblance of morality to African people. The Slavery production model drove exponential growth for Britain, beginning with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, continually evolving right through to post-colonial times.
People of African descent became the new economic engine for European expansion and multi-generational wealth creation. Systematically transitioning over the centuries. Continually being reinforced under the white supremacy lie and the duplicity of Christianity. Religion, can’t be denied, as one of the greatest instruments of white supremacy manipulation and control in the history of civilisation. Religion remains one of the greatest pillar architects of inequality structures and systems of injustice, that has become the enduring experience for Black people in the universe.
Consequently, economics remains at the core of this 400+ years experience. The entire wealth creation system, in the context of the Caribbean Slave Plantation system and colonialism, was created to leverage and maximise land wealth. By systematically extracting natural and human resources from plantation-based economies in the Caribbean to facilitate global commerce for the enrichment of Europeans.
Barbados, for example, was the first society anywhere in the world to be built and sustained entirely upon the enslavement of Africans. There were no alternative systems of economic development in Barbados during that period in history, the system was ruthlessly enforced by the ‘The Barbados Slave Code.’ The hierarchical slave code was authored and enforced by plantation owners (aristocrats), firmly backed and facilitated through legislation and policy by the British state. Therefore, imperialism, the slave trade, plantation slave economy, and colonialism, the entire construct, could never have been successful without the express support and facilitation of the state.
The system of “Triangular Trade” as it was known — between Africa (slaves’ resource), Caribbean, US, and Brazil (plantations…raw resources), Europe (industrial activity, trade, and commerce, wealth creation), was the economic engine of European expansion around the world.
“The West is rich because it took resources from other parts of the world. And the top earners in all nations accumulated their fortunes by extracting it from the productive labor of workers within their own countries (and by forcing “free trade” agreements that used the market competition to suppress wages on increasingly global labor markets).” Brewer
The mass divergence between wealth and poverty in relation to Black populations experiences, is over 400-years in the making! The history and understanding of the awesomeness of that, requires a knowledgeable weaponised mindset to begin overriding that reality, overcoming, and moving forward with confidence toward closing the Black wealth gap.
It’s time to flip the script…write our own story!
The proven path forward
Now that we know the true story; how can that knowledge be used to influence our mindset and change our future economic and social experiences, in the context of Black (Caribbean) economic growth?
How we organise, manage, and control the socioeconomic forces in our space and time, bending the region’s opportunity and prosperity curve upwards, will be a determining factor. How we organise, leverage, produce and execute in the quantum, will contribute to the trajectory! And how we maximise the utility of advanced technologies to leapfrog onto the global production scene, will determine our prosperity curve experience in the future!
If we can create and control our own economics…from resource extraction, processing, manufacturing…sales/marketing, digital commerce, entrenching ourselves into the global supply chain? We can achieve a long-term sustainable export economy and increase our wealth? As demonstrated by the British aristocrats, control, skilled and efficient management of economic ecosystems allows for enormous socioeconomic achievement.
Economics is not a morality play, so, we must not get emotionally caught up when thinking about the complete lack of morality in the British system/model. We just take what we need to help in building our own engineered model, to our own benefit. As we do not have to behave like the British, for example, to become successful ourselves.
Focus instead on the key takeaways — power, control, execution of your own resources and leveraging them to prosperity for your own people!
Riding the Wealth Curve
Wealth is derived from productive capacity in any natural ecosystem and rises or falls based on the arranged forces of those in control of it. The levering and weaponising of the productivity information complex, also allows for the maximisation of technology for efficiency, utilisation, for higher profitability. Those who can position themselves effectively, utilising resources, particularly technology, can continuously transfer production capacity within their own ecosystem. Conversely, poverty is simultaneously created for those systematically shut-out of that same system.
The disadvantaged people must figure out how to create advantages for themselves. The system is not just going to hand it over. It must be taken. If we scientifically understand how wealth is created in a historical context…can we not build concrete intelligent economic information systems and business models to successfully engineer and execute through? Science must remain at the forefront of effective and sustainable solutions, recognising the inherent value of being in full control of ones’ own economics.
For Caribbean populations, the future of a sustained economic development existence will come from the effective utility of leveraged resources. Underwritten by complex information systems and Artificial Intelligence technologies, more specifically.
The newly emerging playbook is applying intelligence to create exponential value to advance a society.
Wealth creation is first driven by mindset, which is a choice, and so too is the chosen growth trajectory a society decides upon; none of which is an inevitability nor predetermined.
Historically, the future wealth of any nation is directly correlated to its productivity gains, derived through technology investments that drive efficiency and innovation.
Therefore, decisions matter, and the critical decision facing the Caribbean today, is one of acceptance and adaptation to the prevailing new economy reality. A reality whereby the more resilient economies of the world are the ones that have become strategic and increasingly diverse and digital.
“Since slavery until now, black people have been engineered into a political and social underclass, which is worsening decade by decade.” John Thomas.
It is time to engineer ourselves out and into prosperity. We, therefore, need to build that road map with attainable milestones and the necessary measurement tools to help determine whether we are making the necessary progress.
NOW Grenada is not responsible for the opinions, statements or media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report.
without denying the horror of slavery, part of the overview is waaay oversimplified. there are countries/nations that did not exploit slave trade, more over they were conquered or enslaved for centuries, yet in the 21st century they are prosperous: Finland, Norway, South Korea, some small european nations, or Singapore, etc etc.
the colonial empires rise and fall, romans, mongols, turks, british, dutch and spanish, etc etc.
Some countries are more complex cases, look at China, India and Russia (listed alphabetically), had own serfs/slaves and deeply tragical histories.
Very insightful perceptive that has been and continue to be missing in our education and everyday discourse and is consequently blinding us from the realities we face as people, locally and globally.
The lack of such perspective contributes to too many of us not acting in our own self-interest, making us deliberate or inadvertent agents for others who don’t believe in practicing truth, correctness, and justice.
Until enough Native Grenadians or Black People as whole understand the sociopolitical construct that has been established to work against us since chattel slavery, we will to continue to cooperated and work willing or inadvertently with our enemies to inflict maximum, ongoing harm/mistreatment and subordination on ourselves and people for generations to come.
I must again ask Perry Douglas to do a better job educating himself about global economic history.
In the 19th century, Great Britain became — for a time — the leading economy in the world. But it was not because of slavery in its Caribbean colonies.
Great Britain became the leading economy in the world because British technicians and engineers perfected machinery, notably the steam engine and the power loom, that launched an Industrial Revolution.
British industry, particularly its textile factories, became the most efficient and the most productive factories in the world, and British manufacturing exports made Britain increasingly prosperous.
So it was the ingenuity of British engineering that was the most important factor in Britain’s wealth creation, and its rise to Super Power status in the 19th century. Slavery had nothing to do with this.
The european colonial system were immoral and still is since for example BVI is an non democratic colony. But there is no correlation between the possesion of colonies and wealth. Switzerland for example never had a colony. The nordic countris never capitalized on colonies. Britain would be a firts world country even if they never colonized any part of the world. Compare the two equal size islands Barbados and Iceland.
Iceland went from being a “fishing vllage” to a banking center mainly due to the education and leadership of its women. In my opinion education is key and, even though there is great pride in the fact, the Grenadian dialect hinders communication, it’s not just an accent, which is very pretty, it’s the dialect and it’s not helpful. Pick a language that the world speaks and learn it, now you can communicate on a level field. Every Grenadian that I know who can speak, excels. Then there is the culture of “pay” and advancement. Grenadians are harsher to Grenadians than anyone else.
The Icelanders also has an accent when they are speaking english. Their own language is only understood in Iceland. I would say that the english speaking part of the caribbean has an advantage compared to most parts of the world when it comes to language.