ABSTRACT
A world market for sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea and cotton enlarged the demand for enslaved labor in the American World through most of the nineteenth century. That monstrous trade in the millions was founded on the aggressive appetites of capital and the institutional authority of the nation-states that enforced the laws that it required. The expanding and profitable colonies became major markets for manufactured goods and were the underwriters for industrialization. A complex trading pattern of overlapping triangles formed a multipointed star with location points in the harbors and coastal cities of New England, Canada, the Caribbean, England and Africa. John Locke, as Secretary to the Proprietors of the Carolinas and a stockholder in slave-trading companies, saw no contradiction of his enlightened views with the human kidnapping and enslavement that went with his position. Property rights topped human rights. Settler colonies were established, and local populations disbursed and destroyed. The American, Haitian and French revolutions expanded Locke’s ideas about liberty to encompass the democratic rights of citizens whose participation in their nations’ wars earned them a stake in their gains.
