This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Vincent Brown as Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His teachings include the history of slavery in America and his most recent book, It's called Tacki's Revolt, The Store of the Story of an Atlantic Slave War. His other writings to note how we need to look at slavery in the context of empire and militarization and warfare.
I want to learn about this here, to talk about it and how we can apply it perhaps to today's um protests against racism and kind of the injustice that we've been seeing, certainly in the last couple of weeks. Is Vincent Brown, as we said, Harvard professor on the phone from Cambridge. Professor Brown, it really is great to have you here on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome, all right, kayl thanks for having me on, and hello Jason as well.
I'm happy to be with you. So tell us, first of all, a little bit about this book and why you think it's it's important to maybe perhaps you know, kind of understanding where we are in society where we are when it comes to racism, that just doesn't seem to go away. Right. Well, appropriately, we're talking a lot more about slavery now because we're talking about racism and
we're talking about racial violence. And one of the things that always impresses me is that the stigma that attaches to black people goes way back to slavery, so we should be talking about it. And that stigma didn't just mark black people out for exclusion and discrimination, it also marked them out for violence. I think one of the things that we don't often understand is how violent American
slavery was. And I don't just mean American slavery in what became the United States, I mean American slavery all throughout the Western hemisphere. That it was a violent institution, best characterized in some ways as a state of warfare between enslavers and the people they enslaved. So tell us more about that, because I think it's a it's a really important point that that is often overlooked and I certainly UH learned a lot starting to to read your book.
Give us the historical context here, sure, So, the expansion of European empires in the America's involved conquests, and we know that right. We know that there was conquest against the Native Americans. We know that Europeans fought wars against each other in order to defend their territory or take territory. We also know, and we know this much better now than we used to, that these plantations that they that they built in the America's were staffed with people who
were often captives in wars in West Africa. And those were wars in West Africa that were stimulated in part by the European arms trade. So the scale of warfare in Africa increased with the European arms trade, which increased the number of slaves exported to the Americas, which enhanced the value of the plantations because they were the people doing the most profitable labor. One thing I think people don't always understand is that slavery was the basis of
the colonization effort in the Americas. Where Europeans were able to exploit slaves labor, they found their enterprises to be much more profitable. So when we think about, say, the territory that became the United States, right the thirteen colonies, the most profitable of those colonies for Europeans were the colonies in the south as you go below Virginia and down into South Carolina, the colonies that enslaved the most people UH and in the eighteenth century, UH large percentage
of then were from Africa. But it's also worth remembering
that the British didn't have thirteen colonies in America. They had twenty six, and by far the most profitable of those colonies were their colonies in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, which was far in a way the most profitable, the most militarily significant, and the most strategically and politically important colony in the British Empire in the eighteenth century on the eve of the revolution, and that was a colony that was enslaved people and anywhere from you know, two
thirds to three quarters of those people at any time in the eighteenth century would have been born in Africa, and many of them would have had experiences in those African wars um that that that made them subject to capture enslavement. Let's get back to our conversation with Vincent Brown, Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University joining us on the phone
from Cambridge's got a new book. It's called Taki's Revolt, the Story of an Atlantic Slave War, and Professor Brown, I'd like to talk more about the book because you talk about the violence, obviously of this revolt and the ultimately how it did more maybe to end the slave trade than what some of the white abolitionists were doing. Help us understand what was involved in this revolt and
ultimately what it led to. Oh, thanks you the question, Jason. Um. I really think of the dynamic that Lay Revolt was a part of when it came to ending the slave trade. I was interested to hear you talking about Colin Kaepernick and his iconic gesture of kneeling right during the national anthem.
Reminds me of the iconic medallion made by a man named Josiah Wedwood in the late eighteenth century with an African man in chains kneeling and the caption was always am I not a man and a brother And it was a question which asked people whether or not black people were deserving as Christian fellowship. The alternative to fellowship was war, and people were thinking about slavery body in the Caribbean as the alternative to that kind of fellowship.
I do think we see something like that dynamic happening now, which is violence in the streets is the alternative to recognizing that we must have, should have and work for an equal society in which black people are not stigmatized, are not killed disproportionate to their numbers and the population by officers of the law. UM. And so I really
see those connections going all the way back. I'm trying to you know what's interesting, Jason was it was it John O'Brien that we had the conversation where he was talking with younger individuals about you know, why do you have to protest? Why do you have to write? And they were saying to him, listen, you have a place at the table. You know, you get to go talk with the president, and you get to go talk to corporate boards. We don't have a place at the table.
And this is how we get noticed and we get attention. And I thought it was really kind of interesting and telling to me. And I do wonder, you know, Professor Brown, how do we stop just talking about all of this and and those actions that are being taken, you know, really bring about lasting change. The cover of Bloomberg Business Week magazine this week is really telling. It's a picture. I think how many black CEOs are out there among I think the SNP it's four. You know, it's really telling.
So how do we really make a difference. I think reducing an equality in society is one of the major things we can do. We've got a society that's grossly unequal, now, far more unequal than it was even in the night sixties. I think we need to move in the other direction. Removing some of the poverty of black people and brown people and poor white people, frankly, is key to removing some of the stigmas that attached to their lives, some of the ways of value in their lives less than others.
I think that's going to be crucial. Recognizing the value of black life is at the heart of it, but also reducing the general level of violence in our society. One of the things I was interested in when I wrote this book is how a militaristic society like uh Jamaican slave society in the British Empire um really was violent from top to bottom, from the level of intimate relations between masters and the enslaves, all the way up
to imperial warfare. Unfortunately, we live in a society that glorifies violence, that has been engaged in what seems like perpetual warfare for decades now, and I do think that that means our entire society is violent. Remember that the police in the United States kill about a thousand people a year, disproportionately Black people, but not all black people by any means. About half of that number, about five
hundreds of those people are generally poor white people. It's a society that's thoroughly violent, and then the stigma that attaches to black people makes it even more violent towards black people. But reducing the total level of vines in society is going to going to go a long way towards revalue in everyone's life, and black lives as well.
So Professor Brown, as a student of history and someone who is living through this right now, Uh, does this moment feel different based on people you talk to, based on your research? I think we all want to hope that it is. But but candidly I defer to someone who's a lot smarter than I am, being you in this case, Uh, to help me with the reality check here, Like, how should we be hopeful. Is there something different that
that feels like it's happening. It feels a bit different to me, And it feels different in part because the protests are so broad, such a broad cross section of society is engaged in them. Um. I do think that that's going to make a change, But it all depends on what comes next, right, UM. There there might be a reaction to this that takes us in the other direction.
If the fear of these protests, uh is stimulated so much sure that people you know, get afraid even more afraid of young people, of black people, of people who are protesting, then we might not move in the right direction. What we really need is to recognize that we need a less violent society, We need a police force that, uh, that doesn't shoot first and ask questions later, uh, and that we need to move towards a more equal society. Well.
And it's clear that this is an economic issue as well, And I'm glad you circled back to that, and I'm glad we started there in in your explanation uh and analysis of even the roots of slavery and the profitability uh that that you tied to those early slave trades because Ultimately, this is a story, a current story of poverty and both and Carol and I've been talking a lot about this, both income and wealth gaps that have to be filled if we're going to do anything about this,
and if I can, yeah, and if I can piggyback on that, because I think we always thought education would be the great leveler right and create you know, or get rid of the inequalities in society, Professor Brown. But we know that that necessarily isn't the case, and we know people don't all have the same access. Yeah, of course, So I mean in our society, one of the ways that people build wealth over generations is to compound interest
on their investments. The compound interest on enslavement. It's nothing, right, And so you know, if for generations people had come here enslaved, earned nothing for their labor, could invest nothing in the for the betterment of their own children, you know, educating them simply when you allow them to gain access to education generations down the line, isn't going to allow them to catch up to people who have Actually we've been investing the fruits of their labor generation after generation
after generation. So one you know, really needs to kind of put our backs into reducing the inequalities that have been built up and accumulated over generation. Now it's a really interesting point, I mean, and and that does come down to some extent to access to capital markets. And again that has been at the core of a lot of the conversation we've had. Thank you so much, Vincent Brown. He is Professor of American History Professor of African and
African American Studies at Harvard University. His new book, Takies Revolt, The Story of an Atlantic Slave War a huge number of lessons. It is clear for what we're talking about right now. And to understand this, you don't just need to understand what's happened over the past few weeks or even the past few years or the last generation. It
goes back centuries. Gotta take our Naomi Kurbal over in London, because she brought that to our attention, and when we saw it, we're like, yeah, we definitely want to talk to Professor Brown. So yeah, I think it's really important, Jason, and I think we need to understand and um the situation and where we are, what got us to here, uh, and certainly what got blacks in America to where they are today and how we can maybe improve it going forward.
So I think that's gonna be We're gonna put that out on a podcast because that was just a fantastic conversation. And I hope we can draw on him in the future because I think he could certainly provide more insight