2025/01/24 by Carrie DeAnne Shanafelt
#Great Britain #Ottobah Cugoano #capitalism #disaster #eighteenth century #finance #slavery
paper · doi:10.25894/jmp.2500
In his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), Quobna Ottobah Cugoano theorized that the creditors of the rapidly growing national debt had begun to use their growing financial leverage to manipulate the political priorities of Great Britain in order to deepen national dependence on plantation slavery and expand moral complicity in human trafficking and forced labor. This article examines Cugoano's charge of national guilt in the context of eighteenth-century debates about public debt and the profits of slave-trading, as well as in the context of twenty-first-century financial exploitation of global disasters and labor abuse.