8mo ago

Isaac Newton’s wealth ‘intimately connected’ with slavery, author says

www.theguardian.com

Summary

A new book, Ricardo’s Dream by Nat Dyer, reveals that Sir Isaac Newton’s wealth was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade during his tenure as master of the mint at the Bank of England.

Newton profited from gold mined by enslaved Africans in Brazil, much of which was converted into British currency under his oversight, earning him a fee for each coin minted.

While Newton’s scientific legacy remains untarnished, the book highlights his financial entanglement with slavery, a common thread among Britain’s banking and finance elites of the era.

52 comments

By our standards he may have been a peice of crap.
At the time he was born in the society he lived in his wealth gained in a largley accepted manner.
I see no need to go back over history constantly bringing this shit up.
- Nah, by their standards, he was a colossal piece of crap too. He was very much disliked. He was known to be humorless and just kind of a jerk overall. He was also pretty useless a lot of the time. He was elected to parliament and only spoke one time during his tenure there. He said, "the window needs closing." Really.
  And then when he took over the mint, he was just ruthless in prosecuting anyone he could for any reason he could find. He had a witch hunt for counterfeiters after there was a change in coinage. It was pretty nuts. So yeah, he was always a piece of shit. This just makes him a bigger piece of shit.
  
  Ok, but I think the point is to judge him by the standards of the time. That might still label him a jerk, and so be it.
  Maybe he was a neuro-diverse individual who saw little value in "people problems" and was only interested in maths and science. Today, we'd show more understanding to that, but we don't know. All we can say was he was a jerk in the eyes of those around him.
  
  Damn, and I thought he was just a piece of shit for inventing calculus
- Newtons part in the slave trade is no less a part of the life and history of Newton then his contributions to science, why would we omit it? Calling him a piece of shit and saying he contributed to an awful system does not alter the fact that modern math and physics are where they are currently due to his contributions. Conversely, his contributions to science doesn't alter the fact he contributed to one of the worst systems in human history.
  
  I'm not denying it I'm simply tired of the inevitable outcome that this brings
  Remove the statues
  Better not teach his theories in schools
  Someone HAS to apologise
  What about recompense in the form of money
  It's a long fucking list and the guys been dead for a couple hundred years.
- All of the statues that got wrecked would like a word.
- Ok, but what do you want anyone to do about it? The guy has been dead for hundreds of years and we can't just pretend that gravity and calculus don't exist because he was a dick.
  
  This is how I see it, if they were someone from history who was rich, I assume it's because of slavery. It's easier to count the amount of people who got rich without slavery on your hands.
"man in charge of money in 17th century found to be LINKED to how money was used in 17th century..."
my god
- Yeah, this seems like a strange connection to make. "He was in charge of the mint, and the mint used gold, and a lot of gold at that time came from Brazil, which used SLAVERY to mine it!"
  Like, yes, this is true, but it's a connection to slavery only insofar as every major economic actor at the time was connected to slavery in some way.
Slavery was commonplace and normal several hundred years ago.
It's actually more surprising that Newton is only "connected" to slavery instead of owning a few slaves personally.
He was a rich dude in the 16 to 1700s, his wealth could only come from the suffering of others. While an interesting tidbit about his life, what does it have to do with his math? Not like we can stop using it due to his moral incompatibility with the present day...
- He was a rich dude in the 16 to 1700s, his wealth could only come from the suffering of others.
  Nobody gains massive wealth without the suffering and exploitation of others, not the 1700s, not in 800BC and not today.
  
  Hundo p!
  Extreme wealth is built on the back of extreme poverty.
  Heads or tails. Billionaires or slaves. And don't kid yourself; literal slavery still exists.
- The summary in the body says his scientific legacy remains untarnished, so it has nothing to do with his math.
  However, much like America's Founding Fathers, it is important to account for the amount that important European and European-descended people in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (really even the 20th) benefited from the transatlantic slave trade. An accounting of history's wrongs is necessary.
I really do believe that people remember historical figures moreso for their achievements and impact on the world and society. Than ever the characteristics of their human personality.
Because let's be honest, a lot of historical figures - might surprise you - aren't exactly great people at the whole humanitarian department.
- I think it might have more to do with the fact that our perception of morality changes with societal norms. People in the 19th century probably looked at Roman gay sex as something bad and vulgar because gays were bad. Now we view Roman gay sex in a positive light.
  Were the 19th century people bad people because they viewed homosexuality as something bad? Or do we consider them bad just because we no longer see homosexuality as something bad? What if 200 years from now homosexuality is considered bad again, do the 19th century people become good?
  Maybe we shouldn't apply our current moral values to people who lived at a different time with different moral values?
- Isn't that contingent on a person's parameters for what they consider humane? Good and evil are subjective concepts that will never be objective. Wouldn't you agree the definition for what you are calling humanitarian department is constantly evolving? For example, it was considered humane to designate women as the caretaker and men as the provider but now the idea of taking away a man or women's option for how they want to build their family's framework is inhumane as fuck. Also I'm not implying anything about a family being between a man and women or any gender related shit. I simply mean to include the full range of our species' sexes.
  Edit for further context: what i mean is that the fault doesn't always point to historic records omitting truths to fit a narrative. There are plenty of examples of the records being accurate, but societal parameters for what is considered humane or inhumane is what evolved.
People in the past were huge pieces of shit. News at 11
- People in the past were products of their time, news at 11
- News at 11: if you'd been born and raised in the 17th century there's a chance you'd have felt the same
  Now the weather
This is great news! Calculus is cancelled!
Schoools Out For Summer!
It's interesting that our first instinct is to think of cancelling. Cancelling is a way for us to assert that we are not "that", to affirm our disgust for those people. It's flushing the shit away, if you will.
Until you realize that it's all shit, all the way down (cue in Ohio meme). The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Arabs, the Malians, the Turks, the Babylonians, the Indians, the Europeans, ...every civilization until, what, 200 years ago, was a slave owning society.
You can't cancel all of human history, you can't flush away the entire earth, even if ultimately, all soil is shit and rotting crap mixed with rocks.
We have to go beyond cancelling. Instead, we have to recon with the fact that we are somewhat woke on the shoulders of giant douchebags. We can't cancel our history away, we have to sit with the shit and see what it means for us today. Instead of absolving the past, cancel it out of sight and think we're done with it, we have to wrestle with its legacy.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
- America still has slaves, the constitution makes an exception for prisoners, which is just Roman style slavery again.
- Shut the fuck up, snowflake. No one was cancelled.
  
  https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Snowflake
  You seem to have gotten offended. How sad. Poor you. Maybe you should stop being a snowflake? /s
Dude was smart as hell. He wasn't nice.
Have you heard of Elon Musk? ..he isn't nearly as smart, though 😢
Did anyone bother to read this article?
No one is calling to cancel him
Dyer explicitly says an epochal thinker
Dyer then says he was apart of his time
And the last third of the article is quotes from other academic all like "That groks." Or "matches what I researched in this corner."
- If anything, all I can really imagine that's necessary is to not worship him. Kind of like when you get out of grade school and find out that the US founding fathers were not in fact gods, but disgusting men that were products of their time.
- It's amazing how
  He was a part of his time
  And
  He was apart of his time
  Sound like total opposites. The latter makes no sense though
  
  I thought you were starting a haiku
I haven't read the book - and probably won't, since Dyer's not a historian, has no relevant credentials listed on his website, and has never written a book before - but based on the article, it doesn't sound like he's saying anything new.
It does sound like it's being weirdly misrepresented, because Dyer didn't "reveal" anything and his wealth isn't any more or less "intimately connected" than any other wealthy person's at that time. It also sounds like it overstates his wealth. He primarily got his money from being Master of the Mint, which until Newton was a symbolic post intended to give him income in return for his major contributions to science, but in standard Newton fashion he ignored the implied social norm and took it seriously instead. That gave him a comfortable income to essentially have some nice things. We're not talking billionaire wealth.
As for the connection to the slave trade - based on the title, I'd expect him to have owned the slaves, or led the expedition to enslave people in order to be "intimately connected." For the time, this was about as connected as any landowner was to slavery. That's not to say it was fine, just that this is expected for anybody of his station and is absolutely not new or surprising information.
But I guess I'm acting all surprised that the Guardian made a shit article, and that shouldn't be news to either.
Should we now detract from his achievements just like with Columbus?
- No one is suggesting this.
- What was Columbus' big achievement if you don't mind me asking? Because he didn't discover a new place (millions of people lived there already), he wasn't even the first European to get to that part of the world (the Vikings did it centuries earlier), he didn't prove the world was round (since that had been known since the ancient Greeks), and he didn't even understand where he was. He thought he was in Asia.
  On top of that, he was so ruthless to the Taino even by the standards of the time that he was brought back to Spain in chains because of it.
  So what was his big achievement?
  
  He created new trade routes between continents and got thrown to jail because of his claim of the new continent. You know, politics.
  But sure, slavery is not ruthless.
  Fucking morons and their double standards.

52 comments