Ch. 14 Emotional Transformations and Other Historic Tragedies

Imagine the emotional state of the shackled victims in the painting on page 668.  Look at the faces of the four men in that painting and visualize the conversation taking place.  This chapter should be titled Emotional Transformations rather than Economic Transformations.

Whips, leg irons, windowless dungeons – how can people be so cruel and heartless?  I do hope that the tables were turned when these slave traffickers were sent to their final destination of hell.

Oh, those Portuguese were clever peeps!  We don’t have anything valuable to trade with you, so we are going to use our maritime might, whilst borrowing from the Mongols, and forcibly overtake your sorry arses to create a “trading post empire” (p. 673).  When all else fails, use brute force.

Sounds like the Spanish timed their takeover of the Philippines just right!  A combination of weak societies, no other competition, and proximity to China were the perfect combination for an “often bloodless Spanish takeover of the islands” (p. 675).

Why are the islands called the Philippines, yet its peoples are “Filipino”?  Never understood that flip from “ph” to “f.”

The Dutch and English “quickly overtook and displaced the Portuguese, often by force, as they competed vigorously against each other as well.”  Well, that scenario about sums up how the female species in my office operate.

Seems to me that the Dutch were more ruthless than the Mongols.  They “killed, enslaved, or left to starve virtually the entire population of some 15,000 people” (p. 676) and replaced them with slave labor.

When all else fails, another option besides brute force is good, old-fashioned bribery, which is what the Brits had to resort to with the Mughals in India.

Of course the conditions in the silver mines were horrendous!  Mine work is literally a descent into hell.  Check out the song “Blue Sky Mine” by Midnight Oil and notice the juxtaposition in the title words.

I would hardly call infanticide a moral method of birth control (p. 682).

Thankfully, we have environmental impact reports today.  Without keeping tabs on such commercialization as the fur trade, many animals would be extinct, just like what is happening to those poor elephants for their tusks.  Leave those animals be!

Yes, “criminal excess” (p. 685) is an excellent way of articulating how people get seduced by foreign commodities!

Unfortunately, we know all too well what alcohol has done to not only our Native American people, but people the world over – to the point that society functions on rehabilitation centers.

Fascinating that the word “slave” derived from the Slavs; bad timing for the African peoples, who were forced into plantation slavery and such a sad part of history.

I am not buying this line that “Africans did not generally sell “their own people” (p. 693).  Nonsense!

Not only was Mother Earth decimated by deforestation for whatever was in vogue at the time (silver), and animals made nearly extinct, the African population decreased from 18% of the world’s population in 1600 to only 6% in 1900 (p. 694).  These actions signify killing for profit.