To refresh our memories as to exactly how free markets operate on the level playing field of capitalism and government staying out of these matters, let us enter the Way Back Machine to the 18th century. We shall land in the era of what is popularly known in the history text books as the French and Indian War in the New World, and the Seven Years War in Europe. This is roughly 1754–1763, though the struggle of France and Britain to control North America and various parts of the Caribbean, India, etc. was nearly a century-long conflict all together. We are in 1762, in British occupied Havana. Several times during these wars the British also occupied Martinique and other of the French Antilles.
The British re-made the Cuban economy during the very short time they ran things, turning it into a highly competitive slave plantation agricultural mono-economy of sugar. Martinique, Guadeloupe, San Domingue were already sugar plantation powerhouse suppliers -- indeed, San Domingue was the greatest wealth producer in the New World, funding the excesses of the French royals and nobles until their own revolution.
Now to the government staying O-U-T of the free market. The Jamaican and other British sugar plantation power elites of the Caribbean lobbied with every resource they had the members of both houses of Parliament to force Britain to return these islands to Spain and France. These islands' sugar production was now also being shipped to England, creating such a supply that the price plummeted. This was equally true for rum of course, and on a somewhat smaller scale, for coffee and tobacco. Their quality tended to be higher as well, and this was NOT FAIR to the original English sugar barons of the Caribbean. This competition was eating their fine wines, fine homes, fine paintings, fine horses, fine finer finest everything because the competition made their product so cheap they were no longer achieving the magnificent fortunes they were accustomed to whipping out of the lives of endless coerced labor from Africa to their mostly absentee landlorism-administered Caribbean plantations.
In the Treaty of Paris Cuba was given back to Spain (in exchange for the Floridas -- which Andrew Jackson would take in turn in approximately another four decades), and so were the French Antilles returned to France in exchange for its North American (New France) territories.
That's how government makes an even playing field for the free market to do its business fair and square for the ultimate benefit of the consumer.
This was laid out with such clarity of detail at the New York Historical Society's exhibition, "Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn." We spent most of my birthday afternoon in it, breathless, taking notes like mad, since unlike most museum now, the NYHS still doesn't allow non-flash, digital photography. This exhibit is one of the results we're starting to see of considering the American, the French and the Haitian revolutions as sections of a single wave of historical movement instead of them being considered as separate events with little if anything in common, other than the desire for "liberty" ignited in the "citizens" in France, in an imitation of the real thing that was the "revolution' of the British middle North American Atlantic colonies.
This exhibit has many surprising items that perhaps we might not consider together, at first thought. The second floor galleries of the exhibit proper are many and dense with information and objects. However, there are deeply related off-shoots on the main floor, for instance, including the original written document of the 13th Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln -- allowing for the final, long-resisted step in the consequences of the San Domingue revolution, recognition of the nation of Haiti by the United States. I admit to feeling a great deal, viewing this actual document on loan from the LOC.
Upstairs the second gallery, "Where the Empires Ended," begins with the various trades going on between the North Americans, particularly those from Rhode Island, with the focus on Paramaribo, Suriname and Haiti, in the late 17th and 18th century. We viewed "Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname," the first genre painting made by a North American, John Greenwood (1727 - 1792). You can take a look at it here.
It was as though we'd gone on vacation, threading our way through these dimly lit galleries, where the real light was focused only on these exceedingly well-chosen objects dramatizing the connections between the slave trade, slavery and trade generally in the New World, colonization and then revolution. Among other things on the main floor were slave badges, that were worn by southern slaves, dating from the 1820's to the latest dated 1860. That says everything about the connections among all these things. We did not have a full revolution here until the Civil War. That was the revolution that changed the way things were done. (Up to a point, at least, and not enough then either, as Slavery By Another Name made so clear.) We felt we'd gone someplace else.
Tired, but exhilarated, we stopped at the NYHS's very nice restaurant and bar (no television! no sports), for wine and appetizers before meeting K and C and P and K for dinner at La Paella. Our barista was very good looking, and an actor, of course, a young fellow born and bred in Yonkers. He asked to be put on da List. He had an audition for another television commercial yesterday -- he's been getting one or two commercials a month lately, so he's a happy man as well as personable, friendly and a very good barista.
It was pouring rain most of the day, but it felt soft -- like a day in the first week of April, thus the silvery rain light of afternoon, the hazy street light of after dark, and the shapes of bare branches of Central Park's trees made it all heart-breakingly lovely.
It was a lovely birthday, one that took us both far away from the classroom. Now, tonight, we all head uptown for salsa in da Bronx.