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Ottobah Cugoano
Also known as: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
Facts (45)
Sources
Ottobah Cugoano on British Slavery, National Debt, and Speculative ... jmphil.org Jan 24, 2025 45 facts
claimOttobah Cugoano published a brief history of globalization 11 years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.
claimOttobah Cugoano asserts that the agents of the slave trade who profited from the trafficking of African people effectively made the British nation moral and financial captives.
accountIn West African communities known to Ottobah Cugoano, resource crises caused by disasters like drought, famine, or flood were managed through a communal distribution of resources that belonged to everyone.
claimOttobah Cugoano asserts that in a nation burdened by debt, public policies, laws, and wars are dictated by creditors rather than elected representatives or the will of the people.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that the complicity of predatory financiers and the culture of racism do not excuse the agents of genocide, but instead increase collective guilt by making the forgiveness of sin and debt impossible.
claimOttobah Cugoano argues that the transatlantic slave trade was both a cause and an effect of the British national debt.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that public debt creates conflicting interests where stockholders benefit from war, while others suffer, leading to a precarious situation for the nation.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that debt causes a loss of moral agency, forcing the debtor to abandon justice and righteousness to serve creditors.
accountOttobah Cugoano experienced kidnapping, trafficking, slavery on a Caribbean plantation, and eventual liberation in London, where he worked as an assistant to painters Richard and Maria Cosway.
accountAfter his liberation in London, Ottobah Cugoano worked as an assistant to the painters Richard and Maria Cosway in Pall Mall.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano posits that the British national debt is not a metaphor for moral depravity but is the actual substance, cause, and effect of the nation's moral failure regarding human trafficking.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that slave-trade profiteers made themselves invulnerable to correction and criticism by seizing control of the British legislature, courts, and financial infrastructure.
claimOttobah Cugoano argues that the accumulation of vast wealth in new economic sectors, when made available for public credit, is extracted from populations silenced by violence and fear.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano characterizes the British prioritization of ever-increasing productivity from Caribbean plantations as a sunk-cost fallacy that rendered all British people morally complicit in slavery and multiplied their collective guilt.
claimOttobah Cugoano accused financiers of creating profitable disasters in 1787, whereas Naomi Klein did not find sufficient evidence to make a similar accusation against financiers in 2007.
claimOttobah Cugoano asserts that capitalism has never existed without racist violence and resource theft, commercial capital has never existed without financial speculation, and corporate wealth has never existed without national debt.
claimOttobah Cugoano refers to slave-traders as 'plunderers' in his work 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery'.
claimOttobah Cugoano proposed a plan for total moral and financial debt forgiveness as a means to acknowledge and repair centuries of violence against African and Indigenous American people.
quoteOttobah Cugoano wrote: "[H]owever wide [the British] have extended their territories abroad, they have sunk into a world of debt at home, which must ever remain an impending burden upon the inhabitants…The national debt casts a sluggish deadness over the whole realm, greatly stops ingenuity and improvements, promotes idleness and wickedness, clogs all the wheels of commerce, and drains the money out of the nation…And those who hold stock at home, are a kind of idle drones, as a burden to the rest of the community."
accountOttobah Cugoano compares the 16th-century Spanish-led genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to the 17th-century British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, characterizing both as national projects driven by greed and debt.
accountIn his historical account of Spanish genocide in the Americas, Ottobah Cugoano characterizes the agents of violence as 'desperadoes' who were driven to murder and theft by the threat of unpayable debts at home.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano asserts that the British government was controlled by an organized crime syndicate, which explains why a supposedly Christian nation would sell its conscience and power to slave-trading interests.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that wealthy slave-traders used their financial influence to gain political and judicial power, causing the British government to operate in the interest of slave-trading rather than as an accountable governing institution.
claimOttobah Cugoano's book 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery' argues that financial culture relies on the creation of a debtor class that is coerced into committing violence and warfare to protect corporate wealth.
claimOttobah Cugoano claims that in a debt-based system, financiers use violent catastrophes as opportunities to offer the appearance of solvency while indenturing the moral conscience of the nation in perpetuity.
claimOttobah Cugoano's work 'Thoughts and Sentiments' serves as a response to Adam Smith, contrasting Smith's optimistic view of unregulated capitalism with Cugoano's apocalyptic Christian warning regarding the economic and moral disaster of the transatlantic slave trade.
claimOttobah Cugoano argues that finance acts as a screen that obscures the relationship between debtors and their poverty, and between the profiteers of slavery and their moral guilt.
claimOttobah Cugoano argued that the British national debt was instrumental in facilitating the transatlantic slave trade and other projects of British imperialist violence.
claimThe differences between Adam Smith's and Ottobah Cugoano's analyses of slavery illustrate broader philosophical challenges in addressing slavery and racial capitalism throughout the modern era.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano argues that financial loss from slavery investments or personal abolitionist beliefs does not absolve individuals of responsibility for the violence or trade-related wars funded by their wealth.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano and Naomi Klein have theorized that establishing a global economic system that uses debt as a mechanism to avoid moral and political reckoning results in increasingly frequent disasters.
referenceIn his book Thoughts and Sentiments, Ottobah Cugoano argues that the interdependence of chattel slavery, national debt, and speculative markets in eighteenth-century Great Britain created a system that evaded both moral critique and the self-correction mechanisms of the free market proposed by Adam Smith.
claimOttobah Cugoano argues that financiers have historically used the mechanism of national debt to create human and natural disasters from which they can extract wealth.
claimOttobah Cugoano's analysis raises questions about to whom collective debts are owed and how those debts have shaped domestic and foreign policies globally.
claimOttobah Cugoano describes the financial system of slavery as a vicious circle where slave-traders, whom he terms 'plunderers,' return to England to invest their wealth into British bank stocks and funds.
perspectiveOttobah Cugoano asserts that Atlantic slavery was a systemic issue rather than a collection of individual moral failures, consumer choices, or acts of cruelty.
claimOttobah Cugoano posited that human trafficking, labor abuse, financial capitalism, and legislative, military, and juridical power constitute a single system controlled by the same agents.
claimOttobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments builds upon and responds to Adam Smith's assessment of British slavery, national debt, and speculative finance as threats to unregulated capitalism.
claimOttobah Cugoano demands a reckoning of the moral debts owed by British citizens in a nation financed by human trafficking, genocide, and forced labor, alongside a reckoning of financial extortion by holders of the British public debt.
claimOttobah Cugoano claims that West African communities possessed essential liberties and social security for the poor that were superior to those in European nations, provided no universal calamity occurred.
claimOttobah Cugoano's 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery' analyzes Hebrew and Christian scripture, European colonial history, and the economic crisis caused by Great Britain's reliance on slavery profits to pay war debts, rather than focusing on autobiography.
claimOttobah Cugoano is identified as the only eighteenth-century British economic theorist who connected the institution of slavery to the rise of national debt and speculative finance cycles.
claimAdam Smith and Ottobah Cugoano both identify threats to healthy commerce, but Adam Smith views these threats as eradicable aberrations in a self-regulating economy, whereas Ottobah Cugoano views them as inextricable from an economic system founded on self-interest, fear, and exploitation.
quoteOttobah Cugoano envisioned 'days of mourning and fasting appointed' during which all of Great Britain would atone for the wrongs committed against Africans.
claimIn the 'world of debt' described by Ottobah Cugoano, the British government prioritized paying debts to financiers over providing for the needs of its people, forcing landowners and taxpayers to sacrifice commercial profits to service this debt.