Late in the morning, I am sitting in a small café near the Plaza de Armas. Through the window I can see the bell tower of the cathedral. It rained yesterday, and the stone pavement is still damp. The Andean light is soft.
I have ordered a coffee. Peru is a major coffee-producing country, particularly known for the beans of its northern Andean highlands. Bright acidity, clean aroma. The waiter brings an espresso in a small porcelain cup, alongside a glass of water. And a sugar bowl. I take the spoon naturally, scoop a spoonful of sugar, and drop it into the coffee. Stir. Sip.
And right after the first sip, without thinking, I look down at the spoon again. The little metal tool still in my hand. A few grains of sugar still clinging to it. And — what this familiar gesture contains — for a moment my thought stops.
Sugar.
In the previous chapter I stood for a long time before a silver coin in a museum. Over the weight of world history that one coin contained. The miners of Potosí, the Pacific galleon, China's tax reform, Joseon's cupellation method. The story of a planet's scale held in one coin.
A spoonful of sugar holds the same kind of story.
But sugar is a stranger thing than silver. Silver one sees behind glass in a museum. Sugar one eats every day. The Korean average is about 60 grams a day. It hides in coffee, in drinks, in desserts, in sauces. Accumulated over a year, about 22 kilograms per person. With Korea's 50 million people, 1.1 million tons a year. This vast quantity — where does it come from? How does it get here? Why is it so cheap and taken for granted?
These questions are the subject of this chapter. The history of one spoonful of sugar. Within that history we see the moment Wetiko was industrialized. If silver was the archetype of extraction, sugar is the archetype of production. And the site of that production became — the root of the modern factory system.
I take another sip of coffee. The sweetness lingers on the tongue. The familiar, comforting, innocent sweetness. But once I begin to look at what is behind it, this small pleasure feels different. Four hundred years of African human displacement. Runaway peasants of Caribbean islands. The long working hours of English laborers. The children still picking cacao in Ivory Coast today. All this — is dissolved in a single spoonful of sugar.
One small metal spoon. Five grams of sugar. The historical weight is far heavier.
To begin the story, one must first understand sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum). Why this plant is special.
Sugarcane is a robust grass three to six meters tall, growing only in tropical and subtropical climates. Originally cultivated in New Guinea and Southeast Asia, it spread through ancient India to the Middle East, and by the late Middle Ages reached the Mediterranean coast. In 1492 Columbus carried sugarcane cuttings to the Caribbean on his second voyage (1493).¹ The tropical American climate proved ideal for it. Sugarcane plantations soon spread across the Caribbean islands.
But — sugarcane cultivation was unlike any other crop. The difference is decisive.
Particularity 1: Within 48 hours of harvest, the cane must be pressed and the juice extracted. Beyond that the sugar ferments and is lost. That is, it cannot wait. Harvest timing and pressing timing must coincide.²
Particularity 2: The juice extracted must be boiled down and crystallized within several hours. It also cannot wait. Harvest, pressing, and boiling must form a continuous process.
Particularity 3: All this must be performed in a large-scale on-site facility. It is not a crop a single farmer can do at small scale on his own field. Hundreds of acres of land, hundreds of laborers, an enormous press, large boilers, crystallization rooms — all of this must be concentrated in one place.
In other words, sugarcane agriculture is essentially a factory industry. Wheat, rice, corn, potatoes are agriculture. Sugarcane is industry in the appearance of agriculture. There is no distinction between field and factory. The site itself is an integrated production facility.
The organizational form fitted to this particularity is the plantation. The word, derived from the English "plant," came to designate not merely "a farm" but a particular form of organization.
Elements of the plantation:
This last element is decisive. Who will do the work? The answer — no one volunteers. Plantation labor is extremely heavy, dangerous, and badly paid. Sixteen to eighteen hours of toil a day under the burning tropical sun. A press in which a hand could be caught and severed. Daily burns from boiling sugar liquid. The constant threats of malaria and yellow fever.
Without forcing such work, no one does it. So the plantation was always combined with a system of forced labor. At first the Caribbean Indigenous (the Taino). But they vanished quickly through disease and massacre. Next, indentured servants — a system in which European poor or convicts worked for several years in exchange for passage to the New World. But their numbers were insufficient.
The final answer was — the African slave.
The scholar who probed this plantation structure most deeply was Sidney Mintz (1922–2015). An American anthropologist. He did fieldwork in Puerto Rico and Jamaica from the 1950s and, on the basis of that experience, published a decisive book in 1985. The title: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.³
Mintz's claim was shocking. The modern capitalist factory system was born not in Manchester, England, but in the Caribbean plantation. A century earlier in time, archetypal in structure.
His evidence runs thus.
Time discipline. The "labor by the clock" symbolic of the English Industrial Revolution factory in fact began in the Caribbean sugar mill. During harvest, 24-hour operation was necessary. Workers were rotated. Work pace was managed precisely. If one was late, the whole process stopped. This commodification of time was the heart of the plantation. In the Caribbean of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The English factory adopted the same system only in the late eighteenth century.⁴
Division of labor. One person does not perform the whole process. Each performs only one specialized task. Cutters cut, carriers carry, pressers press, boilers boil. This division raises productivity and also prevents each worker from grasping the whole. This is what Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" would later systematize. But in the Caribbean it had been at work for two hundred years already.
The integration of machine and human. The factory portion of the plantation is in fact organized around machines. The vast press, the boilers, the system of pipes. The worker becomes an auxiliary device of these machines. The human moves to the rhythm the machine demands. The human becomes a part of the machine. The nightmarish features of the Industrial Revolution were already complete in the Caribbean. Only the engine of the machine was human muscle and the slaver's whip.
A consistent standard commodity. The plantation produces in bulk a single kind of commodity. Raw or refined sugar. Sugar from any factory in any place has the same properties (within grades). This standardization is the foundation of global commodity circulation. Again, this too is taken to be the feature of the Industrial Revolution — but the Caribbean came first.
Mintz's conclusion: The sugar plantation, with the African slave instead of the machine as its part, is structurally a modern factory. The "invention" of the Industrial Revolution amounts to importing this structure into Europe. And the capital that made the import possible came from the profits of the plantation's sugar.
Why does this thesis matter? It shifts the origin of capitalism from inside Europe to the collusion of Europe and the colonies. Capitalism was not invented by Europe. Capitalism was born in an Atlantic triangular structure. And one corner of that triangle was — the African slave.
The system known as the Atlantic triangular trade operated for some 350 years from the mid-sixteenth century into the nineteenth. The basic structure was as follows.⁵
Europe → Africa: European merchants carried manufactured goods to West African coasts. Main items: firearms and powder, brandy and rum, textiles, metal tools, glass beads. These were traded at slaving ports on the African coast. In exchange — people.
Africa → Americas (the Middle Passage): The purchased people were loaded onto slave ships. They were carried across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the American coasts. Voyage time averaged six to eight weeks. This was one of the cruelest forced migrations in human history. We will return to it in detail.
Americas → Europe: Colonial commodities produced on the American plantations were shipped to Europe. Main items: sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum, coffee, cocoa. These were sold in European markets, and the proceeds funded the next voyage.
The three legs formed a single circuit. Merchants profited at each. The second leg — the slave run — was the most lucrative. The price of a surviving slave sold in the Americas was five to ten times the African purchase price.
How many Africans were drawn into this triangular trade?
The "Slave Voyages" database at Emory University is a research project that has compiled all the voyages of the Atlantic slave trade. As of 2023 the database records about 36,000 slave voyages. The aggregate estimates:⁶
This number is a sociological statistic, but one must consider the human experience behind it. 12.5 million. 12.5 million family separations. 12.5 million forced farewells. 12.5 million instances of terror and despair.
And this counts only those who died in the Middle Passage. The march from the African interior to the coast killed hundreds of thousands or millions. Hundreds of thousands more died in the coastal slave prisons as they waited. Millions died in the first years after arrival in the Americas, having failed to adapt. Adding all of these, the estimate of total African deaths from the slave trade system goes far beyond 20 million.⁷
What was a slave ship?
The way they were loaded is most shocking. Slaves were placed in the hold by what was called "tight-packing." The space allotted to one person was for an adult man: about 183 cm long × 40 cm wide × 76 cm high.⁸ A space slightly larger than a coffin. In this space they spent six to eight weeks. Chained. Crouched. Among the smell and excrement of the next person.
Mortality at sea averaged 15%.⁹ The chief causes were disease — particularly dysentery, smallpox, scurvy. But suicide was also common. Some slaves tried to die by refusing food. The captains used a force-feeding device (speculum oris) to pry the mouth open and pour food in. Others tried to jump overboard. They thought it better to be taken by sharks. The captains hung nets around the ship to prevent it.
All this is recorded. The slave-ship captains kept logs, and the logs survive in English and Portuguese archives. We do not know these stories not because there are no records, but because we have not read them.
Along the African coast were dozens of slave-trade fortresses. The most famous: Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. These fortresses had underground dungeons. Separate "male dungeons" and "female dungeons." Each held hundreds of people. Without windows, without ventilation, with excrement piling on the floor.
Slave candidates waited there weeks to months. Until the next slave ship arrived. Some went mad, some died; most survived to be loaded. The gate that led out to the ships was named — "the Door of No Return."¹⁰ Whoever passed through it would not set foot on African soil again.
Today Elmina Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tourists visit. In 1998 U.S. President Bill Clinton issued a statement of apology there. In 2009 President Barack Obama also visited and gave an address. But — over centuries the names of those who passed through that gate still mostly do not survive.
Slaves who survived to land in the Caribbean or on the South American coasts were put up at auction. Healthy adults were expensive; children and the elderly cheap. Even families were sold to different masters. Every connection from Africa was severed at this moment.
Life expectancy on the plantation was, in the Caribbean and Brazilian regions, seven to ten years.¹¹ One-seventh the "normal" lifespan. The plantation owner's calculation was cruelly simple. "It is cheaper to buy a new slave than to keep one alive." So they were worked to the maximum, and when they died, replaced.
This logic operated for 350 years. The very fact that the system required continuous import shows how thoroughly it consumed people. While 12.5 million crossed the Atlantic, the slave population of the U.S. South just before the Civil War was about 4 million. The rest — had been eaten.
This is the precise expression. Wetiko was industrialized. Extracting life force became an automated system. The mercury amalgamation of Potosí and the sugar factories of the Caribbean are two faces of the same structure. The only difference is the geographical origin of the victims.
Another axis of this chapter is the European consumer. Especially the working class of England.
The sharpest of Mintz's insights is this. The mass consumption of Caribbean sugar by the English Industrial Revolution factory worker completed the triangular structure.
At first glance it seems strange. Why the worker, not the noble or the rich? In the early period sugar was a luxury. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe sugar was sold in apothecaries as medicine. Or as a display piece at royal banquets. At that time sugar was as precious as gold.
From the seventeenth century the change began. As the Caribbean plantation enabled mass production, prices fell. By the mid-eighteenth century the English middle class could afford sugar. With tea. Or in fruit jam. By the nineteenth century even the working class consumed sugar as a daily good.
And here a decisive shift took place. Sugar and tea became staple foods for the factory workers of the Industrial Revolution.¹² The combination of sweetened tea + jam-spread bread became the daily breakfast and lunch of an English worker's household.
Why? Three reasons.
Factory labor was extreme. Twelve to sixteen hours a day before the machine. To sustain such labor, high-calorie food is necessary. But the wages of the nineteenth-century English worker did not allow daily meat or fresh vegetables. Sugar was — an astonishingly cheap source of calories.
One pound (about 454 g) of sugar contains about 1,750 kilocalories. At the time in England this sugar cost only a fraction of a worker's daily wage. Meat at the same price provided far fewer calories. Economically, sugar was the optimal choice.
So workers spread jam thickly on bread. They added a great deal of sugar to tea. Sugar candies as snacks. This was the fuel that let the body endure ten hours of factory work.
Sugar alone was not enough. Drowsiness had to be prevented. To doze before a machine is to invite an accident, and the foreman's punishment. Here tea played a decisive role.
Tea contains caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant. To the factory worker, tea was both medicine and drink. A cup at every shift change. A cup at the afternoon break. A cup before the morning shift.
But tea is bitter at first. The English palate was not used to bitterness. So they drank it with much sugar. A drinking culture formed entirely different from Chinese or Japanese green tea — drunk without sugar. "English tea" was, from the start, "tea with sugar and milk."¹³
Mintz's precise observation: This combination (tea + sugar) was the chemical foundation that sustained the labor of the Industrial Revolution. The calories of sugar and the caffeine of tea combined into a narcotic compound that made extreme labor possible.
And a psychological factor. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, sweetened tea was an imitation of aristocratic culture. What the upper class began, the middle class copied, and the worker followed. To drink a sweetened cup of tea from a fine porcelain cup became the symbol of "civilized life."
This was also a brilliant strategy of colonial commodity distribution. The British East India Company and its allies, who imported colonial sugar and Chinese tea, deliberately spread this culture throughout society. Advertisements, social rituals, etiquette books — everything carried the message that "the well-bred drink tea." By the late nineteenth century the English were the world's largest consumers of tea and of sugar.
And without that consumption, the Caribbean plantation would not have continued. The English market's demand for sugar absorbed the plantation's production, so the plantation grew and expanded. More slaves were needed, and more Africans were dragged across.
Here Mintz's decisive insight emerges. The English factory worker and the African slave were both victims of Wetiko. Only the form differed.
The African slave was the victim of direct violence. Chains, whips, forced labor.
The English worker was the victim of indirect violence. The factory's time discipline. Long working hours. Low wages. Dangerous work environments. Lung disease and disfigured bodies.
But the two violences were two faces of the same system. And the English worker became an unwitting accomplice in the exploitation of the African slave. The sugar in his tea was made by whip on the other side of the planet. He did not know this. But his daily consumption sustained the system.
This is the prototype of the modern global economy. The consumer does not know the back of his consumption. That the cobalt in the smartphone was mined by a child in the Congo, the T-shirt sewn by a thirteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh, the chocolate grown with slave labor on Ivory Coast plantations — most consumers do not know. Abstraction erases the back side (Chapter 9).
But this ignorance does not exempt complicity. We are accomplices of the system. This recognition is uncomfortable. But it is necessary. It is the first step in breaking Wetiko's self-concealment.
From the late eighteenth century, the movement to abolish slavery began in England. The Quakers led it. Evangelical Protestants joined. William Wilberforce (1759–1833) fought in Parliament for decades. In the end:
On the surface this is a great moral victory of human history. The narrative that "civilization" overcame "barbarism." British textbooks still teach that Britain was the first and most civilized empire to abolish slavery.
But behind this narrative, a more complex truth awaits.
One provision of the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 is striking. The law did not compensate the freed slaves. Instead it compensated the slave owners.¹⁵
Precisely, the British government paid about £20 million to slave owners. This was about 40% of Britain's annual budget at the time, and about 5% of GDP — an astronomical sum.¹⁶ The logic ran: a slave was the master's "property," and to confiscate property the state owed just compensation.
What did the slave owners do with the compensation? Many built luxurious mansions in England, invested in new businesses, expanded their political influence. A significant portion of the upper class of Britain sustained itself through these payments.
The freed slaves received nothing. Centuries of unpaid wages for forced labor were not compensated. They obtained "freedom" but had no capital. Many continued to work on the same plantations of their former masters. This time as very low-paid laborers rather than slaves. Only the form of exploitation changed.
And a still more astonishing fact. To finance the compensation, the British government issued government bonds. And these bonds were repaid — until 2015.¹⁷
That is, British taxpayers of the twenty-first century were still paying interest on the compensation given to nineteenth-century slave owners. Through the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, European integration, and Brexit, the debt continued to live. A small fraction of the British public's tax went to repaying it. It was finally settled in 2015.
When this fact was revealed in a 2018 tweet by the British Treasury, it sparked nationwide debate. Many learned for the first time that part of the taxes they had paid throughout their lives had flowed to the descendants of nineteenth-century slave-owning families. And that those descendants still make up a significant part of the British elite.¹⁸
What does this say to us?
Slavery officially ended. But its economic effects continue. Families that profited from slavery used that capital to extend their influence into later generations. Universities, corporations, charitable foundations, and political power in Britain trace their indirect origin to the capital of slavery.
This is the economic foundation of structural racial inequality. The economic gap between Black and white today is the direct result of capital accumulation that began with slavery and has continued unbroken to the present. Not a matter of individual talent or effort. A matter of intergenerational capital transfer.
And so long as this structure persists — slavery is legally ended only; structurally it has not ended. The beneficiaries of slavery still benefit, and the descendants of slavery's victims still suffer. This is what William Faulkner's famous saying "history is not the past" means.¹⁹
For the last part of this chapter. Has the sugar plantation disappeared? Or is it continuing under different names?
I argue the latter. The evidence is plain.
The laptop on which I am writing, and the smartphone in the same room. The batteries of these devices contain cobalt. Cobalt is the key raw material of the lithium-ion battery.
About 70% of the world's cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.²⁰ And much of that mining takes place at informal mines known as "artisanal mining". The conditions:
The number of child cobalt miners in the Congo is estimated at about 40,000.²¹ Many work from age six or seven. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and Amnesty International have repeatedly denounced it. But the system continues. Why? Because Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung, and Hyundai buy this cobalt to make their smartphones and electric vehicles.
In 2019 a U.S. law firm filed a class-action suit against these corporations on behalf of sixteen Congolese children (or their families). For responsibility for injury and death. The case is still in progress. But the very lawsuit is evidence that the system is still operating.²²
Chocolate is a more dramatic example than sugar. About 70% of the world's cacao is produced in West Africa (Ivory Coast, Ghana). And much of it depends on child labor.
According to a 2020 University of Chicago study, the number of children aged 5–17 working on cacao farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana is about 1.5 million.²³ Many of them:
Who benefits from this child labor? Western chocolate corporations — Mars, Hershey, Nestlé, Cargill, Barry Callebaut. They have promised for decades to "eliminate child labor," but progress is slow. Because in the current system, cheap cocoa enables high profits. Fair-trade cocoa is more expensive and yields less.
So a piece of chocolate we buy at the supermarket carries the shadow of West African child labor. Literally.
The pattern applies to other commodities.
Palm oil. Palm-oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. Destruction of primary forest, loss of orangutan habitat, exploitation of migrant labor, in some areas slavery.²⁴ This palm oil enters our instant noodles, snacks, soaps, and cosmetics.
Fast fashion. Garment factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia. Fourteen to sixteen hours of labor a day. Low wages. Dangerous buildings (the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse killed 1,134). Clothing for global brands such as H&M, Zara, Uniqlo.²⁵
Coffee. Coffee farms in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Brazil, Vietnam. In many places, child labor, debt-bound contract labor, extreme low wages.²⁶
Agricultural produce. Strawberries, tomatoes, onions in the United States. Migrant workers from Mexico and Central America harvest them. Vulnerability through undocumented status — unable to file complaints, exploited.
All these are modern plantations. Sugarcane and chains have vanished. But the structure — by which low-wage labor far away is converted into cheap commodities nearby — continues.
In 1988 a Dutch nonprofit launched the Fair Trade certification system.²⁷ The principle is simple. The consumer pays a slightly higher price, and the additional money goes directly to the producer. The middleman's margin is restricted, and standards on conditions of production are imposed.
The system has had some real effect. Some cooperatives have obtained Fair Trade certification and improved prices. In some commodities (coffee, chocolate, bananas) it has formed a meaningful market.
But the limits are equally clear. Fair Trade is less than 1% of total world trade. Most consumers still choose the cheapest goods. And Fair Trade certification itself is, in some cases, formal and does not always translate into real benefit for the farmer.
The deeper problem is that — Fair Trade is improvement within the logic of the market. It does not change the logic of the market itself. The essence of Wetiko does not change. It only mitigates some of the harm. This is valuable, but not sufficient.
For fundamental change, the system, not the consumer, must change. This is impossible by individual consumer choice. Political, institutional, structural change is necessary. Global labor standards. Supply-chain transparency laws. Mandatory human-rights due diligence. All these are needed. And they must overcome the resistance of the Wetiko system. Corporations spend trillions in lobbying to block such regulations. So the change is slow.
I have finished the coffee. A little of the grounds remains in the bottom of the cup. The sugar has all dissolved. The grains on the spoon have vanished.
But the story of this chapter does not vanish. It remains in my head.
One spoonful of sugar. Five grams. Behind it:
All of this is dissolved in one spoonful.
One important thing must be said at the end. This chapter must not become a moral sermon. I am not telling the reader "do not eat sugar," "throw away the smartphone." Such individual choices do not change the system. They merely impose guilt on the individual and personalize a structural problem. This too is one strategy of Wetiko — shifting responsibility onto the consumer.
But seeing is another matter. Sugar eaten without awareness and sugar eaten with awareness are not the same. When I lift this spoon, if even a fragment of the history behind it comes to mind, I am, in a small way, breaking the system's self-concealment. Wetiko's greatest defense is ignorance and habit; awareness itself becomes resistance.
And as awareness accumulates — politics changes. Law changes. The system changes. This is how history changes. Slowly, but really.
Combine this chapter and Chapter 11, and the two pillars of the first globalization appear. The silver of Potosí (the archetype of extraction) and the sugar of the Caribbean (the archetype of production). The two together created the world economy after 1571.
But this globalization did not stop at the Atlantic. It crossed the Pacific. It reached Japan. Armed with arquebuses and Christianity, it struck the Korean coast. Exactly one century, from 1492 to 1592. The same wave, having circled the earth, arrived at the Korean peninsula.
In the next chapter we see the Korean contact of this wave. We reread what the Imjin War was — in the context of world history. That war was not simply a Korean-Japanese war. It was the impact of the first globalization on the Korean peninsula.
It will be the most important chapter for the Korean reader.
¹ For Columbus's introduction of sugarcane to the Caribbean, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).
² For the technical exposition of the temporal constraints of sugarcane, see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), chapter 1.
³ Ibid., entire.
⁴ For time discipline in the Caribbean plantation, see ibid., chapter 2.
⁵ For the basic structure of the Atlantic triangular trade, see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
⁶ Slave Voyages Database, Emory University (slavevoyages.org). Statistics as of 2023.
⁷ For estimates of total African deaths from the slave trade, see Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
⁸ For space allocation on slave ships, see Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), chapter 3.
⁹ For an average Middle Passage mortality of 15%, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapter 5.
¹⁰ For the "Door of No Return" at Elmina Castle, see Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
¹¹ For the average lifespan of Caribbean slaves, see Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
¹² For the rise in sugar-and-tea consumption among English workers, see Mintz (1985), chapter 3.
¹³ For the history of English tea culture, see Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
¹⁴ For the principal dates in Atlantic abolition, see Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
¹⁵ For the compensation provision of the 1833 British Slavery Abolition Act, see Catherine Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
¹⁶ Statistics on the scale of compensation are in the introduction to ibid.
¹⁷ For the 2015 settlement of the debt, see the British Treasury tweet of 2018 and related coverage: Guardian, "Britain's colonial shame: slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition," 12 February 2018.
¹⁸ For the connection between the British elite today and descendants of slave owners, see the database of the Legacies of British Slavery project (University College London).
¹⁹ William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), Act I, Scene 3: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
²⁰ For the share of Congolese cobalt production, see U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2023.
²¹ Estimate of Congolese child miners from UNICEF, Children in the Cobalt Supply Chain (2020).
²² John Doe et al. v. Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Dell, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 2019 (Case No. 1:19-cv-03737).
²³ Luc Christiaensen and Alexandre Fleury, NORC Final Report: Assessing Progress in Reducing Child Labor in Cocoa Production in Cocoa Growing Areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana (Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago, 2020).
²⁴ For labor conditions in the palm-oil industry, see various Amnesty International reports, e.g., The Great Palm Oil Scandal (2016).
²⁵ For labor conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry, see ILO Bangladesh Better Work program reports.
²⁶ For labor conditions in the coffee industry, see Oxfam, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup (Washington, D.C.: Oxfam America, 2002).
²⁷ For the history of the fair trade movement, see Laura T. Raynolds, Douglas L. Murray, and John Wilkinson, eds., Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization (London: Routledge, 2007).