The Law of Profit spoken word in History Lesson 5 from Baldy’s Music Group reveals how slavery was never just a Southern institution — it was a global system of law and finance. Schools often frame slavery as cotton fields and whips, but the truth is that laws written in Virginia, stock companies in London, and markets in New York City all worked together to turn human beings into capital.
The story begins with the House of Burgesses in Virginia, where whiteness was written into law and poor whites received privilege while Black people were chained. These laws became the supply line. Across the Atlantic, kings and merchants waited. King James I signed the charters that gave birth to the Virginia Company and the Royal African Company, where shares of stock were backed by enslaved Africans. Slavery was business. Every voyage was an investment. Every body carried value on a balance sheet.
Insurance companies like Lloyd’s of London calculated human life as cargo. If captives drowned, investors collected payouts. If they survived, plantations reaped the profit. Black lives meant profit in death or in breath.
The system stretched further. In New York, a slave market opened directly on Wall Street. Traders bought and sold human beings in the same place where finance still rules today. The model was already perfected: law on one side, finance on the other. Together, they created a machine that generated wealth across Europe and America.
The refrain of this history is simple: slavery was business. Law made people property. Finance made them currency. And the system still spends that profit today.
Learn more about the Royal African Company and continue the series with History Lesson 4 — The Birth of Whiteness.
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