Summary
A new book, Ricardo’s Dream by Nat Dyer, reveals that Sir Isaac Newton’s wealth was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade during his tenure as master of the mint at the Bank of England.
Newton profited from gold mined by enslaved Africans in Brazil, much of which was converted into British currency under his oversight, earning him a fee for each coin minted.
While Newton’s scientific legacy remains untarnished, the book highlights his financial entanglement with slavery, a common thread among Britain’s banking and finance elites of the era.
By our standards he may have been a peice of crap.
At the time he was born in the society he lived in his wealth gained in a largley accepted manner.
I see no need to go back over history constantly bringing this shit up.
Nah, by their standards, he was a colossal piece of crap too. He was very much disliked. He was known to be humorless and just kind of a jerk overall. He was also pretty useless a lot of the time. He was elected to parliament and only spoke one time during his tenure there. He said, “the window needs closing.” Really.
And then when he took over the mint, he was just ruthless in prosecuting anyone he could for any reason he could find. He had a witch hunt for counterfeiters after there was a change in coinage. It was pretty nuts. So yeah, he was always a piece of shit. This just makes him a bigger piece of shit.
Damn, and I thought he was just a piece of shit for inventing calculus
All of the statues that got wrecked would like a word.
“man in charge of money in 17th century found to be LINKED to how money was used in 17th century…”
my god
Yeah, this seems like a strange connection to make. “He was in charge of the mint, and the mint used gold, and a lot of gold at that time came from Brazil, which used SLAVERY to mine it!”
Like, yes, this is true, but it’s a connection to slavery only insofar as every major economic actor at the time was connected to slavery in some way.
Have you heard of Elon Musk? …he isn’t nearly as smart, though 😢
Dude was smart as hell. He wasn’t nice.
This is great news! Calculus is cancelled!
Schoools Out For Summer!
Did anyone bother to read this article?
- No one is calling to cancel him
- Dyer explicitly says an epochal thinker
- Dyer then says he was apart of his time
- And the last third of the article is quotes from other academic all like “That groks.” Or “matches what I researched in this corner.”
If anything, all I can really imagine that’s necessary is to not worship him. Kind of like when you get out of grade school and find out that the US founding fathers were not in fact gods, but disgusting men that were products of their time.
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I haven’t read the book - and probably won’t, since Dyer’s not a historian, has no relevant credentials listed on his website, and has never written a book before - but based on the article, it doesn’t sound like he’s saying anything new.
It does sound like it’s being weirdly misrepresented, because Dyer didn’t “reveal” anything and his wealth isn’t any more or less “intimately connected” than any other wealthy person’s at that time. It also sounds like it overstates his wealth. He primarily got his money from being Master of the Mint, which until Newton was a symbolic post intended to give him income in return for his major contributions to science, but in standard Newton fashion he ignored the implied social norm and took it seriously instead. That gave him a comfortable income to essentially have some nice things. We’re not talking billionaire wealth.
As for the connection to the slave trade - based on the title, I’d expect him to have owned the slaves, or led the expedition to enslave people in order to be “intimately connected.” For the time, this was about as connected as any landowner was to slavery. That’s not to say it was fine, just that this is expected for anybody of his station and is absolutely not new or surprising information.
But I guess I’m acting all surprised that the Guardian made a shit article, and that shouldn’t be news to either.
