The Indomitable Human Spirit Fighting Empire That Never Ended

A World Built on Slavery and Opium Always Falls

The modern international system was not built on neutral economic forces. The world we inherit is not a clean break from the past but a continuation of the economic structures forged during the long era of empire. The philosophy that animated the extraction that once moved silver from the Andes, opium from Bengal, silks from China, cotton from the American South and slave labor from Africa have not vanished. 

Maritime ports like London, Hong Kong, New York and Amsterdam became the nodes of a system that directed global capital flows and enforced extraction. While formal colonial rule ended, the structural control of these financial centers remain.

If the global system we inherited was built on extraction, coercion and the suppression of human capacity, then the task before us is not simply to condemn that history. The task is to replace it using past victories of liberation as guidance fighting empire and oligarchy: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…

The Political Economy Project has a simple argument: human beings are not raw, extractive inputs for profit or imperial designs. We are not labor units to be minimized, nor mere consumers whose only purpose is purchasing power. We are beings endowed with creativity capable of discovery, invention and a cooperative construction to overcome scarcity for a better world today and for our posterity.

Yet to build a human centered economy, we must first face the past monster terrorizing us today.

Conquest as Imperium’s First Principle

Empire requires that all humans are not created equal. Belief in an untermensch (subhuman) and an ubermensch (superhuman) is needed to justify the taking, enslaving and extracting. 

Rewind to 1545, the Spanish empire discovered silver in Potosí, Bolivia, a mountain so rich it reshaped global trade. Indigenous miners, later joined by enslaved Africans, were forced into deadly shafts under the Incan mit’a system. Their labor filled Spanish ships with bullion that sailed to Seville and then across the Pacific to Manila, where it was exchanged for Chinese goods. This silver currency trade propolled the modern maritime based global financial circuit.

Around the same time, Portugal perfected the Atlantic slave plantation. West Africans were captured and moved across the ocean to Brazil, where sugar plantations became engines of death. At the same time, Portugal built an Indian Ocean network in Goa, Malacca and Macao, creating the earliest oceanic trading empire run as a commercial-military enterprise.

Together, Spain and Portugal created a model for extracting resources, exploiting labor, monopolizing trade and enriching the families controlling the imperial core.

Monopoly Policy of Iberian 'mare clausum' (closed sea). Image Wikipedia.

The Dutch Turn Extraction Into a Corporate Science

As Venetian money moved north in search of more stable environments, seven Dutch provinces in the Spanish Netherlands revolted against Spanish rule and formed a government in 1588 countering the Iberian union of Spanish and Portuguese monopolies. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was formed as a modern day multinational corporation and given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.

From Amsterdam to Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and to the East Indies of Batavia, the VOC built a chain of fortified posts and monopolized the spice trade through systematic extraction. VOC used Bengal as a source of textiles, sold those goods across Asia and used Japanese silver to stabilize their position inside China. The corporation became incredibly wealthy as the instrument of empire and empire became the logic of the corporation. 

The VOC’s wealth (adjusted for inflation) was enormous. Image: Visual Capitalist.

The British East India Company

The Dutch innovation in the trading of shares in a joint-stock company allowed them to finance expeditions with stock subscriptions sold in the United Provinces of the Netherlands and in London. In the City of London, the Royal Exchange was established in 1565 to finance England’s growing overseas trade. In 1577, Francis Drake set out on an expedition from England to plunder Spanish settlements in South America in search of gold and silver. The Spanish Armada's defeat by England in 1588 delivered a decisive blow to the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly of far-eastern trade.

In 1600, the British East India Company (EIC) was founded as a joint-stock company. The EIC eventually accounted for half of the world's trade. The company also developed the British Raj to rule the Indian subcontinent.

British East India Company Flag (1801)

By the 18th century, EIC produced the most efficient extraction machine the world had seen. The trade routes overlapped seamlessly:

• African slavery was brought to the southern U.S.

• Confederate states supplied cotton to create cheap textiles in British mills.

• Those textiles were dumped in India, destroying its advanced textile industries.

• India financed its imports by producing opium.

• Opium was forced into China to reverse the flow of silver.

• Silver and Chinese goods flowed back to Britain.

This was not a loose network of unrelated practices but a coordinated system of extraction. Each step depended on the next.

Slavery at the Core

Millions of Africans were shipped to the Americas by British, Portuguese and Dutch vessels. After the U.S. banned the international slave trade in 1808, the slavers reorganized. As part of this global system, states like Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina turned into slave-breeding economies, selling human beings to the Deep South. Children were raised as future capital. Women were forced into reproductive labor. Families were broken for cotton quotas.

This domestic trade fed the cotton mills of Manchester, where child and female laborers worked under brutal, Dickensian conditions to transform slave-grown cotton into industrial textiles to dump in India.

Opium as Imperial Policy

By the early 19th century, Britain faced a trade deficit with China, which supplied tea and silk but demanded silver in return. The solution was opium. Grown in Bengal under East India Company oversight, opium became a state instrument. 

When Chinese officials tried to suppress the trade, Britain responded with gunboats and treaties. Hong Kong became the spoils of war and the center of a narcotics-finance nexus. Opium was not an aberration. It was considered a strategic necessity and as “new vents for our industry,” in the words of Lord Palmerston.

The Confederacy: An Imperial Partner

The American South’s “King Cotton” was part of this imperial geopolitical trade. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, stoking national tensions over pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. The election of Abraham Lincoln tilted power against the expansion of slavery, which threatened the imperial trade stretching from London to Shanghai.  Southern leaders understood that Britain and France, dependent on slave-grown cotton, would intervene on their behalf during the Civil War.

They were not misguided. British aristocrats and industrialists were deeply entangled in Southern cotton wealth. British banks financed U.S. shipping and British elites nurtured networks of pro-slavery sympathizers. The Confederacy was not an isolated rebellion. It represented a regional expression of a global system. 

Ideology and Empire

Empires do not survive on economic structures alone. They require ideologies, institutions and sometimes covert instruments to maintain control. Across the 18th and 19th centuries, movements arose sometimes organically, sometimes with imperial encouragement to protect the extractive order.

British East India propagandists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo promoted “free trade” doctrines that justified British industrial dominance and colonial monopolies. Imperial designers like Palmerston and Elgin used naval power to compel market access. Trading families like Jardine, Matheson, Sassoon and Baring built generational fortunes from narcotics, slave cotton and colonial finance.

The new country of the "Golden Circle" would have been centered in Havana and consisted of the Southern United States, Mexico (which was to be divided into 25 new slave states), Central America, northern parts of South America and Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and most other islands in the Caribbean.

On the American side, secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and later the Ku Klux Klan led by Confederate General and Scottish Rite Free Mason Albert Pike, advanced a racial and economic exploitative order in the support of imperial trade.

An array of social formations are necessary for imperial logistics of contraband and coercion. An extractive global system cannot survive without a population believing in an untermensch (subhuman) and an ubermensch (superhuman), which is required to justify a political economy designed to enforce extraction by categorizing certain groups of humans as disposable.

The global order built on slavery, silver extraction, opium dependency and industrial coercion has not disappeared. Its financial architecture persists in global banks, offshore networks, commodity markets, narcotics economies and geopolitical strategies that still shape the world.

The moral logic of that system that profit outranks human dignity, that markets outrank nations, that human beings are expendable inputs still animate global policies in subtle and overt ways. Understanding that empire is not an act of pessimism. It is a step toward freedom.

Economics as a Science of Human Development

If the global system we inherited was built on extraction, coercion and the suppression of human capacity, then the task before us is not simply to condemn that history but replace it. 

Most economic models treat human beings as factors of production or rational optimizers. That approach guarantees small ideas and limited politics and possibilities. The Political Economy Project positions economics as the study of how societies expand their productive powers, their cultural richness and the freedom of their citizens to shape their own future. Renaissance traditions recognize the centrality of human development. 

The three pillars of the political economy project:

Productive Investment Over Extraction

Extractive systems strip wealth. Productive systems create it. A creative political economy directs national credit toward the foundations of long-term growth based on energy production, efficient transportation, water system management, research and the human infrastructure of schools, teachers and culture. It measures prosperity not by the increase of physical and intellectual capability across generations. Nations rise or fall depending on whether they invest in their potential or allow it to decay.

Sovereignty Over Subordination

A nation that cannot control its credit, build infrastructure and generate abundant energy is not free. Sovereign nations possess the tools to shape their own destiny. This means rebuilding the industrial infrastructure, mastering the machine-tool sector, securing abundant and low-cost energy and preventing critical systems from being extracted by financial black holes.

Culture Over Commodification

A population trained only to consume can never build a great civilization. A culture that elevates beauty, science, music, civic responsibility and shared purpose is essential. It forms the moral and intellectual infrastructure that allows a society to innovate, cooperate and endure. A creative republic treats culture as a public good not a luxury.

The New Measure of Wealth

A nation is wealthy not because it has resources but because it develops them through cultivating the productive powers of labor of its people. Our metrics change accordingly:

• Literacy becomes a matter of sovereignty.

• Healthcare and education become economic infrastructure.

• Research and development become national defense.

• Art becomes a measure of civic health.

• Engineering becomes a form of freedom.

The imperial world was designed to keep populations divided, dependent, addicted and unable to shape their own destiny. Its architecture lingers in monetarist global finance, supply chains, resource wars and cultural demoralization.

The alternative is the creation of a world in which every child has access to electricity, education, safety, dignity and the scientific and cultural tools to shape the world they inherit and express themselves accordingly.

This requires a shift in the deepest assumptions of our politics. It requires leaders who are willing to fight extractive systems because they understand that human beings are the source of all wealth. The Political Economy Project is a call to build the institutions that make such a world possible and restore the meaning of the nation-state as a platform for human flourishing.

Follow the conversation at https://politicaleconomyproject.substack.com.