We usually talk about history as a sequence of
choices, you know, moral, political, cultural.
Right. But the source material we're digging
into today, a text called Unhappening Slavery,
it asks us to just throw that framework out entirely.
It's a pretty jarring shift. I mean, it asks
us to look at the history of slavery as a systemic
safety issue. A safety issue. So less of a moral
problem and more of a massive failure in project
management. Exactly. This isn't a sociological
study. It reads like a postmortem on a failed
engineering project. The author calls it forensic
historiography. OK, so what does that mean? What
are we mixing together here? It's archival science,
but then it's layered with systems engineering
and even geological data. It's a really unusual
combination. The core premise, then, is that
the whole colonial slave system was launched
without a valid charter. Right. The text actually
makes this. really explicit comparison to the
modern NHS IT disaster in the UK. Which, for
anyone who doesn't know, was just a legendary
failure, an attempt to digitize medical records
that completely collapsed. A total collapse.
And this source argues the project of colonization
failed for the same reason. It launched without
a valid project charter. That foundational document.
Yeah. The document that authorizes a project
and, crucially, defines its stakeholders. And
that phase, the stakeholder identification, it
was just skipped. Because the primary stakeholders,
the enslaved people, were classified as inventory.
They weren't people in the system's logic. right
there is the safety engineering crisis. The whole
thing was running on corrupted data. So by denying
the sovereignty of the human subject, the project
violated what the author calls natural law safety
protocols. And it just couldn't handle the load.
The logistical complexity of the Atlantic trade,
the Pacific blackbirding migrations, it completely
outstripped the administrative capacity to manage
it. It was bugged from the start. Absolutely.
And this is where the forensic part really comes
in. The source claims that because the administration
was so overwhelmed that the paperwork. The proof
of ownership. The actual proof is literally missing.
It points to a specific event. The storm. The
storm. A huge shipment of records from the Danish
West Indies in 1921. Those records plus archives
from the Pacific trade were all lost at sea.
So what was actually on that ship? I mean, what
kind of records are we talking about? Everything.
Everything that mattered legally. Lists of bonds,
debt lists, reckonings of slaves sold. In legal
terms, the ship. was carrying the receipts. Okay,
I think I'm getting the aha moment here. It's
a loophole. It's like if a bank loses your mortgage
paperwork. That is the perfect analogy. That's
the core argument. They can't foreclose. They
can't. If the creditor, the colonial power, cannot
produce the debt note because it's at the bottom
of the ocean, the debt is unenforceable. So the
image of the slave, as the text calls it, is
like an invalid file format. It just won't load.
And because district ownership can't be proven,
the status of the individual defaults back to
its original setting, sovereignty. The ocean
is a giant delete button. But the source zooms
out from there, right? It connects this lost
data to the industry itself. It talks about the
ores of America. Yeah, it's a metaphor for the
heavy extractive industries, iron, manganese,
platinum. This whole industrial model is described
as a sinking ship moving towards retirement.
So the project was built to support this heavy
extraction, but that whole economic model is
itself physically sinking. Precisely. Which,
you know, leads to the question of succession.
Who inherits what's left when that ship goes
down? And the source has an answer. It does.
It points to all who weathered the storm. And
that phrase does double duty here. It means the
actual tropical storm that wiped the records.
And the metaphorical storm of survival. It's
almost an evolutionary argument. Just as a forest
is designed to survive a hurricane, the visible
minority, the descendants of this systemic failure,
they validated their own sovereignty through
resilience. By surviving the failure of the project,
they became the rightful owners of the charter.
That's the logic. It's a fascinating inversion.
It really is. We usually see lost records as
a tragedy, you know, a gap in our memory. But
this argues that the lost memory is actually
a clean slate. It reframes the loss as a form
of liberation. The unhappening isn't about forgetting.
It's about realizing the contract was voided
by, well, an act of nature. Which leaves us with
a final thought for you to chew on. If civilization
is just one big project and the original paperwork
proving ownership was destroyed in a storm, does
that mean the charter has always belonged to
the people who survived the disaster? Thanks
for diving in with us.