The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why It Exists, and How It May Be ExtinguishedCarey, Henry Charles
History
The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign: Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished
Carey, Henry Charles
Labor; Slave trade; Slavery; Slavery -- United States; Tariff -- United States; Working class
The difference between an absentee landlord expending at a distance
all his rents, and a resident one distributing it again among his
tenants in exchange for services, and the difference in the value of
the products of the land resulting from proximity to market, are so
well exhibited in the following passage from a recent work on India,
that the reader cannot fail to profit by its perusal:--
"The great part of the wheat, grain, and other exportable land
produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is
drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border
upon them; and _par consequent_, the price has been rapidly
increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the
soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a
distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as
bad as it is in the parts of Bundelcund that I came over, no net
surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present
state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land
produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what
is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajahs of these
Bundelcund states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs
expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public
establishments of one kind or other; and as the essential articles of
subsistence, _wheat_ and _grain, &c._, which are produced in their
own districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient
for the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from
distant territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of
bullocks, because there is no road from the districts whence they
obtain it, over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety;
and as this mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the
produce, when it reaches the capitals, around which these local
establishments are concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a
price equal to the collective cost of purchasing and bringing this
substance from the most distant districts, to which they are at any
time obliged to have recourse for a supply, or they will not be
supplied; and as there cannot be two prices for the same thing in the
same market, the wheat and grain produced in the neighbourhood of one
of these Bundelcund capitals, fetch as high a price there as that
brought from the most remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda
river; while it costs comparatively nothing to bring it from the
former lands to the markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate
of rent much greater compared with their natural powers of fertility
than those of the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for
these markets or capitals; and as all the lands are the property of
the Rajahs, they draw all these rents as revenue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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