Opening:
When, in the spring of 1636, Miles Morgan, a 20-year-old Englishman, was Jewish, walking down the stairs of the steamship Mary and setting foot in the North American port city of Boston, he, like countless immigrants who had poured into the land, looked forward to a new world where his hard work could be exchanged for a happy life for his wife and children.
I believe that at the moment when he stepped on the land of America, even if God walked up to him and told him that his Morgan family would have a rich country in the future and influence the whole United States and even the world, it is estimated that he would not dare to think about it.
So how did the Morgan family grow step by step from a young man who didn't mix well in the country to a big family that can influence the world today?
The story of all this begins when Miles Morgan walks out of the harbor and looks at the new world in front of him with his hands on his hips.
The United States on the Margins and the Marginal Miles Morgan:
At the beginning of the 17th century, the Americas were still the periphery of the world, and the Americas had no qualifications to actively participate in all the things that happened in the world, and it was just a colony and exile place called the "New World".
At that time, even the United States did not exist, the Industrial Revolution was far from breaking out, and seafaring, exploration, trade, plunder, enslavement, colonization, and genocide were still the main theme of the time.
America is only one of the colonies of European countries, and of course belongs to the periphery of the world.
When we travel back in time and space to the point in time when Miles Morgan set foot on American soil, and pause time, we can see that the Inca civilization and Aztec civilization in the Americas have died out for nearly a hundred years under the virus and massacre brought by the Spanish colonizers. The last remaining Mayan civilization has moved into the rainforest, fighting a grueling guerrilla war against the Spanish colonizers.
And after 61 years, the last Mayan city-state, Peténza, will also be destroyed by the Spanish cannons. The three major civilizations of the Americas were completely wiped out by the colonizers.
But the benefits of this atrocity against humanity were abundant, and in the 16th century alone, Spain harvested about $1.5 trillion in gold and silver equivalent to 1990 prices from its colonization and discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, such as the Potosí silver mines.
The famous Potosí silver mine, discovered by the Spanish in 1545, supplied Spain with nearly 40,000 tons of silver over the next two centuries. By the end of the 18th century, 150,000 tons of silver had been shipped from the mine.
At the same time, the Spaniards pioneered the transportation of black slaves from Africa to the Americas since 1502. This move did bring enough ultra-cheap expendable labor to its own plantations, and it brought itself very rich bloody rewards.
The plundering of all this wealth was naturally manifested in national strength, which was the fundamental reason why Spain could have an invincible arma at that time. The excess gains from crimes against humanity underpinned Spain's maritime hegemony at the time.
Of course, the Armada also gave Spain enough in return, and between 1545 and 1560, the Armada brought back 5.5 tons of gold and 246 tons of silver.
And all this greatly stimulated the war criminals in Europe, who flocked to the world like crazy and began to wage war with each other while robbing and dividing up the world's wealth.
But five expeditions to the British Isles took a heavy toll on the Armada, and the Dutch destroyed the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Downs in 1639. The Dutch took over as maritime supremacy, monopolizing trade with China, Japan, India, Ceylon and the Spice Islands. Britain and France also rose rapidly, carving up a large number of colonies in North America. Portugal was actively involved in the slave trade, supplying slaves to the nascent maritime hegemony.
The Great Age of Magnificent but Bloody and Anti-Humanity:
The British tobacco and cotton plantations in North America, now the American colonies, needed a large number of men, and the French needed a large number of slaves to serve their sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. The labor-intensity of these plantations was such that it could even lead to a net increase of minus 5% in the slave population at the time. After all, there were so many plantations, and even if the black slaves had four or five births per family, there were not many dead slaves.
As a result, the slave trade became a pillar industry at the time. According to Patrick Manning, between the 16th and 19th centuries, about 12 million slaves entered the triangular slave trade, about 1.5 million died on ships, and about 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas.
This is a very large number, compared to the backward productivity and technology at that time, the capture of slaves, centralized imprisonment and transportation are not so easy things, it is difficult for us to imagine the "hardship" and "pay" of modern people, and it is difficult to understand that in the era when there is no industrialization to improve efficiency, basically can only rely on manpower, to capture 12 million people, how much time and cost investment is needed, not to mention that behind this is hidden that we can not count the Africans who have lost their lives because of the involvement of this "cause", Maybe it will be several times that number.
In this regard, as an aborigine, I just want to use an old word to evaluate this history, which is called "madness".
This was the A side of the world in which Miles Morgan lived at that time, and the B side of the world at that time belonged to China.
The large quantities of silver produced by the aforementioned Mexican silver mines, together with the silver mines of Peru, accounted for 80% of the world's silver production at the time. And 30% of the world's silver goes to China. Because Chinese porcelain, silk, and tea at that time were luxury and necessities for Europe, and were limited to those who had shaped their own identity by name, bloodline, and strange behavior that separated them from the common people, and the so-called European aristocracy was entitled to enjoy them. They were so valuable that Europeans had to spend large quantities of silver on these products, which were beyond the productivity of Europe at the time. All this indirectly gave birth to the so-called Age of Discovery.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, China received an average of 100 tons of silver per year on these trades. At the end of the 16th century, every household in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River had an average of 100 taels of silver.
In a way, China was indeed the center of the world at that time.
However, it is a pity that China at that time did not have the force to deter the world, and its developed culture and economy could not be transformed into a force to protect itself, so it was also doomed to suffer disasters because of its wealth and development. History since then has borne this out. I believe that as Chinese, everyone should be able to deeply understand this.
The historical fact that China is the center of the world has actually had a very significant, even decisive, impact on the trend of the whole world since then, and this influence actually plays a pivotal role in this series of stories. As the declining part of the past history of falling in the east and rising in the west, it has actually been holding up the rising part. It's just that we can only press these contents today and expand them in detail later.
On the other hand, although 30% of the silver flowed into China at that time, we have to ask, where did the remaining 70% of silver and other precious metals go?
I'm afraid this question is not difficult to answer.
Since the Europeans took control of these colonies, the wealth plundered from the colonies was naturally in the hands of the Europeans. So it is clear that in addition to the 30% of the Europeans who traded with China, the remaining 70% of the silver and gold naturally flowed into the triangular slave trade on the one hand, and precipitated to Europe at that time.
The vast wealth and the private ownership of property promised by the old European aristocracy in order to allow the outlaws to venture to the sea gave rise to a new class, and a new bourgeoisie between the capitalists of today and the old aristocracy of the past developed in Europe.
The emergence of a new economic base has naturally led to changes in the superstructure. Europe, with the rapid accumulation of homegrown wealth brought about by this global crime against humanity, has begun to derive two crucial phenomena.
One is that in 1517, Martin Luther wrote the "Ninety-Five Theses" based on the ideas of his predecessors, opposing the papal see's sale of indulgences and beginning to emphasize justification by faith. That is, as long as a believer believes in God, then he can also receive divine revelation by reading the Bible himself.
This undoubtedly fundamentally shook the theocracy of the Holy See at that time, and prepared the minds for the liberation of Europeans from theocratic slavery as individuals. Protestantism was born. And it is precisely because of the birth of Protestantism and the subsequent branch of Protestantism, that is, the religious oppression of Puritanism, that the Puritans of the Mayflower set off from Europe to the New World to find the other side of life, and then gradually developed the historical context of the United States, laying the foreshadowing of history.
The other is that after the Black Death, due to the sharp decline in the number of labor in Europe, the nobles had to arouse the enthusiasm of the laborers by freeing serfs to ensure that their territories could still have enough production to support themselves.
At the same time, the aforementioned accumulation of wealth made the bourgeoisie, in addition to external adventures, and the internal allocation of industries also became a rigid necessity, and the factory handicraft industry flourished in the 16th century.
As soon as the citizens of Chengguan combined the attitude of free labor with the money in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist relations of production came to fruition.
Based on this, it inevitably summons its own productive forces and superstructure. As a result, there was a widespread trend of individualism in Europe, and except for the old aristocracy, every European began to yearn for a future in which they could get rid of theocracy, monarchy, and aristocratic privileges and obtain individual freedom. Eventually, Descartes summed up the phrase "I think subjectivity", which is the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am". It's just that this sentence appeared five years after Miles Morgan stood in Boston Harbor.
The curtain of the era slowly opened on the journey to the New World:
At that time, the backward productive forces and the society still dominated by the backward aristocracy made life very difficult for the people of Europe at the bottom. Even in the Victorian era, at the height of Britain, the survival of British workers was still in doubt, let alone the people at the bottom of Europe two hundred years ago.
As a result, many low-level people in Europe who were not doing well boarded the ship to the American continent. After all, in their opinion, staying in Europe is nothing more than struggling, it is better to go to the New World to fight, maybe they can still soar.
Miles Morgan was in such a magnificent era.
During his childhood, England was under James I, and when Miles was 9 years old, England came to the time of Charles I's rule.
These two emperors, the former claimed to be the messenger of God, advocating the divine right of kings, which pitted the internal ruling class against each other because of the struggle for divine power and political power. The latter succeeded to the throne in the middle of the "Thirty Years' War", the first major melee in Europe, and then engaged in a lot of riotous operations, and finally triggered the English Civil War, which is known as the "Bishops' War", and was guillotined, becoming the first king in European history to be publicly executed.
All in all, Myers is in a chaotic, turbulent and precarious Britain. And he himself is not a dignitary in the UK, he is just a very inconspicuous character among the countless marginal figures in the UK, and it may be very difficult to even survive. All the grandeur of colonization, plunder, wealth, fame, etc., had nothing to do with his life. But these stories, especially those about going to sea to the New World, offer a possibility for those who could not survive or who suffered various calamities, such as religious persecution.
For this possibility, on September 6, 1620, a ship carrying 35 Puritans, 53 artisans, fishermen, poor peasants, and 14 white slaves departed from Plymouth, England, and arrived in present-day Massachusetts on November 21 of that year.
I think the name of this ship has become a household name with the globalization of US imperialism, and it is the Mayflower.
As a result, the curtain of another era was slowly opened, and a great drama about the succession of imperialist hegemony, the prosperity of industrial capital leading to two world wars, and the subsequent rise of financial capital as the decisive global dominant force was also staged on the world stage one by one, until the current century of changes in which we are now located.
And the first protagonist of our series of stories about how financial hegemony was born in the United States and how it evolved on Wall Street to the point where it is today, the Morgan family, its family ancestor, Miles Morgan, was ignorantly set foot on this stage in the most marginal wilderness at that time as a marginal person in order to get a better life.
And then with his surname, together with countless Wall Street families and countless Jewish capital, he walked step by step to the center of the historical stage with the rise of hegemony, and jointly engraved a powerful and profound stroke for history, but it is also extremely worthy of everyone's reflection and vigilance.
The wheel of history is rolling forward, the general trend of history is vast, how many people have died against it, and how many people have prospered along with it. Everything seems to be predetermined, but in fact, it is all the interweaving of times and individuals.
So how did the Morgan family start from Myers, start from Boston, which had only been established for 6 years at that time, this piece of land that can be called a barren land, step by step into the torrent of the times, and become a financial giant now known as Big Mo and Little Mo in the industry? What did the family go through, what did it grasp, what it lost, and what did it achieve? What kind of reflection and vigilance will Wall Street bring to us?
All this, let's use this series to explain it to our comrades one by one. Today's story about the Morgan family is here first, if you want to know what will happen next, please pay attention first, and let's listen to the next breakdown.
We are extraterritorial compilers, comrades, see you in the next issue.