‘The Colour of Money’, explores how this shift in the attitudes of the day can be largely attributed to the colonial powers’ desire to justify the slave trade. Professor James Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York and winner of the 1975 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for his book “Black and White: The Negro and English Society” explains, “the British don’t become slave traders and slavers because they are racist; they became racist because they use slaves for great profit in the Americas and devise a set of attitudes towards black people that justifies what they’ve done. The real engine behind the slave system is economics.” It was through this need to legitimise the exploitation of Africans for the completion of colonial projects and ultimately for profit that the notion of a hierarchy of separate human races was effectively invented; a notion which subsequently seeped into social attitudes, allowing the subjugation and dehumanisation of black Africans to continue and prosper as an ‘acceptable’ part of commerce through the centuries which followed.
