Summary
A new book, Ricardo’s Dream by Nat Dyer, reveals that Sir Isaac Newton’s wealth was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade during his tenure as master of the mint at the Bank of England.
Newton profited from gold mined by enslaved Africans in Brazil, much of which was converted into British currency under his oversight, earning him a fee for each coin minted.
While Newton’s scientific legacy remains untarnished, the book highlights his financial entanglement with slavery, a common thread among Britain’s banking and finance elites of the era.
Nah, by their standards, he was a colossal piece of crap too. He was very much disliked. He was known to be humorless and just kind of a jerk overall. He was also pretty useless a lot of the time. He was elected to parliament and only spoke one time during his tenure there. He said, “the window needs closing.” Really.
And then when he took over the mint, he was just ruthless in prosecuting anyone he could for any reason he could find. He had a witch hunt for counterfeiters after there was a change in coinage. It was pretty nuts. So yeah, he was always a piece of shit. This just makes him a bigger piece of shit.
Ok, but I think the point is to judge him by the standards of the time. That might still label him a jerk, and so be it.
Maybe he was a neuro-diverse individual who saw little value in “people problems” and was only interested in maths and science. Today, we’d show more understanding to that, but we don’t know. All we can say was he was a jerk in the eyes of those around him.
That is not an excuse for his witch hunt. And it was a witch hunt by the standards of the time, although they wouldn’t have called it that obviously. He ruined people’s lives. He literally got people executed. One was certainly guilty of counterfeiting, but he also just made a list of suspects when he was put in charge of the mint and went after them McCarthy style. You cannot argue that drawing up lists of people and having them rounded up on spurious charges based on a list of people you suspected might have been guilty was the norm then because it really wasn’t.
Also, why should we judge him by the standards of the time? It was essentially “standard” for nobles to rape children who were put into arranged marriages with them because those children were considered property and brood mares all over the place and not just in the Western world. I sure as fuck judge Muhammad for marrying a six-year-old and raping her when she was nine. I don’t care if that was the standard at the time. It’s fucking disgusting.
It sounds like your point is that we should be context-aware. By being context-aware, we could avoid judging someone unfairly, such as someone who was neuro-diverse. It sounds like you really value accuracy in assessments. It also sounds like you’re saying that judging someone from one’s time with the standards of one’s time is more accurate than judging someone from the past with the standards of one’s time. If so, would you say people from our time accurately judge Donald Trump? Would you say there is consensus about how to judge Donald Trump? In other words, is there consensus in the standards of our time? Zooming out a little bit, if we are truly context-aware, would we not have to judge context-awareness itself as a reflection of who we are?
Damn, and I thought he was just a piece of shit for inventing calculus