Elihu Yale was not only a slave owner but was also a
slave trader. He made money from buying and selling human beings.
Elihu Yale (5 April 1649 – 8 July 1721) was an American
born British merchant, slave trader, President of the East India Company
settlement in Fort St. George, at Madras, and a benefactor of the Collegiate
School in the Colony of Connecticut, which in 1718 was renamed Yale College in
his honor.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, to David Yale (1613–1690)
and Ursula Knight, he was the grandson of Ann Lloyd (1591–1659), who after the
death of her first husband, Thomas Yale (1587–1619) in Chester, Cheshire,
England, married Governor Theophilus Eaton (1590–1658) of New Haven Colony.
The Yale family left Boston and returned to England when
Elihu was three years old and he grew up going to school in London.
For 20 years Yale served the Honourable East India
Company. In 1684 he became the first president of Fort St. George, the
company’s post at Madras (now Chennai), India.
He succeeded a number of agents from Andrew Cogan to
William Gyfford. Yale was instrumental in the development of the Government
General Hospital, housed at Fort St. George
Yale amassed a fortune while working for the company,
largely through secret contracts with Madras merchants, against the East India
Company’s directive. By 1692, his repeated flouting of East India Company
regulations and growing embarrassment at his illegal profiteering resulted in
his being relieved of the post of governor.
Yale returned to Britain in 1699. He spent the rest of
his life at Plas Grono in Wales, a mansion bought by his father, or at his
house in London, spending liberally the considerable wealth he had accumulated.
Yale’s ancestry can be traced back to the family estate
at Plas yn Iâl near the village of Llandegla in Wales.
The history of slavery spans many cultures,
nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. However,
the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in
different systems of slavery in different times and places.
Slavery occurs relatively rarely among hunter-gatherer
populations because it develops under conditions of social stratification. Slavery
operated in the first civilizations (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, which dates
back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi
(c. 1860 BCE), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery became
common within much of Europe during the Early Middle Ages and it continued into
the following centuries.
The Byzantine–Ottoman wars (1265–1479) and the Ottoman
wars in Europe (14th to 20th centuries) resulted in the capture of large
numbers of Christian slaves. The Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British
and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic
slave trade, especially after 1600. The Republic of Ragusa became the first
European country to ban the slave trade in 1416. In modern times Denmark-Norway
abolished the trade in 1802.
Although slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world
(with the exception of penal labor), human trafficking remains an international
problem and an estimated 25-40 million people were enslaved as of 2013, the
majority in Asia. During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were
taken into slavery. Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic
child-slavery and -trafficking on cacao plantations in West Africa.
Slavery in the 21st century continues, with the top ten
countries with the highest prevalence according to the Global Slavery Index
being North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Afghanistan,
Mauritania, South Sudan, Pakistan, Cambodia and Iran.
Although Mauritania
criminalized slavery in August 2007, up to an estimated 600,000 men, women and
children, 20% of the population of Mauritania, are currently enslaved, many
used as bonded labor.
Islamist quasi-states such as the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant and Boko Haram have abducted and enslaved women and children
(often to serve as sex slaves).
Since we are changing and erasing history, let’s continue
with Yale University.
