Monday, 22 June 2020
Canada: behold Prince Rupert of the Rhine, your slavery promoting founding father
This snotty looking Anglo-European
wannabe Roman figure is Rupert, original governor of the Hudson Bay Company,
the corporation that operated Canada as a commercial enterprise from 1670, its
creation, to 1870, when the corporation was effectively purchased for £300,000 ($1.5 million) by Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert%27s_Land_Act_1868).
With the exception of the East India Company,
whose employee, Henry Hudson, got remembered in the name of the Bay, there are no larger examples of the route from
colonial commerce to nationhood than
that of the corporation that became Canada. By virtue of fighting for the monarchy in the
English civil war the well-connected Rupert ( 1619-1682), originally from
Prague in Bohemia, got his name on a huge stretch of land, first inhabited and managed
by first nations, in the north of what came to be America. Rupert is unknown by the vast majority of
the inhabitants of the country that bought his entitlement, but his legacy of
empire and slavery (https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Company_of_Adventurers_Trading_to_Africa_(Cromwell_the_Great)
is not dead, as recent murders of members of Canada’s colonized communities illustrate.
Any similarity of Rupert to any current Canadian leaders is entirely
coincidental.