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.   

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