Sir Isaac Newton invested in the Slave Trade...

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Isaac Newton invested in the Slave Trade and lost a third of his fortune...

Isaac Newton’s wealth ‘intimately connected’ with slavery, author says

Scientist and banker benefited from gold mined primarily by enslaved Africans in Brazil, book claims

www.theguardian.com

During the scientist’s 30-year tenure at the mint, the book outlines, Newton oversaw an influx of gold mined primarily by enslaved Africans in Brazil. And as master of the mint, he took a small fee for every coin that was minted.

 

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How Isaac Newton Lost $3 Million Dollars in the “South Sea Bubble” of 1720: Even Geniuses Can’t Prevail Against the Machinations of the Markets

The Aristotelian notion of “man” as a “rational animal” has seen its share of detractors, from the Cynics to Bertrand Russell to nearly the whole of Poststructuralist thought.

www.openculture.com

the great physicist muttered that he ‘could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.’

 

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Newton ran the Royal society like his chiefdom...

https://www.bigissuenorth.com/features/2021/11/isaac-newtons-london-life/


Soon after he arrived at the Mint, Newton’s ruthless efficiency made him unpopular with his staff. Determined to run a profitable business, he weeded out corrupt practices and introduced time and motion studies that increased productivity rates but forced workers to repeat monotonous and dangerous tasks at high speed. By introducing milled edges on coins, Newton made forgery more difficult, and he pursued counterfeiters relentlessly, even buying disguises for trusted employees to infiltrate the local taverns and identify criminals, some of whom were sent to the gallows. Newton revamped England’s coinage system, but as so often happens, the rich became richer and the poor even poorer.

Newton ruled similarly autocratically at the Royal Society, where he over-rode opposition to secure new premises and stacked committees in his own favour. Determined to exclude his arch-rival, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, Newton recruited the help of Princess Caroline. A superb mediator with a clear grasp of their intellectual conflicts, Caroline ridiculed their mutual obstinacy. “But great men are like women, who never give up their lovers except with the utmost chagrin and mortal anger. And that, gentlemen, is where your opinions have got to.”