[rerevisionist]

When I was in Australia, I remember a tourist trip round a gold rush site somewhere in the Perth (western Australia) area. Part of the information that surfaced was that, in fact, even men who made notable discoveries got very little money for it. Something similar was true in South Africa. For example, someone who found the biggest ever gold nugget ended up owning his own pub. Similarly with diamonds. It appears (sigh) that Jews controlled the assaying and presumably helped decide on the 'rewards'. There's an interesting analogy with the US frontier moving west, which was in fact planned pretty carefully. (See our forum on US and revolution and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) Click - look for American West)

Something I've often noticed with war films - or at least those by the victors - is the way the new inductees chatter and gossip and wonder about their new adventures - they are presented as completely naive about what's being planned for them. And this certainly looks like a realistic presentation. No doubt kids going to school for the first time are similarly innocent of the planning that preceded them.

I'm leading up here to the Spanish and Portuguese empires - the early ones, in the Americas. (Incidentally - can someone explain why Portugal and Spain are separate? There seems no obvious geographical reason).

These of course have not been treated very fairly by English-speaking historians. And probably still aren't, though the flavour of bias must have changed. It's a new thing to investigate the Jewish part in the slave trade in the USA, and surely there may be something similar to be rediscovered in the Latin American empires. Slavery in the mines must have been terrible ... and yet, in a TV presentation of Potosi by Niall Ferguson (a Rothschild apologist) it was stated that one in five miners died - a figure that can't differ much from pre-industrial mining anywhere. Maybe the 'black legend' is a reality.

Another thing is that the decline of Spain is always, by Britons, matched up with (1) Catholic fanaticism, notably the Inquisition, and (2) hoarding of gold and silver as a policy - it was not to be spent outside Spain.

It struck me that maybe there was Jewish involvement, maybe secret, since this was at and after the Reconquista. Maybe the reason gold wasn't used in trade by Spaniards was because they mysteriously couldn't get their hands on it?

[NB the above is mostly from memory - some detail may be wrong]

[FirstClassSkeptic]

The first settlers at Jamestown, Virginia came to get the gold that they had been told was there in abundance. Most of them were gentleman dandies type of British, who were worthless in frontier life. I wish I could find my old history book that talked about that.

[rerevisionist]

There's a similar comment, I think in Bagehot's English Constitution, on a couple in Australia, who had to try to live in their carriage. ('Carriage folk' being people able to afford a relatively luxurious horse-drawn carriage).

I've just found the passage online! There is a story that among
the first settlers in Western Australia, some, who were rich, took out
labourers at their own expense, and also carriages to ride in. But soon
they had to try if they could live in the carriages. Before the masters’
houses were built, the labourers had gone off — they were building
houses and cultivating land for themselves, and the masters were left to
sit in their carriages.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Similar things happened in America. A lot of White slaves were brought over. Children were grabbed from the street and from orphanages. Many of these escaped, as did black slaves, because there was so much land to hide in. Also, the Revolutionary war gave cover for them. I think, many escaped at that time. They say, many lived with the indians, but I think that is a romantic view, because most indians killed a White on sight.