The aim of plantation schooling was never to make the enslaved, the emancipated, or the indentured the owners of capital or the landlords of profits. Inequality remains the root of domination. The question of social inequality and redistribution, from Marx to Stiglitz (2012) and Piketty (2015), has been posed primarily in terms of opposition between capital and labour, profits and wages, and labour and capital since the industrial revolution (1770–1840) and its carter—the transatlantic slave trade. After slavery and indentureship, schooling for those whom the plantocracy had hoped would continue to be labourers culminated in widespread epistemic poverty with waves of social inequality rippling into the present. This was irreconcilable with the opulence which their labour fashioned in England during the industrial revolution.
