Malcolm Gladwell writes in his best seller, Outliers: The Story of Success, that our individual successes "are products of our history and community, of opportunity and legacy." And he uses his family history to prove his point.
Gladwell writes, "My great-great-great-grandmother was bought [by William Ford] at Alligator Pond [a slave market on the south coast of Jamaica]. That act, in turn, gave her son John Ford, the privilege of a skin color that spared him a life of slavery. The culture of possibility that [his grandmother] Daisy Ford embraced and put to use so brilliantly on behalf of her daughters was passed on to her by the peculiarities of the West Indian social structure. And my mother's education was the product of the riots of 1937 and the industriousness of Mr. Chance. These were history's gifts to my family."
No less than three members of the extended Ford family ended up winning Rhodes Scholarships. Gladwell's aunt [his mother's sister], won what was called a Centenary Scholarship that had been established one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It was reserved for the graduates of public elementary schools, and, in a measure of how deeply the British felt about honoring the memory of abolition, there was a total of one Centenary scholarship awarded every year for the whole island, with the prize going to the top girl and the top boy in alternating years. His aunt was lucky. That forced his grandmother Daisy to borrow money from Mr. Chance, a local store owner, to secure the funds necessary to send his mother to the University of London in England with her sister.
Looking back into history, blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of more than ten to one and there were few, if any, marriageable white women. As a result, the majority of white men in the West Indies had black or brown mistresses. Mulatto women were prized as mistresses, and their children, one shade lighter in turn, moved still further up the social and economic ladder.
A brutal suppression of a rebellion in colonial Jamaica happened in 1865. The British governor, Edward Eye, had hundreds of Jamaicans killed or executed, hundreds more flogged, and even more homes and huts burnt down. When the news reached Britain, prominent citizens organized a Jamaica Committee demanding that the governor be recalled and prosecuted for murder. The committee was headed by John Stuart Mill with other prominent members including Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin and Henry Fawcett, a professor of political economy at Cambridge.
On the opposing side defending the governor was another committee. This one was headed by Thomas Carlyle. On this committee were men recognized as some of the leading humanitarians and literary figures of the day: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson and Charles Kingsley. Mill and Carlyle were squaring off in England after a similar debate here in America had been resolved by a war--a war whose dividing lines represented a similar alignment of forces.
Adam Smith told us that we are equal because we share the same human nature. At a time when some races of men were thought inherently inferior, he put it this way: "The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of."
Malcolm Gladwell's family history is proof that human beings flourish in liberty and languish when they are treated like chattel. The most important resource for economic advancement is human and social capital--the knowledge, skills, and habits that make people productive.
Sources: Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success and
"The Not So Dismal Science: Humanitarians vs. Economists" by William McGurn, VP, News Corporation