Summary
A new book, Ricardo’s Dream by Nat Dyer, reveals that Sir Isaac Newton’s wealth was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade during his tenure as master of the mint at the Bank of England.
Newton profited from gold mined by enslaved Africans in Brazil, much of which was converted into British currency under his oversight, earning him a fee for each coin minted.
While Newton’s scientific legacy remains untarnished, the book highlights his financial entanglement with slavery, a common thread among Britain’s banking and finance elites of the era.
Ok, but what do you want anyone to do about it? The guy has been dead for hundreds of years and we can’t just pretend that gravity and calculus don’t exist because he was a dick.
People don’t just see Issac Newton as an important scientific contributor. They idolize him. Same for people like Thomas Jefferson. Appreciating history means understanding the full range of the people involved. When things like this are downplayed, it gives in to a narrative of history that supports terrible policies today.
I don’t think anyone is idolizing him because of slavery.
I suspect most people would be hard pressed to name anything about him other than gravity.
Newton wasn’t the only one who developed calculus. Leibnitz developed it independently around the same time, and both of them had prior mathematicians’ work to base their work on. If it weren’t for Newton, we would still have calculus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus
That said, we can acknowledge Newton’s mathematical and scientific achievements while still acknowledging problematic or terrible things that he also did. We don’t need to whitewash history in order to recognize someone’s achievements.