Okra belongs to an illustrious family of plants (Malvaceae), which includes such famous members as cotton, cacao, hibiscus and dur-ian. It probably originated in North-eastern Africa (today's Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan), although there is a strong contending theory that traces its origin to South-east Asia and India." According to the dominant theory, okra was domesticated in North-eastern Africa and spread north (the Mediterranean), east (the Middle East, South Asia, China and Japan), and west (West Africa). Korea, sadly, missed out. Okra was brought to the US and the rest of the Americas by enslaved Africans, together with crops like watermelon, peanuts, rice, sesame, black-eyed peas and bananas (both the dessert banana, commonly known as banana', and the plantain, the so-called cooking banana - see 'Banana').« The name is a giveaway. The word 'okra' is a derivation from Igbo, one of the main languages of today's Nigeria. 'Gumbo', another common name for the vegetable (as well as the dish in which it is the crucial ingredient) in the US, comes from the languages of Central and South-eastern Africa.

Enslavement of Africans started on an industrial scale when Europeans occupied the New World. Having nearly wiped out the native population (not only through genocide but also by bring. ing over new pathogens), they desperately needed replacement workers - at the lowest possible prices. Over 12 million Africans were captured by slave traders. Of these, at least 2 million perished during the process of enslavement - the initial process of capture and captivity in Africa, the atrocious Atlantic crossing (called the Middle Passage) and imprisonment in 'seasoning camps' in the Americas, where the captured Africans were broken into submission before they were sold off. Without these enslaved Africans and their descendants, the European capitalist countries could not have had access to cheap resources that fed their factories, banks and workers - gold, silver, cotton, sugar, indigo, rubber and what have you. In particular, without these people, the US could not have become the economic superpower that it is today. And this is not a rhetorical statement.

In 1791, the enslaved people of St Domingue, today's Haiti, rose against French sugar plantation owners, under the brilliant military leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a former slave himself. Louver-ture was captured by the French in 1802 and shipped to France, where he died in captivity a year later. But, in 1804, the enslaved people of St Domingue finally expelled the French and declared independence, with Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had succeeded Louverture as the leader, at the helm. Upon its foundation, Haiti abolished slavery, becoming the first country ever to do so in human history. The Haitian revolution had some immediate impacts on the US economy. When the revolt started, a lot of French sugar plantation owners ran away to what is today the US state of Louisiana. It was then a French territory and also very suitable for growing sugar. They brought over enslaved people who were skilled in sugar-growing and -processing, as well as better farming and processing technologies, taking Louisiana's sugar industry to another level. Five decades later, Louisiana was producing a quarter of the world's cane-sugar supply.

But the most far-reaching - if totally unintended - impact of the Haitian revolution was the so-called Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The bloody nose that he got from the Haitian revolution made Napoleon, the then ruler of France, decide to disengage from the Americas, especially from the country's North American territorial possession. The territory, then called Louisiane, named after Louis XIV,* covered about one-third of current US territory, spanning roughly from Montana in the north-west and the US state of Louisiana in the south-east. The US had been negotiating with France to buy the port of New Orleans and what is now the US state of Florida for a few years previously, but, when he decided to quit the Americas, Napoleon offered to 'sell'* all of Louisiana to the US. With the Louisiana Purchase, US territory more or less doubled instantly. Initially, mining was the main activity in the new territory. But, as the century progressed and more and more European settlers moved to start farming, the territory turned into the country's (and the rest of the world's) breadbasket, thanks to the huge tracts of the fertile, flat land that it contained (see 'Rye'). This settlement, however, caused untold misery among Native Americans. They were driven off their ancestral lands. Many of them ended up in 'reservations', where they suffered poverty and marginalization.

Free-market enthusiasts have often defended capitalism using the language of freedom. The Americans have prided themselves for possessing a 'free enterprise' system. The title of the most influential book by Milton Friedman, the free-market guru, and his wife Rose Friedman is Free to Choose. The leading free-market think-tanks regularly publish indexes of economic freedom - Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom and Cato Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index are the most well-known ones. The freedom that free-market advocates value is, however, a very narrow one. First, it is freedom in the economic sphere - freedom for businesses to produce and sell what they find most profitable, freedom for workers to choose their occupations, freedom for consumers to buy what they want. If other freedoms - political or social freedoms - clash with economic freedom, free-market economists have no hesitation in putting the latter first. This is why Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek openly supported the murderous military dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. They saw the free-market policies under Pinochet, implemented by the so-called 'Chicago Boys',* as defending economic freedom against 'socialist' policies of Salvador Allende (they weren't that socialis