I'm currently reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green and came across the following passage (emphasis mine):
Seventeenth-century Europe—with not just Newton and Hooke, but also Boyle and Galileo and Gascoigne and Pascal—saw so many important scientific and mathematical breakthroughs not because the people born in that time and place happened to be unusually smart, but because the analytic system of the scientific revolution was emerging, and because institutions like the Royal Society allowed well-educated elites to learn from one another more efficiently, and also because Europe was suddenly and unprecedentedly rich. It's no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labor.
I've never considered the impact of slavery on the scientific revolution specifically and was curious to know more about it.
There are lots of articles one can find on the internet that state that slavery was not as profitable as people claim. Those articles are correct if one is parsing out very specific economic definitions to make their point fit to account for cost. But one can do that with any industry. One can look at a car and see a vehicle on a car lot, or one can see the mining of metals needed, the rubber, the shipping, the insuring of the transportation of these materials, etc in the cost of the car. When one looks at slavery in this way while also keeping in mind that scientific progress has depended on expanding imperial and economic motives then it is clear that the scientific revolution and the Atlantic Slave Trade are inextricably tied in perpetuity.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-slavery-helped-build-a-world-economy
https://africanamericangolfersdigest.com/15-major-corporations-you-never-knew-profited-from-slavery/
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493