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Introduction

It should not have been deemed surprising when in 1977 Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations—Andrew Young, a former chief aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—asserted audaciously that London “invented” racism. Instead, the pastor-cum-diplomat was pelted ferociously in a hailstorm of invective,¹ as he backpedaled rapidly. Actually, London had a point it did not articulate: if anything, its bastard offspring in Washington, in the government the envoy represented, was probably more culpable for the continuation of this pestilence,² as it lurched into incipient being in the 1580s in what is now North Carolina and gravitated toward a model of development that diverged from those spurred by the Ottomans and Madrid, then rebelled in 1776 to ensure this putridness would endure.³ How and why this deadly process unfolded in its earliest stage rests near the heart of this book.

Still, Ambassador Young, an ordained Protestant minister, would have better served historical understanding (besides providing useful instruction to predominantly Protestant London) if he had reflected on the point that the rise of this once dissident and besieged sect in the North American settlements led to the supplanting of religion as an animating factor of society with “race,”⁴ a major theme to be explored in the pages that follow.⁵ Certainly “whiteness”—effectively, Pan-Europeanism—provided a broader base for colonialism than even the Catholicism that drove Madrid. Historian Donald Matthews has observed that white supremacy in any case—a ruling ethos in London’s settlements, then the North American Republic—had a religious cast, indicative of its tangled roots, with lynchings of Negroes emerging as a kind of sacrament.⁶

Ambassador Young would also have better served understanding if he had had the foresight to reflect the penetrating view of the eminent scholar Geraldine Heng, who has argued that at least by the thirteenth century, England had become “The First Racial State in the West,” referring to the pervasive anti-Judaism that then prevailed. And just as it became easier to impose an expansionist foreign policy that propelled colonialism, given the experience with the Crusades, likewise it became easier to impose the racism that underpinned settler colonialism and slavery, once anti-Judaism became official policy in London. As U.S. Negroes were to be treated, the Jewish community in England was said to emit a “special fetid stench,” while bearing “horns and tails” and engaging in “cannibalism.” Religion was deployed “socio-culturally” and “bio-politically” to “racialize a human group” in England in a manner eerily similar to what was to unfold in North America. Certainly, there are differences that distinguish anti-Judaism from anti-Negro bias. The persecuted in England were “unable to own land in agricultural Europe,” but in response, “Jews famously established themselves as financiers,” a status generally unavailable to Negroes, though the ban on landowning was. Interestingly, though this murderous bigotry is understandably associated with Madrid, which dramatically expelled the Jewish community in the hinge year that was 1492, it was London that was the first European country to “stigmatize Jews” as “criminals”—another parallel to U.S. Negroes—and the “first to administer the badge” this community was forced to wear. England was the first to initiate “state-sponsored efforts at conversion” and, more to the point vis-à-vis Spain: “the first to expel Jews from its national territory.” Then it was the prevailing religion, says Heng, that “supplied the theory and the state and populace supplied the praxis” of bigotry, analogous to the deployment of the “Curse of Ham” and racism targeting U.S. Negroes. Fear of “interracial sexual relations” was then the praxis in London, just like it was subsequently in Washington.⁷ Ironically and perversely, London’s earlier bigotry positioned England to capitalize upon Madrid’s later version, by appealing to Sephardim and the Jewish community more broadly that had been perniciously targeted by the Spanish Inquisition.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the predicates of the rise of England, moving from the periphery to the center (and inferentially, this is a story about their revolting spawn in North America post-1776). This is also a book about the seeds of the apocalypse, which led to the foregoing—slavery, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (and the precursors of capitalism)—planted in the long sixteenth century (roughly 1492 to 1607),⁸ which eventuated in what is euphemistically termed “modernity,” a process that reached its apogee in North America, the essential locus of this work. In these pages I seek to explain the global forces that created this catastrophe—notably for Africans and the indigenous of the Americas—and how the minor European archipelago on the fringes of the continent (the British isles) was poised to come from behind, surge ahead, and maneuver adeptly in the potent slipstream created by Spain, Portugal, the Ottomans, even the Dutch and the French, as this long century lurched to a turning point in Jamestown. Although, as noted, I posit that 1492 is the hinge moment in the rise of Western Europe, I also argue in these pages that it is important to sketch the years before this turning point, especially since it was 1453—the Ottoman Turks seizing Constantinople (today’s Istanbul)—that played a critical role in spurring Columbus’s voyage and, of course, there were other trends that led to 1453, and so on, as we march backward in time.⁹

In brief, and as shall be outlined, the Ottomans enslaved Africans and Europeans, among others, as contemporary Albania and Bosnia suggest. The Spanish, the other sixteenth-century titan, created an escape hatch by spurring the creation of a “Free African” population, which could be armed. Moreover, for 150 years until the late seventeenth century, thousands of Filipinos were enslaved by Spaniards in Mexico,¹⁰ suggesting an alternative to a bonded labor force comprised of Africans or even indigenes. That is, the substantial reliance on enslaved African labor in North America honed by London was hardly inevitable.

Florida’s first slaves came from southern Spain, though admittedly an African population existed in that part of Europe and wound up in North America. Yet at this early juncture, sixteenth-century Spanish law and custom afforded the enslaved rights not systematically enjoyed in what was to become Dixie. Moreover, Spain’s shortage of soldiers and laborers, exacerbated by a fanatical Catholicism that often barred other Europeans under the guise of religiosity—a gambit London did not indulge to the same extent—provided Africans with leverage.¹¹

However, as time passed, it was London’s model, then accelerated by Washington, that prevailed,: focusing enslavement tightly on Africans and those of even partial African ancestry, then seeking to expel “Free Negroes” to Sierra Leone and Liberia. London and Washington created a broader base for settler colonialism by way of a “white” population, based in the first instance on once warring, then migrant English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh; then expanding to include other European immigrants mobilized to confront the immense challenge delivered by rambunctious and rebellious indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans. This approach over time also allowed Washington to have allies in important nations and even colonies, providing enormous political leverage.¹²

This approach also had the added “advantage” of dulling class antagonism among settlers, who, perhaps understandably, were concerned less about the cutthroat competition delivered by an enslaved labor force and more with the real prospect of having their throats cut in the middle of the night by those very same slaves. Among the diverse settlers—Protestant and Jewish; English and Irish et al.—there was a perverse mitosis at play as these fragments cohered into a formidable whole of “whiteness,” then white supremacy, which involved class collaboration of the rankest sort between and among the wealthy and those not so endowed.

In a sense, as the Ottomans pressed westward, Madrid and Lisbon began to cross the Atlantic as a countermove by way of retreat or even as a way to gain leverage.¹³ But with the “discovery” of the Americas, leading to the ravages of the African slave trade, the Iberians, especially Spain, accumulated sufficient wealth and resources to confront their Islamic foes more effectively. ¹⁴

The toxicity of settler colonialism combined with white supremacy not only dulled class antagonism in the colonies. It also solved a domestic problem with the exporting of real and imagined dissidents. In 1549 England was rocked to its foundations by “Kett’s Revolt,” where land was at issue and warehouses were put to the torch and harbors destroyed. A result of this disorienting upheaval, according to one analysis, was to convince the yeomanry to ally with the gentry,¹⁵ a class collaborationist ethos then exported to the settlements. Assuredly, this rebellion shook England to its foundations, forcing the ruling elite to consider alternatives to the status quo, facilitating the thrust across the Atlantic. It is evident that land enclosure in England was tumultuous, making land three times more profitable, as it created disaster for the poorest, providing an incentive for them to try their luck abroad. A plot of land that once employed one or two hundred persons would—after enclosure—serve only the owner and a few shepherds.¹⁶

This vociferation was unbridled as the unsustainability of the status quo became conspicuous. Palace intrigue, a dizzying array of wars, with allies becoming enemies in a blink of an eye, the sapping spread of diseases, mass death as a veritable norm, bloodthirstiness as a way of life—all this and worse became habitual. This convinced many that taking a gamble on pioneering in the Americas was the “least bad” alternative to the status quo. Indeed, the discrediting of the status quo that was feudalism provided favorable conditions for the rise of a new system: capitalism.

As I write in 2019, there is much discussion about the purported 400th anniversary of the arrival of Africans in what is now the United States, though Africans enslaved and otherwise were present in northern Florida as early as 1565 or the area due north as early as 1526. As the following paragraphs suggest, this 1619 date is notional at best or, alternatively, seeks to understand the man without understanding the child. In my book on the seventeenth century, noted above, I wrote of the mass enslavement and genocidal impulse that ravaged Africans and indigenous Americans. That book detailed the arrival in full force of the apocalypse; the one at hand limns the precursor: the dawning of this annihilation. The sixteenth century meant the takeoff of the apocalypse, while the following century embodied the boost phase. In brief, this apocalypse spelled the devastation of multiple continents: the Americas, Australia,¹⁷ and Africa not least, all for the ultimate benefit of a relatively tiny elite in London, then Washington.

Thus, for reasons that become clearer below, the enslavement of Africans got off to a relatively “slow” start. From 1501 to 1650, a period during which Portuguese elites, at least until about 1620, and then their Dutch peers, held a dominant position in delivering transatlantic imports of captives: 726,000 Africans were dragged to the Americas, essentially to Spanish settlements and Brazil. By way of contrast, from 1650 to 1775, during London’s and Paris’s ascendancy and the concomitant accelerated development of sugar and tobacco, about 4.8 million Africans were brought to the Americas. Then, for the next century or so, until 1866, almost 5.1 million manacled Africans were brought to the region, at a time when the republicans in North America played a preeminent role in this dirty business. Similarly, at the time of the European invasion of the Americas, there were many millions of inhabitants of these continents, but between 1520 and 1620 the Aztecs and Incas, two of the major indigenous groupings, lost about 90 percent of their populations. In short, the late seventeenth century marked the ascendancy of the apocalypse, and the late sixteenth century marked the time when apocalypse was approaching in seven-league boots.¹⁸ Yet the holocaust did not conclude in the seventeenth century, as ghastly as it was. The writer Eduardo Galeano argues that in three centuries, beginning in the 1500s, the “Cerro Rico” alone, one region in South America, “consumed eight million lives.”¹⁹ Thus, due north in California, the indigenous population was about 150,000 in 1846 at the onset of the U.S. occupation, but it was a mere 16,000 by 1890,²⁰ a direct result of a policy that one scholar has termed “genocide.”²¹

IN LATE 1526 IN WHAT is now South Carolina, perhaps closer to what is now Sapelo Island, Georgia, in what was to be the case for centuries to come, enslaved Africans were on the warpath, along with their indigenous comrades. The Africans had escaped from a Spanish settlement, which had endured for a scant three months before the uprising, and set it aflame, as they fled into the waiting arms of similarly rebellious indigenes—Guale—and put paid to Madrid’s attempt to extend their tenuous remit beyond the territory to the south they had named Florida.²² In a sense, this was not a first for a territory later to labor under the Stars and Stripes, for in 1514 scores of enslaved Africans revolted in Puerto Rico in what one scholar has described as “the first African uprising known to have taken place anywhere in the Indies.”²³

Evidently, Madrid’s minions envisioned turning the southeast quadrant of North America into a feudal empire staffed by indigenous workers and enslaved Africans, but the latter’s joint revolt buried yet another exploiter’s dream. In the resultant chaos, even some Europeans appeared to join the victors and deserted to the Native American side.²⁴ Actually, if alert Spaniards had been paying closer attention, they would not have been overly surprised by this uprising and what it portended, for in 1527 in the region stretching southward from Panama an African escaped from a colonizer’s vessel, swam ashore, and ensconced himself among the indigenes, who he then proceeded to organize and lead so thoroughly that this community became a continuing thorn in the flesh of the would-be European usurpers.²⁵

Madrid was dimly aware of the dilemma it had created for itself. Enslaved Africans were being imported to the Americas by 1503, in part premised on the idea that—perhaps because of the disorientation delivered by dumping aliens in a foreign land—the labor of one of these imported workers was equal to or surpassed by that of four “Indians.”²⁶ But as early as 1505, reconsideration was occurring, as there was a suspension, albeit temporary, of the importation of slaves into Hispaniola, as quite ominously, this would-be chattel had been fleeing and setting up outlaw settlements of their own in the mountains and forests and from there executing violent raids on Spanish towns and haciendas. Thus, by 1522, the first large-scale uprising of the enslaved occurred during the Christmas holiday (which was to become a prime time in following centuries to attack dulled and inebriated settlers), as a sugar mill belonging quite appropriately to the son of Columbus was victimized, with a number of his comrades slaughtered. That same year an enslaved man named Miguel led an army of 800 former chattel that forced the closing of profitable mines and delivered horror to the homes of settlers due south. By 1529, four years after being built, Santa Marta on the northern coast of South America was razed by rebellious Africans. In Mexico, there were slave insurrections in 1523, 1537, and 1546. Puerto Rico experienced severe trouble of this type in 1527, and by the 1540s it was again Hispaniola’s turn as settlers were terrorized by maroons or cimarrones.²⁷ Slave revolts hit Cuba in 1530, not to mention the capital along the coast of today’s Colombia that same year, which was destroyed. Africans fled to today’s Ecuador and formed an independent polity that Madrid was compelled to recognize in 1598.²⁸

This earlier North American revolt of 1526 made it possible for Londoners, many decades later, to make their own claim to this vast territory, which was then inherited by their preening settler colony, now known as the United States of America. In other words, those who triumphed in what is now the United States had a kind of “second mover’s advantage,” advancing in the wake of Spanish retreat and, as shall be seen, learning lessons from this competitor’s defeat that proved to be devastating to Africans particularly.

Today’s Dixie is well aware of the debt owed to Madrid: the conquistador Hernando de Soto nowadays is venerated as the “first white hero” of the region; towns and cities annually hold parades, barbeques, and pageants in his honor, downplaying his conspicuous role as an enslaver and his catastrophic impact on indigenes, while pooh-poohing the massive evidence that depicts his savage quest as the handiwork of a psychopathic killer.²⁹

Though often neglected, the contemporary United States remains ensconced in the shadow of the original colonizers. Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, the population of the Caddo people in the southeastern quadrant of what is now the United States was an estimated 200,000, but by the eighteenth century, as the new nation was being launched, their population had shrunk reportedly to about 1,400, making the final ouster of indigenes more likely.³⁰ By the nineteenth century, the northern reaches of Mexico, soon to be incorporated into the United States, was regarded widely as the “land of war,” indicative of how indigenous resistance had not only been longstanding but also had been weakening the original inhabitants of the land.³¹ The genocide that was visited upon the indigenous of North America was a rolling process, with the republican knockout blow facilitated mightily by the preceding blows inflicted by Madrid.³²

Thus, it was in the twentieth century that enraged settlers in the newly minted republican state New Mexico remained furious about the indigenous challenge to their alleged right to the land. The settler delegate returned to a 1551 decree by Charles V for justification supposedly sketching “separation of races” that was said to castigate “’Negroes, Mulattos and Mixed Bloods” who were said to “teach … evil ways” to indigenes. Then the rationalizer returned to Spanish law of 1513 for justification for what would have been deemed “Anglo” occupation of the land.³³

Washington was even able to co-opt, to a degree, settlers dispatched by Spain. Recently, for example, the New York Times reported the story of Patricia Aragon Luczo, a retired flight attendant from New Mexico, who traced her Sephardic legacy to Juan de Vitoria Carvajal, a member of the Spanish expedition that sought to seize the area surrounding Santa Fe in 1598.³⁴

TODAY A SELF-DESCRIBED “New Conquest History” has arisen that stresses the sixteenth-century presence of African maroons whose very existence called into question the purported control of Spain, even in Hispaniola, to the point where the notion of “maroons as conquerors” has to be taken seriously.³⁵ As events in 1526 in what is now South Carolina indicate, there was a kind of advantage of the latecomer, the tardy, enjoyed by London, which could profit as Africans and indigenes, on the one hand, pounded would-be conquistadors and, on the other hand, allowed Englishmen to administer knockout blows to the exhausted survivors in succeeding decades.

Debilitating blows were also unleashed by the initial invaders too. For the land upon which Dixie was built still groans from the excruciating dread delivered by the likes of de Soto and his comrades, groans that continue to resound in the form of dispossessed indigenes and severely oppressed Africans. These conquerors bulled their way into indigenous settlements, murdering all they encountered, including small children, old men, pregnant women—especially pregnant women. They hacked them mercilessly, slicing open their bulging bellies with their sharpened swords with macabre intensity. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashing them headlong against the ground.³⁶ There were “Holocaustic levels of slaughter and enslavement,”³⁷ asserts scholar Matthew Restall with accuracy, speaking of Mexico in words that are hardly unique to this territory.

The deadliness of the resultant apocalypse commenced virtually from the day Columbus reached terra firma in October 1492.³⁸ In the decades immediately following, an estimated 650,000 indigenes were enslaved and by 1580, in Algiers, enslaved indigenes from the Americas were to be found.³⁹ In other words, it was not just European microbes that devastated indigenes, it was also a conscious strategy of naked profiteering from enslaving combined with a maniacal desire to remove the existing population, with enslaved Africans then arriving to develop the land. Thus, by 1530, 69 percent of the enslaved in Puerto Rico—now a U.S. “possession”—were African.⁴⁰ Simultaneously, a market in Europe quickly developed involving indigenous American women and children deployed as domestic or household slaves.⁴¹

For as early as 1514, a few decades after the epochal voyage of Christopher Columbus, Madrid was frightened by the rapid increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Hispaniola, their initial foothold, and as one twentieth-century observer put it, “By 1560 the natural increase of that prolific race,” meaning Africans, “coupled with the constant inflow brought by the slave traders”—intoxicated by the maddening scent of profit—“had created a most alarming preponderance in their number” compared to the colonizers.⁴²

As early as 1570, Africans in the Caribbean exceeded the number of Europeans and, after bloodily targeted violence, probably that of indigenes too; that year, there were an estimated 10 million indigenes, 250,000 Africans—“mulattos” or “mestizos”—and 140,000 “Europeans” in Iberian America. That first figure fell sharply in succeeding years, while that of Africans continued to rise relative to that of Europeans. By 1576 there were reportedly more Africans than colonizers in the important node that was Mexico City. Part of Madrid’s problem was overweening ambition; more Spaniards reached Manila in 1580 than any other year of the sixteenth century, and it was near then that the grasping power began dreamily to contemplate an invasion of China, to then be followed by thrusts into India, Cochin China (or Vietnam), Siam, the Moluccas, Borneo, and Sumatra. Still, by 1600, Madrid controlled the largest collection of territories the world had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire and the heyday of Genghis Khan, as it also dominated Italy, southern Netherlands (the ancestor of modern Belgium), a good deal of the Americas, and its pioneering neighbor, Portugal. Yes, it was a Pan-European project, albeit with a Catholic tinge from the start; after all, Columbus’s roots were in Genoa; there were Basques, of course, and Florentines and Frenchmen (Magellan was Portuguese), Greeks and Cordobans.⁴³ Yet, as the following pages suggest, it was also a religious project, as signaled by the vanguard role played by Jesuits.⁴⁴

Spain’s vaulting ambition, according to one assayer, led to the commencement of the dominating process known as “globalization,” in that in 1571 Manila was founded as a crucial entrepot linking the Americas and Asia in the trading of silver bullion between China and Spain, with knock-on effects worldwide, including in Africa, increasingly the favored source of labor supply. Silver traded for Chinese silk, tea, and porcelain fueled the rise of Madrid, facilitating the precipitous decline of indigenous Americans and their replacement by enslaved Africans.⁴⁵ After 1571, Chinese fabrics were arriving in substantial quantities in South America, as a result of the Manila galleon trade. This form of “globalization” is in a sense a euphemism for the roots of capitalism.⁴⁶

By 1500, China accounted for an estimated 25 percent of the world’s output of goods and services and England for about 1 percent, but by 1900 as an outgrowth of slavery and rapacious colonialism, those numbers had been virtually reversed.⁴⁷

We continue to reside in the shadow of this important century—the sixteenth—as globalization accelerated and the state was strengthened. Not accidentally, it was then that John Harrington, described recently as the “cynic-in-residence” in Queen Elizabeth’s court, opined: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason,”⁴⁸ a statement that also reflected the overthrow and weakening of various unsustainable polities in the name of the new force created by “globalization.”

STILL, DESPITE THE ONRUSH of the global, the ruler in Madrid was not known as “His Catholic Majesty” by accident, for religion, or more precisely, Catholicism, was privileged. “Religious adherence was more important as a test of loyalty than ethnicity”—or race—according to an analysis of the Spanish settlement in St. Augustine, Florida: “Slaves, therefore, received different treatment here than in English or even other Spanish colonies” in part because protecting the wealth of Cuba and Mexico was the primary goal,⁴⁹ not least by dint of slave-constructed fortifications and in part because religion was overdetermined.

This telescoped disquisition about Florida brings into sharp relief major themes of this book: the firm implantation of settler colonialism in what is now the United States—including the enslavement of Africans—originated in today’s “Sunshine State” and, as shall be seen, in New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment.” The history of Virginia and New England, which wrongly deems either or both to be the seedbed of settler colonialism in what is now the United States—and, in the long run, the United States itself has to be adjudged with this point firmly in mind. Thus, armed Africans in Spanish Florida played an expansive role, in a way that would have been difficult in Virginia or Massachusetts, for example.⁵⁰ London, the “second” colonizer and their republican successors, grappled assiduously with the formidable problem of how to defang embattled and armed Africans in Florida, leading to ruinous nineteenth-century wars.

Thus, the armed Africans of northern Florida were an obvious counterpoint to the enslaved Africans languishing across the border in what became London’s settlements in Georgia and South Carolina, forcing Britain to expend blood and treasure to extirpate this “threat,” which it did by about 1763, which was then followed by the rebellious settlers intervening more forcefully in Florida over the next half-century or more, until the matter was resolved by the creation of the “Sunshine State” in the slaveholders’ republic. London, then Washington, decided not to build on the “St. Augustine exception” created by Madrid but to strangle it instead. It was left to London, then Washington, to leapfrog Madrid altogether by developing a sturdier axis of colonialism, namely “whiteness,” the privileging of “race” over religion, a process (again) extended by Britain’s erstwhile stepchild in 1776, allowing for the incorporation more readily and easily of a growing number of European immigrants, with little room to compromise with a “Free Negro” population.⁵¹

THERE WAS A CONTRADICTORY APPROACH to Africans by Spanish colonizers. There were so-called Black Conquistadors, for example, Juan Garrido, instrumental in the creation of “New Spain” or Mexico, and Sebastian Toral, who obtained his freedom because of his role in the siege of Yucatan, and Juan Valiente, who helped to conquer Guatemala, then settled in Chile. On the other hand, there was a history congruent with subsequent slave revolts within the slaveholders’ republic, for example, that of Miguel in 1553 in the gold-rich region of Venezuela; similar rebellions erupted in like gold mining regions in today’s Colombia in the late sixteenth century. It is possible that thousands of the enslaved murdered their masters and foremen and hid in the mountains and forests, constructing palenques and various forms of marronage that proved difficult to eradicate. Near that same time, in Cuzco in Peru, enslaved Africans and indigenes—in contrast to the Black Conquistadors—formed a rebellious contingent led by an indigene, Francisco Chichima. Due north in Vera Cruz, a citadel was formed in the 1580s by Nanga (Yanga), possibly of Akan or West African origin. About three decades later, the settlers effectuated a kind of entente with these rebels. Perhaps as a partial result, legislation enacted by the monarchs in Madrid and Lisbon were more demanding of masters and more humane toward the enslaved than their peers in London, Paris, The Hague, and especially Washington.⁵²

In a sense, Madrid took religion too seriously, seemingly oblivious to the rising notion that settler colonialism required “race” more than religion. Madrid assumed that it could both enslave and empower Africans, whereas the ultimately victorious republicans begged to differ. I argue that this difference between Madrid and London is to be found in religion, not necessarily because Catholicism was more “progressive” than Protestantism,⁵³ but more so because the former was a more centralized faith, better able to enact and enforce edicts, as opposed to the fissiparous latter. Decentralized Protestantism was a better fit than rigid Catholicism, perhaps by virtue of the fabled “absence of mind” in forging a settlement project that relied more heavily on a construction of “whiteness” or the ingathering of various and disparate European ethnicities. Similarly, the heralded “religious liberty” that characterized the republican secession in the late eighteenth century coincidentally allowed for a Pan-European mobilization to crush rebellious Africans and indigenes alike.

AS THE TIME APPROACHED TO colonize what became St. Augustine in 1565, the monarch in Madrid was told that “there are many Negroes, mulattoes and people of evil inclination in the islands of Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and others nearby. In each of these islands,” said conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles disconsolately, “there are more than thirty of them to each Christian. It is a land where this generation multiplies rapidly,” and, besides, “in possession of the French” most notably, “all of these slaves will be set free,” since “to enjoy this freedom, the Negroes will help them against their own masters and rulers, for them to take over the land. It will be a very easy thing to do with the help of the Negroes.”⁵⁴ This was perceptive, and combined with Madrid’s self-defeating religious sectarianism, which hindered the necessity to build, à la London, a “whiteness” project, crossing theological borders, left few alternatives beyond seeking to co-opt Africans, creating a “Free African” population that could be armed, an endangering process that certain settlers may have deemed to be a cure worse than the illness.

This was part and parcel of the elongated process whereby religion was supplanted by “race” as the animating axis of society, which reached its zenith in the Americas, especially Protestant-dominated North America. For as the late doyen of historians Herbert Bolton once averred, “In the English colonies the only good Indians were dead Indians.”⁵⁵ But this induced morbidity did not occur to a similar degree in, for example, French settlements in North America. After all, London coveted the land of indigenes for settlement, while Paris was more intrigued by the trade in furs and a military alliance with the indigenes against other European powers such as London. Thus, says the scholar W. J. Eccles, Perfidious Albion “had to displace—that is destroy—the Indians” and France was more interested in seeking to “preserve them, in order to achieve their aims.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, as a nineteenth century California leader put it, “the success of Britian as a colonizing power was ascribable to its strict policy of racial separation and that the failures of France and Spain”—and Portugal too, it might have been added—“were due to the absence of such a policy….” ⁵⁷ And the hateful Jim Crow policy installed in the revolting spawn of London in Washington further bolstered this malignant analysis.

Paris was the wild card in terms of European powers, willing to work with indigenes—and Africans too—against their competitors. On 10 July 1555, Jacques de Sores (at times known as Soria), described as “the most heretic Lutheran,” attacked Havana, which was defended in turn by a force of 355, including 220 indigenes, 80 Africans, and only 35 Spaniards, the numbers a hint as to how dependent the colonizers were at fraught moments. This “heretic Lutheran” was a kind of John Brown of the Pan-Caribbean, threatening slave revolts in order to attain his sweeping goals,⁵⁸ and providing untold leverage to Africans and lessons for them too, in terms of aligning with one power against another. The Frenchman and his hearty crew of a mere 53 men had leveraged African disgruntlement when he freed the enslaved in attacking Margarita, Cabo de la Vela, La Burburata, Santa Maria, Cartagena, Santiago de Cuba, and Havana—and, for a while, captured all of these enriched sites.⁵⁹

TO BE SURE, EVEN IF London were to surpass Madrid or Paris, it would not guarantee European supremacy, setting aside the ultimate goal of global dominance. For in the sixteenth century, in some ways the most fearsome of them all was the Ottoman Empire. The potency of the Ottomans was signaled when Christians, sensing the directions of the prevailing winds, began defecting to the Ottoman side.⁶⁰ Yes, some of these “defections” were coerced, but many were not. In any event, the formidable Ottoman fleet was a microcosm of the Ottoman Empire. Commanders tended to be Turks, but the oarsmen were Greeks and Bulgarians, and the specialists emerged from the heart of Christian Europe: Genoese, Catalans, Sicilians, Provençals, Venetians.⁶¹

So bolstered, as Madrid was seeking to repress Africans, Constantinople captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered Rhodes in 1522, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohacs in 1526, and besieged Vienna with a massive army of 400,000 in 1529. On the western Mediterranean front, the Turks seized Tripoli from the Knights of Malta in 1551, destroyed a Spanish armada at the island of Djerba in 1560, and besieged Malta in 1561.⁶² The Ottomans seemed to be soaring from strength to strength in the early sixteenth century, not only bombarding Serbia and Buda but more generally besieging eastern Europe too. Syria and Palestine were subjugated, along with Baghdad, Basra, Aden, and Cairo. Bases were established in Ethiopia and Algeria. In the prelude to 1492, the Ottomans were seeking to bolster their fellow Muslims in Andalusia. Ironically, as the Habsburgs, as well as Spain, expanded into the Americas, this made it easier for the Ottomans to expand into Europe and nearby regions. Ultimately, however, the wealth accumulated by Spaniards and other Western Europeans in the Americas allowed Madrid and their immediate neighbors to reverse what appeared to be insuperable advantages enjoyed by the Ottomans.⁶³

Yet, as matters evolved, 1516–17 was a critical time, not only because of the ascendancy of Martin Luther⁶⁴ and the expansion of the Ottomans into North Africa and beyond, but also because of the consolidation of Spain and the Habsburgs. The split among Christians appeared at first glance to provide an immense opportunity for the Ottomans, but instead, in the longer term it boosted Luther’s heirs.

Western Europe’s contestation with the Ottomans was a precondition of the rise of plundering of the Americas and Africa. The Iberians pirouetted deftly from the directive of Pope Nicholas V in 1452 sanctifying Lisbon’s praxis of selling into slavery all “heathens” and “’Foes of Christ’”—principally Moslems—to the broader application in the Americas.⁶⁵ This fifteenth-century edict was an extension of the Crusades.⁶⁶ That is, a Pan-European Christian campaign against Islam extended to a campaign against non-European/non-Christians (especially in the Americas and Africa); arguably, this Pan-European initiative was a prelude to the rise of the similarly devastating “whiteness” project. Thus, in fifteenth-century Valencia, Spain, captors sought to misrepresent what amounted to Senegalese and Gambians (West Africans) as Moors (North Africans)—religious-cum-political antagonists—so as to enslave them consistent with theological mores.⁶⁷

As suggested earlier, with the taking of Constantinople in 1453, Christian Europe endured an existential crisis, a calamity that was seen as almost unprecedented in history. Unshackled ire was not caged when Ottomans began gifting Hungarian slaves to their North African allies.⁶⁸ Defeated Christians were forced into slavery, contributing to a growing sense of “Europe” against “Asia,” a confrontation that was fungible and easily transferable to “America” and “Africa.” The explosive charge was made that the 1453 setback meant “virgins prostituted, boys made to submit as women,” garnished with the repeated use of the term “inhuman race” affixed to victorious Turks. By 1530 the eminent Dutch Christian philosopher Erasmus continued to charge that even God would sanction war against the Turks, this “race of barbarians,” a fury then being transferred to Africans and “Americans” too.⁶⁹ “We are far inferior to the Turks unless Christian Kings should unite their forces,” said Pope Pius II in 1462,⁷⁰ a putative precondition for the racial vehemence—white supremacy, in other words—that was to be unleashed in the sixteenth century in the Atlantic corridor.

This was an era of an enslaving free-for-all in any case, one that ensnared others besides Africans; the Turks and those in their vicinity were preeminent in this regard but part of the diabolical “genius” of settler colonialism, notably as it matured in North America, was that those who had once been victimized by enslavers instead were invited to become enslavers themselves—or perfidious discriminators—in the new guise of “whiteness.” About 2,000 Slavs yearly were enslaved by Crimean Tartars and sold to the Ottomans in the fourteenth century, with that figure rising in the fifteenth century; slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475 when the Ottomans took over the Black Sea trade from the Genoese, as the Crimeans were instigating industrial-scale enslaving, especially between 1514 and 1654.⁷¹

Indeed, it is easy to surmise that the impetus impelling Europeans westward—particularly the Spaniards who had endured the most bracing experience with Islam, arriving at a terminal point (ironically) in 1492—was the continued push westward of Islam, veritably chasing the Iberians in that direction too. Periodic defeats at the gates of Vienna failed to squelch fears altogether of being overrun, especially given that Islam long since had established a beachhead in North Africa, visible from Gibraltar. Algiers alone—whose very name sent frissons of nervousness coursing down the spines of Western Europeans—was said to have an enslaved population of at least 25,000 Christians by the late sixteenth century, many of whom were Spanish, Portuguese: and English.⁷² These latter nations, particularly London, “won out” in the sixteenth century, replacing West Asia and Turkey as the core of the world system,⁷³ argues contemporary analyst, Bruno Macaes, though he could have added that this was done by way of imposing apocalyptic conditions on Africans and indigenes of the Americas.

Thus, a telling indicator is that from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Russia’s trade with the East was more profitable than European trade, but then, as the impact of slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas began to assert itself, this commerce with the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and China began to decline,⁷⁴ then reawakened in the twenty-first century.

Yes, the Ottoman Turks also enslaved Africans: each year from the sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century thousands of slaves from Ethiopia, Nubia, and Southern Sudan arrived in the slave markets of Cairo—seized by the Ottomans in 1517, as post-1492 competition with the Habsburgs and Spain accelerated—then hundreds of these manacled workers made their way to Istanbul and provincial capitals of the empire alike. Ironically, as embodied in the power and influence wielded by the eunuchs of African descent,⁷⁵ the Ottomans’ designation of Africans differed from that created by London, then Washington, with the latter waiting until the twentieth century to create a virtual equivalent of the “Black Eunuch.” Moreover, unlike the “whiteness” project captained by the slaveholders’ republic that led to the creation of a powerful capitalist economy, the Ottomans deigned to enslave Europeans too.

There were a number of signposts on the road to Ottoman decline, a power that by the mid-sixteenth century seemed to be an unstoppable juggernaut with their equal-opportunity enslaving. But surely one of these emblazonments was their defeat at Lepanto in 1571 when the Christian, principally Catholic, powers ganged up and administered a withering setback on their foe to the east. No, the Ottomans did not sink into precipitous decline thereafter, but as the nineteenth-century historian Leopold Ranke put it succinctly, “The Turks lost all their old confidence after the Battle of Lepanto.”⁷⁶

A predicate to the rise of London was the deal that it brokered with the Ottomans, then the Moroccans, against Spain, not altogether unlike the deal brokered by China in the late twentieth century with those thought to be its capitalist antagonists, which has left this Asian giant in the passing lane.

London, in other words, which had been buying an alliance with the Ottomans to blunt its mutual Catholic antagonist in Madrid, could now calculate that this policy was less of a necessity after Lepanto and could then begin to turn its attention to weakening Spain at the source of its then immense wealth: the Americas. More to the point, all this set the stage for the eclipse of the Ottomans’ equal-opportunity enslaving policy and the rise of London’s—then Washington’s—single-minded focus on bonding Africans and indigenes. A by-product of this lengthy process was the formation of today’s “Latin America,” characterized on this side of the border in a decidedly racialized manner,⁷⁷ a legacy of the continuing and defining stain of white supremacy in the North American republic.

Thus, a few years after Lepanto, the officially authorized pirate Francis Drake set sail and landed in what was said to be Spanish territory—California—where “New Albion” was declared, making the so-called Golden State, appropriately enough, the “founding site for the overseas British Empire,” according to scholar Robert H. Power,⁷⁸ and today’s citadel of republican and capitalist hegemony.

IT IS CRUCIAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE that not only did Western European nations, especially England, rise on the backs of enslaved Africans and dispossessed indigenes, but that this too arrested development on a continental scale.⁷⁹ The story of Mali’s Mansa Musa is now well known, not least the immense wealth that obtained in his golden realm, where Islam prevailed. Actually, most of the gold then circulating in what amounted to global markets and providing currency for the silk and spice roads in antiquity and the Middle Ages came from West Africa, soon to decline vertiginously, as Western Europe rose at its expense.⁸⁰ The “fame” Musa and his polity generated, especially the gold there, “inundated the fourteenth century,” says one leading scholar. This “left a deep impression,” says François Xavier Fauvelle, to the point that “people were still talking about it half a century later.”⁸¹ For millennia, gold has been a means of exchange and a store of value,⁸² making it hardly coincidental that a great swathe of Africa was pillaged to obtain this mineral.

Ironically, this religious inflected battle with Islam was accompanied by yet another bitterly sectarian conflict, that between Catholics and Protestants (with both having difficulty in overcoming deeply rooted anti-Semitism). This was not simply a theological difference. The Iberians’ “first mover advantage” in looting the Americas, then sanctified by the Vatican in the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the world between Madrid and Portugal, provided London with disincentive to continue adherence to the One True Faith. When Henry VIII broke bonds with Catholicism, ostensibly because of differences over his divorce, this also meant the dissolution of monasteries, an act that filled royal coffers and released timber, stone, and bronze for national defense projects—precisely to challenge Spain. Also empowered were ascending lawyers and merchants who became influential stakeholders in the newer system, an aristocracy that stood to lose all in a return to the old faith and old relationships.⁸³

The abject terror of the horrendous Protestant-Catholic conflict in Europe was in a sense a dress rehearsal and precedent for what was visited upon indigenes in the Americas and their African counterparts. As late as the twentieth century, the lapsed populist turned demagogue Tom Watson of Jim Crow Georgia continued to wallow in the rampant religiosity run amok of the epoch-making St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1570s France, when thousands of Protestants were liquidated by genocidal Catholics. This bloodthirstiness was employed as a rationale for the anti-Catholicism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, illustrating once more the continuing potency of the sixteenth century.⁸⁴ The soon-to-be Senator Watson apparently did not realize that a kind of reconciliation between once warring Protestants and Catholics on a common altar of “whiteness” and white supremacy was the essential epoxy that bound together those in his own former slaveholders’ republic, a principle enunciated solemnly in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that this attorney knew well.

Catholic Spain’s military prowess was honed in a centuries-long battle with Arabs and Muslims, which was then exercised brutally not just against Protestants but indigenes in the Americas and Africans there too.

Protestant England evolved similarly. The costs of war were immense, exacting a heavy cost in lives and taxes alike. London’s ill-fated French campaign of 1513–14 alone consumed a million pounds, equivalent to ten years’ worth of ordinary revenue. Military expenses between 1539 and 1552 came to about 3.5 million pounds, a million of which was spent on campaigns in Scotland and keeping Boulogne. The 1513 initiative witnessed an English army of 28,000 men joined in France by around 7,000 German and Dutch mercenaries. Simultaneously, a force of more than 26,000 marched speedily to meet King James IV’s army in Northumberland for the slaughter of Flodden. Campaigning on a similar scale took place in 1522, 1544, and 1545. Even the stupendous gain delivered by the liquidation of monasteries was insufficient to cover the expense of warmongering: more taxes were imposed. Thus, England contained a precursor of a military-industrial complex, as towns and parishes stored armor and weapons and coastal works—bulwarks, beacons, and bastions—were constructed for defense. As early as 1468 Southampton had a gun of about 1,000 pounds in weight. Landowners were expected to maintain an armory of sorts. The monarch had no standing army, but every able-bodied man was expected to fight, again making a venture into the wilderness of the Americas seem tame by comparison, a speculation reflected in the high level of desertion and mutiny. Certainly, military experience in Europe proved to be quite useful for London on the battlefields of the Caribbean, Africa, and North America.

London, during the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, endured a much higher proportion of Englishmen than French or Spaniards serving as soldiers at some point during his reign. With regard to Paris alone, there were wars in 1475, 1489–1492, 1512–1514, 1522–1525, 1542–1546, 1549–1550, 1557–1559, 1562–1564, etc. In yet another sixteenth-century idea that has yet to dissipate, per Machiavelli, was that foreign wars defuse domestic conflict. In any case, European elites often sought to depend on mercenaries rather than domestic forces to suppress domestic dissent, with the resultant benefit flowing to these guns-for-hire, serving as yet another boost for a Pan-European identity that could easily morph into “whiteness”—a militarized identity politics, in other words. In any event, London had its hands full seeking to contain Wales, Ireland, and Scotland during the sixteenth century (and before) with settlements and wars in the Americas emerging as not only a safety valve relieving pressure on London but allowing often disgruntled “minorities,” especially Catholics, to stake a claim on the fruits of Empire, thus diverting their anger away from England.⁸⁵

Necessity is not only the mother of invention but the crucible of warfare is as well. The “discovery” of the Americas raised the stakes for sovereignty with Madrid’s wealth and firepower seemingly threatening the existence of London itself. Coincidentally, post-1500 there was a much ballyhooed “Military Revolution,” which transformed warfare on the old continent, and had the added “benefit” of destabilizing Africa and the Americas. The invention, then proliferation, of gunpowder meant that old medieval city walls could no longer offer adequate protection. New fortifications also meant that wars became longer with many sieges lasting more than a year. The rise of firearms translated into a need to train soldiers. Armies became increasingly professionalized, evolving from bands of mercenaries. Armies expanded in size, meaning more men under arms and militarized societies, as well as militarized thinking, suitable for conquest abroad. Along with dispatching domestic foes to far-flung settlements as disposable colonizers, armies also facilitated the liquidation (or quieting) of domestic opponents. Government debt also rose coincidentally in the sixteenth century, enhancing the power of the state. Spain was an initial beneficiary here as their legendary ruler, Philip II, was at war in every single year of his long sixteenth-century reign.⁸⁶ But, again, London—then Washington—surpassed Madrid in virtually every one of these important categories.

The repeated attempted invasions of England by Spain—the late sixteenth century notwithstanding—culminated in the game-changing defeat of the Armada in 1588, with London maneuvering adroitly in the slipstream created by Madrid’s propulsion. Certainly 1588 was a true sign of things to come. Historian Geoffrey Parker has argued that the failure of the Armada “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” The future, he asserts, “pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588,” as “Spain began a slow decline and a new world order [began] its gradual ascendancy.”⁸⁷

Of course, alert Spaniards would have been wise to pay attention to Londoners within their ambit, prior to invading. There were English merchants resident in Andalusia from 1480 to 1532, a number of whom were slaveholders actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. One scholar argues, contrary to previous assessments, that 1489 marks the starting point in the English history of African slaveholding. “Englishmen of all social classes from low class to high class, and even to royalty … emerge[d] as slaveowners,” asserts historian Gustav Ungerer, a trend that waxed and waned over the centuries but continued to carry sufficient strength to shed light on the prolonged existence of alliances across class lines among those defined as “white” that exerted itself most recently in the former slaveholders’ republic in November 2016. There was also a goodly number of slaveholders who were Englishwomen too, which may shed light on their descendants’ twenty-first-century voting habits in North America as well.⁸⁸

YET ANOTHER CONDITION PRECEDENT for the rise of London and the simultaneous decline of Africa and the Americas took place a few years after the failed Armada, in 1591. The site was north central Africa. Morocco, yet another predominantly Islamic nation courted by London, had invaded with England’s assistance the once mighty Songhay Empire. This proved to be a double disaster, with both victor and vanquished emerging weaker, a boon to an ascending “Christian”—if not Protestant—Europe. By destroying the strongest centralized state in sub-Saharan Africa, the Moroccan conquest did irreparable harm to the trans-Saharan routes that had enriched both Morocco and West Africa, and this instability radiated to the aptly (and unfortunately) named Gold and Slave Coasts of Africa, indicative of what was soon to be plundered excessively on the beset continent.⁸⁹ Morocco’s force of 5,000 was bolstered by Moriscos (Muslims expelled from Spain) and mercenaries, as they proceeded to Gao on the Niger River. Over 80,000 fighters with mere lances and javelins were mowed down systematically by weapons, an outgrowth of the aforementioned “Military Revolution.” In a sad coda to a bygone era—and the commencement of a newer one—they reportedly cried, as they fell, “We are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion,”⁹⁰ apparently unaware that this newer era was in the long run to sideline religion in favor of conquest and commerce and capitalism. Moroccans had been armed with English muskets in return for saltpeter for ammunition, then soon wielded in what was to be called Virginia in the early seventeenth century. The Moroccan envoy in London was quite close to Anthony Radcliffe, residing at his home for six months at one point; the latter’s daughter, Anne, was a benefactor of what became Harvard University, which once housed a women’s college named in her honor, continuing the resonances from the sixteenth century.⁹¹ Relations between England and Morocco were so close—perhaps a key to understanding Shakespeare’s Othello, for example—that less than a decade after the transformative 1591 vanquishing of the Songhay Empire, the two powers were huddling and discussing a joint invasion of their mutual foe, Spain, then followed by a joint ouster of the Spaniards from the Caribbean.⁹²

The Moroccan-English collaboration was not the only factor contributing to the subjugation of Africa and the Americas. By 1420, Europe counted barely more than a third of the people it contained one hundred years before as a result of the disease known as the Black Death. Predictably, the Jewish minority was blamed, leading to terrible violence against them; thus, early in 1348 the rumor arose that this minority in northern Spain and southern France were poisoning Christian wells and thus disseminating the plague.⁹³ This served to lead to the mass expulsion of this minority from Spain in 1492, and, in the longer run, their being incorporated with untoward consequences for Madrid in the Netherlands, Turkey, and, to a degree, in England too. In the shorter term, their diaspora networks proved to be essential to the new era that was arising, purportedly investing in Columbus’s voyage and—perhaps absconding from inquisitorial Madrid—fleeing on his vessels. Some from this Iberian minority were present when São Tomé in West Africa was being subjected to enslavement and sugar production, a pestiferous process then exported to Brazil with devastating consequences for Africans and indigenous Americans both.⁹⁴ Other “New Christians,” that is, those from the minority subject to an inauthentic conversion, wound up in Cape Verde and Congo with untoward consequences for Africans.⁹⁵

Still, it was not just a more forthcoming approach to the Jewish community and Islam that served ultimately to catapult London into the first rank of nations. Protestants and their often bewildering array of sects and tendencies—Arminian, Calvinist, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Antinomian, Socinian, Society of Friends (Quakers) et al.—jutted out of Europe, undermining existing beliefs and preparing the ground for a new kind of thinking: capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-Catholicism too, destabilizing the One True Faith—and “His Catholic Majesty” in the bargain, as a previously mighty Gulliver was tied down by an ant-like army of Lilliputians.⁹⁶

In undermining existing beliefs, Protestants set the stage for the rise of others: racism, not least, a point that Ambassador Young could have mentioned in 1977. In short, the radical decentralization of Protestantism, as opposed to the hierarchical centralization of Catholicism, provided fertile soil for the rise of racism and other “faiths.” Besides, as besieged underdogs in the midst of religious wars, Protestants were poised to make overtures to the Jewish community and Islam alike, as a matter of survival if nothing else but contrary to past praxis,⁹⁷ and, ultimately, Protestants and Catholics, then the Jewish, were rebranded as “white” republicans, curbing murderous interreligious conflict and ushering in an era of racialized conflict, victimizing Africans and indigenes alike.

Ambassador Young also could have noted that the evolution of settler colonialism in his homeland involved a religious compromise between Protestants and Catholics, then a transition to “race” as they were rebranded as “white” in North America, easing the path for racialized slavery and uprooting of indigenes, which in turn was disrupted by the Haitian Revolution,⁹⁸ which then gave rise to an emphasis on class as the animating axis of society with the rise of socialism and working-class movements.⁹⁹ He could have mentioned that English, Irish, and Scots warred against each other but then united as “white” in the colonies to fight “others.” This book is about the earliest stage of this centuries-long process.