The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
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Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers. Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. This is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.”
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The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean
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Besides enslavement and the wealth it brought, which facilitated development of the productive forces that then delivered military firepower, London was a beneficiary of the decline of competing powers. There are a number of landmark years in this bloody century of ascendancy, and one is assuredly 1683 when the Ottoman Turks were turned back at Vienna, which vouchsafed the security of points west—London not least—and marked the continuing decline of the Ottomans. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from Africa through Europe into Central Asia, was a virtual British protectorate, a reality buoyed by the fact that even before 1683, Istanbul was a cauldron of instability as sultans were murdered, executed, and otherwise deposed in the decades stretching from 1617 to 1703. With the breathing space this provided, London could more readily and easily turn its fuller attention to Africa and the Americas.53
THE JESUITS ARRIVED IN THE HORN of Africa as early as 1557, the usual advance guard adumbrating the arrival of armed force, then colonialism. The technological trends that were sweeping through Europe did not leave East Africa unaffected. Firearms first arrived in Ethiopia in the fifteenth century; by the 1620s there were 1,500 muskets in the country; by the 1670s guns were common there.54 Moreover, as early as 1542 the Ottomans in Yemen were arming Ethiopians, the target of incursions by London’s chief European ally, the Portuguese, who already had established a toehold in East Africa. When the Ottomans suffered a severe setback in 1683, this weakened Africa simultaneously.55 With the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Europeans were panicking, with the Pope sending an envoy to Persia with the aim of galvanizing an attack on the Turkish rear, which accompanied another plan to persuade the Christian Abyssinians to distract the Sultan with an attack on Egypt.56
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