Читать книгу The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism - Gerald Horne - Страница 7

CHAPTER 1

Beginning

Though slow to the colonial banquet that was enslavement, England was not altogether unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the eleventh century.¹ Scotland, for example, was filled with English slaves.²

This was an aspect of the larger point: at the height of its power, the Roman Empire, which once controlled England, trafficked in hundreds of thousands of slaves annually; in the previous millennium, slavery and the slave trade were rampant, a praxis in which the Vikings and Scandinavians excelled, often preying on the English and other Europeans. When the Islamic world boomed in the eighth century, there was a sharp rise in the demand for slaves.³ During that era, more than a millennium past, one trader alone boasted of selling more than 12, 000 enslaved Africans in Persian markets.⁴ Yet this slavery, as horrid as it was, did not reach the dimensions of the racial slavery that took off in the seventeenth century.

This older version of slavery was tied intimately to war, with the former being the fruit of the latter. This did not bode well for Africa, as Western Europeans developed the weapons of war.

The fifteenth century marked the onset of a newer kind of slavery: by 1441, Portuguese pirates had seized Africans for sale and by 1470 Spaniards had begun to do the same. It was in 1482 that Portugal began construction of a large fort to facilitate trade in Africans.⁵ By the middle of the fifteenth century, enslaved Africans formed as much as 10 percent of Lisbon’s population.⁶

The leaders of the Iberian Peninsula had a first movers’ advantage in reaching the Americas and sailing to Africa, which then allowed Spain to press England, forcing London for reasons of survival, if nothing more, to seek to follow in Madrid’s footsteps. Simultaneous with Columbus’s voyage was the launching of the Inquisition, which, ironically, also provided an advantage in that it provided the framework for a centralizing institution, essential for the process of state building.⁷

Most notably in the 1490s, this form of hateful commerce accelerated, when Christopher Columbus and his band of cutthroats began to dispatch Tainos from the Caribbean to the slave markets of Europe. Columbus’s first business venture in the Americas involved sending four boatloads of indigenes to Mediterranean slave markets. Others followed in his footsteps, including the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. These powers all participated in this dirty business, but infamy in this regard was held by Madrid, which was to indigenous slavery what England and the United States were to African slavery.⁸

Appropriately, Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to the continents across the Atlantic from Europe, was a slave trader, too. Columbus’s voyage, as noted, had been driven by the takeover of Constantinople in 1453 and a few years later the Ottomans were seizing Aegean islands, as churches were converted to mosques and children were taken into slavery. Columbus’s Genoa showed that the acts of the Turks were not that unusual since this Italian town exemplified the belief that slavery was a legitimate business and thus allowed significant investment in the odious commerce that brought young men, women, and children from the Black Sea and sold them to buyers in Muslim Spain or Egypt. Unlike Venetians, who paid their galley rowers, Genoese staffed their war galleys with the enslaved. The Genoese pioneered in enslaving Africans, though the Portuguese were also premature in this regard, and by 1452 had received a papal dispensation for it. Columbus, as a consequence, was well positioned to turn his trailblazing journey into a new zenith in slave trading, particularly since his crew consisted of leading criminal elements, who over the centuries were to be leaders in this dirty business.⁹ With the arrival of the Spanish on the American mainland in the early 1500s, the commerce in Africans can be said to have increased dramatically there.¹⁰ Between 1500 and 1550 the Portuguese took at least 1,700 slaves per year out of Africa and more than half ended up in São Tomé.¹¹

Tiny Portugal, with a population today of about nine million, was enmeshed in an overstretch almost from the beginning of its thrust into overseas navigation that was to reach into the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. Lisbon found it necessary early on to rely on laboring Africans for various tasks. An African pilot, Esteban Gomez, sailed up what became the Hudson River abutting Manhattan in 1525, while another African became the first non-indigenous resident of this valuable island.¹²

But just as Lisbon and Madrid were tightening their respective grips on vast swathes of territory abroad, the Ottoman Turks had moved into Egypt and deeper into the Balkans, causing Erasmus to announce in the first half of the sixteenth century that this was leading to an epochal clash since “the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky.” The future, he predicted, would belong either to the Muslims or to the Christians because it could not belong to both.¹³ When the Ottomans were blocked at Vienna in 1683, it seemed that the only sun that mattered was the one that soon was never to set on the British Empire, and then later the secessionist appendage in North America.

However, European encroachment was resisted fiercely by the Africans. Soon the Portuguese were at war in West Africa, with three hundred of these Europeans massacred in one fell swoop in 1570 alone. The Africans had gathered in the forest and watched carefully as these invaders decamped before killing them all. On another occasion they severed the invaders’ heads from their bodies, leaving their bodies on the beach, then placed their skulls on wooden stakes.¹⁴ A few years later, Portuguese again fell victim to angry West Africans, as the invaders were slaughtered once more.¹⁵

Since Africans often rebelled vociferously against enslavement, this caused Europeans in response to offer more inducements to those recruited to confront them, including land grants in the Americas and other enticements.

By the first decade of the sixteenth century, Granada—only recently recaptured from Islamic forces and once the center of Moorish civilization on the Iberian Peninsula—was enmeshed in a slave trade that heavily consisted of Africans. Again, this well preceded the push by Englishmen, for at this juncture few from their monarchy had visited Africa, let alone sold and traded its denizens. However, as early as 1530 there were Englishmen bringing enslaved Africans to Brazil, but, again, not in the systematic manner that was to flourish in the following century. The first English voyage to West Africa was said to be made in 1553 by Captain Thomas Windham, accompanied by a Portuguese pilot. By 1562 John Hawkins had seized Africans to sell into bondage,¹⁶ with the settlements in Hispaniola as purchasers.¹⁷ Allegedly, Hawkins was funded directly by Queen Elizabeth, indicative of the high-level support for slaving.¹⁸ Reportedly, along with Windham’s voyage, twenty-seven enslaved Africans wound up in England in 1553.¹⁹ Anticipating the various forms of resistance that were to define the slave trade, on one of his voyages Hawkins was traduced by an African leader who had pledged to sell him “prisoners of war,” but instead the leader deceived him by reneging on the arranged delivery. Flesh peddlers often “encountered hostile towns” during their sixteenth-century African forays.²⁰

It was in the sixteenth century that Africans in Panama were convinced to pledge allegiance to Madrid in exchange for autonomy.²¹ This autonomy could then be leveraged to forge separate deals with the indigenous or competing European powers. It was evident early on that implanting this rapacious colonialism would be no simple task given the rambunctiousness of Africans.

This flexibility by Madrid was an understandable response to the necessity to preserve the obvious accumulated wealth generated by the emerging antagonist that was Spain, along with a reflection of the strength of mercantile interests that was to blossom in a full-bodied capitalism. By 1555 enslaved Africans were brought to what were to be termed the British Isles themselves.²²

Moving away from the internal conflict with Irish and Scots that had been wracking England to the external engagement that was to occupy London for decades to come brought a new set of issues. By 1584, Richard Hakluyt, an ideologist of this new engagement, compared offenses of the rival Spaniards to “Turkish cruelties,” which was bracing to consider. Yet, dreamily, he contemplated a “Northwest passage” to the riches of China and the risk of encountering mere cruelties then seemed worthwhile.²³

The success of Hawkins stimulated the avarice of his countrymen to the point that the monarch granted charters encouraging this baneful commerce in 1585 and 1588; then in 1618 a charter was granted to Sir Robert Rich in London for trade from Guinea, in West Africa, followed by another charter in 1631 and yet another in 1662, as the African Slave Trade began to take flight. The latter charter was allocated to the monarch’s brother, allowing for the delivery of 3,000 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. Then, on 27 September 1672, in a hinge moment in the history of capitalism, slavery, and white supremacy alike, the fourth and final exclusive company was chartered, the Royal African Company. From the point of view of capital, what made the “Glorious Revolution” really glorious was the banning of such exclusive charters, the seeds of which were planted in 1688. The deregulation of this trade opened it to the strenuous efforts of merchants, led to the takeoff of capitalism itself and imbricated participation in the African Slave Trade with bourgeois democratic rights against the power of the state.²⁴

IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THIS PROCESS, Africans—slave and free—in the Americas proved to be indispensable allies of London as it sought to plunder Spanish colonies in the late 1500s and early 1600s. This established a transformational template that was to accelerate in the seventeenth century and became a hallmark of the entire experience of enslavement: Africans rebelling against those who seemed to be in control and aligning with a foreign invader to topple a shaky sovereign.²⁵ Near that same time in the sixteenth century, the English received a dose of this medicine when Portuguese traders on a now growingly beset continent successfully encouraged Africans to attack arriving mariners from London.²⁶ It was in 1527 that Spanish explorers were accused of inciting perhaps the earliest rebellion of enslaved Africans on the North American coast, and one of the earliest anywhere on this continent, when Africans revolted in what is now South Carolina, serving to foil European competitors.²⁷

This contestation with Madrid led to London’s increasing ties to Levantine and Mediterranean Muslims, meaning Turks and Moors were to be found on English soil in growing numbers in the 1500s.²⁸ That is, the final ouster of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492 left lingering resentments between Muslims and Catholics that Protestant London sought to exploit.

It is fair to infer that increasing competition with Spain was driving London’s policies, not only in terms of diplomatic entente with Islamic forces but also in terms of seeking to barge into the colonial banquet. By the 1580s Sir Francis Drake had arrived at Roanoke on the North American mainland with hundreds of slaves in tow that he had captured in his attacks on various Spanish colonies; these included indigenous Americans and Africans alike.²⁹ This escapade also included a vehement attack on St. Augustine, Florida, the Spanish settlement that was to bedevil Georgia and points north in the eighteenth century. There he took away hundreds of the enslaved, dropping them off in North Carolina.³⁰ This barbarous episode forms the prelude to the story that will be told here about the seventeenth century and the onset of an apocalypse, whose reverberations continue to vibrate. In short, enslaved Africans arrived in North America under the English flag decades before the notionally accepted date of 1619 and, if one counts the European trade generally, decades before the 1560s when the Spanish arrived in Florida.³¹

Sir Francis’s venturesome journey, like that of Hawkins years earlier, was both a way to bring Spain down a peg,³² while leeching parasitically onto Madrid’s booming wealth,³³ and feeding proliferating mercantile interests that by the end of the seventeenth century had managed to bring the monarch down a peg by way of their “Glorious Revolution.” The aristocracy may have been distracted, oblivious to the rising political strength of merchants given the profits of Sir Francis’s journeys, which by one account garnered an eye-watering 4,700 percent return,³⁴ some of which flowed into the pockets of various dukes and earls. (Admittedly, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, some aristocrats by lineage became merchants by currency.)

At this juncture, England could well be viewed as a piratical nation—or more formally, engaging in the primitive accumulation of capital—by plundering Spain of precious metals and enslaved Africans alike. This involved intensified militarism and grandiose levels of violence, which could be glorified as a defense of the Almighty. Unsurprisingly, the sails of Columbus’s vessels carried the sign of the cross. But as the foundations of capitalism were established, the need for piracy, at least in the traditional sense, declined, along with religiosity.

Correspondingly, the population of a fattened England and the Low Countries almost doubled between 1500 and 1800. The English and the Dutch both had the Spanish in their crosshairs. And, ultimately, Madrid was not able to withstand the dual musket shots. The Dutch may have been the biggest loser, however, of this three-cornered conflict. After all, this sea-hugging nation was shipping three times as much by value as the English by 1650, the zenith of Holland’s global influence. By that point, London’s naval expenditure began to assert itself more forcefully, eventually consuming nearly a fifth of the entire national budget, which served to insure that English vessels would not endure the fate so often endured by those of Spain under assault by Sir Francis Drake and his minions.³⁵

Spain, in sum, was battered by Sir Francis Drake’s forces, as Madrid was compelled to consider the implications for both Cuba and Florida early on.³⁶ By mid-1587, Spain had failed to enter the Chesapeake,³⁷ a response to the real fear that Londoners were arriving in droves just north of St. Augustine. “I have been unable to learn anything further or more definite,” Madrid was told, “except from certain Negroes who ran away from Francis Drake.”³⁸ So motivated, Christopher Newport by 1592 had journeyed to the Caribbean, seizing Africans all along the way.³⁹ He was soon followed by James Langton, who traveled to Hispaniola where he encountered unwelcome “well armed” Africans. Undaunted, he carried off four or five slaves from an estate.⁴⁰

Sir Francis Drake’s encounter in Roanoke coincides with evidence about a rise of the number of Africans in England itself. By 1596 the Privy Council, at the request of Queen Elizabeth, issued a directive ordering the removal of all Africans from England. At the same time, there was a rise in the number of enslaved Englishmen in the Mediterranean and North Africa in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Arguably, the increase in the number of discontented and oppressed Africans paved the way for London to enter more forcefully the lush profitability of the African Slave Trade, just as seeing more Englishmen forced into bondage—ironically—enhanced the arrival of this ugly reality.⁴¹

London was in a bind, however. For just as Spain had challenged English sovereignty most dramatically in 1588—and barely was turned back—there was in 1602 a sudden and enormous increase in London’s Admiralty Court evidence of the coastal pirate trade, which kidnapped men, women, and children for the Moroccan slave markets. This, in turn, led to an increase in naval expenditure, which, in turn again, proved quite useful in overseas expansion.⁴² According to one account, the enslavement of European Christians exceeded the number of Africans and Native Americans captured for sale by the end of the sixteenth century, with this European trade serving to inspire Europeans not toward abolition but toward utilizing this dirty commerce more profitably than the principal beneficiary at that moment—the Ottoman Turks—by yoking it to an ascending capitalism.⁴³ It is estimated that Algiers held 20,000 Christian captives in 1621, as corsairs from there sailed as far as Iceland, while reportedly Moroccans by 1625 had hijacked forty ships off the coast of Newfoundland.⁴⁴

In brief, this geographic venturesome of Africans, combined with their increasing presence in the Americas, points to the reality that there was a real contestation for continental control that Europeans, least of all Englishmen, were not destined to master.

As London was moving aggressively to enslave more Africans to bolster its North American settlements, persistent complaints of “hostility” and “violence” and “great wrongs done unto them at seas” were visited upon the English at the behest of Algiers and Tunis particularly,⁴⁵ not to mention continuing Spanish irritants as Madrid sensed the import of this English incursion into new territories.⁴⁶

Intriguingly, Charles Sumner, who was to become an embodiment of U.S. abolitionism, complained bitterly in 1853 about the so-called Barbary States, particularly Algiers, which had become a “terror to the Christian nations” as early as the sixteenth century. “Their corsairs became the scourge of Christendom,” he raged, as they “pressed even to the Straits of Dover” as “unsuspecting inhabitants were swept into cruel capacity. The English government was aroused to efforts to check these atrocities,” which at once led to increased naval expenditure, quite useful for the fortunes of settler colonialism, though it diverted energies to North Africa and away from the waters separating Bermuda and Virginia. “In 1620,” Sumner reminded, “a fleet of eighteen ships, under the command of Sir Robert Mansel” was “dispatched against Algiers.” He deplored the “deplorable inconsistency” that then led to London being responsible for enslaving Africans, but more than castigation, Sumner could have gone further to point out what Englishmen learned about enslavement from their captors that was then applied to West Africans or how warfare with North Africans prepared Englishmen to fight West Africans, etc. To his credit, he did note the irony of those being enslaved by North Africans becoming settlers in a slave society that normatively brutalized Africans and indigenes.⁴⁷

Supposedly, piracy was introduced into Algiers in the sixteenth century by a Turkish pirate, his aid having been sought to repel the Spaniards then in possession of the surrounding vast North African land. The territory then fell to Turkish rule for scores of years. During this period, reputedly 30,000 Christian slaves were said to have been employed in constructing a harbor in Algiers. The dreaded and formidable strength of the pirates only increased in the seventeenth century. The growth of kidnapping and enslaving of Christians did not seem to make London more sensitive to bondage and probably increased naval spending as a deterrent, which was detrimental to Africa and the Americas.⁴⁸ By the early seventeenth century, it was estimated that more than 3,000 from the British Isles were engaged in involuntary servitude,⁴⁹ which is probably an underestimate.

EARLY ON, THE LABOR of the colonial settlers was probably six times more profitable than comparable labor at home, thus encouraging moving west across the Atlantic. The settlements offered a protected market for English manufactures, as well as cheap sources of raw materials that stimulated home production. This, in turn, created products that could be exchanged for enslaved Africans to be deposited in the colonies, thus completing a virtual circle—for London.⁵⁰

It took a while for the new reality of Africans as seen through a London lens to take hold. By the late sixteenth century, those who were to be called “Negroes” were not always represented as “savages”; the recurrent descriptor after the flourishing slave trade necessitated more dehumanizing language. But the trend inaugurated by Hawkins did mean that Africans were often seen as threateningly unpredictable and potentially hostile, which was no surprise since Africans had reason to believe that Englishmen were intrigued devilishly by the possibility of their enchainment. Of course, the long-term entente with the North Africans had contributed at times to a separate assessment of those referred to as “Moors,” since they often appeared in London as diplomats and ambassadors. Yet those called “blackamoore” in London were sufficiently visible in 1596 that Queen Elizabeth proclaimed there were “already to manie”—or too many—in the realm and seized the opportunity to exchange several for English hostages held in Spain and Portugal. The conflation that was “blackamoors” should not lead to the perception that no difference was drawn between, say, North Africans and those further down the coast stretching into Senegambia and the Gold Coast. The former were thought to be calculating and the latter unreasoning.⁵¹ Spain, as the common enemy of Morocco and London, in any case, tended to drive the latter two together.⁵²

There was good reason for anger at Spain in Turkey. It was not just that the Iberian Jewish community, fleeing the Inquisition, was racing into the arms of the Ottomans; it was the reality that Turkey was being swamped by specie—coin—from Spanish America, driving indigenous coins with low silver content from circulation, disrupting the economy and placing the local elite in ill humor as the regime borrowed from personal fortunes in compensation. With this crisis, the Jewish population of Turkey, many of whom were prominent in commerce, left for the Netherlands, where they again came into conflict with Madrid, which was seeking to strangle the nation in the sixteenth century.⁵³

There were other factors contributing to London’s venture into mass enslavement of Africans, besides emulation of the Iberians and the riches delivered by cruel exploitation. Joint-stock trading companies were generally unknown in London in the 1500s but numbered in the hundreds a century later.⁵⁴ This facilitated investment and limited liability, all useful when the time came to take the plunge into what became Virginia.

Then there was the great inflation of the sixteenth century, with the value of money being worth only half as much as a century earlier, which provided an incentive to accumulate new wealth.⁵⁵ Fluctuating ties to Russia often threatened to cut off England’s lucrative cloth trade to that nation and Ottoman influx blocked London moving further south and east to Persia, providing more incentive to seek new fields of exploitation in the Americas. In any event, as England began to plunder Spain’s colonies, London’s population swelled from 85,000 in 1565 to 140,000 by the early seventeenth century. As a result and culmination of this trend, the East India Company was founded in 1600,⁵⁶ promising untold riches from a colonial conquest that was to serve as a model for the invasion of what became Virginia.

London’s buoyancy was also a function of Russia’s growth, at least when ties between the two were on the upswing. For as England was expanding, so was Russia: the latter expanding into northern Asia from 1580 to 1700; as Russia expanded, England benefited from the resultant increased trade, like a bicyclist being dragged along in the wake of the speediness of a lead competitor.⁵⁷ As matters evolved, there was a complementariness between Russia’s spread east and England’s spread westward to the Americas and southward to Africa, except that Russia had less competition from major powers and competition from China only intermittently.⁵⁸ “The greatest transformation of the world of the seventeenth century,” says one scholar, “was the explosive expansion of Russian trade and settlement across Siberia….” Thus, by 1639, Russia had reached the Pacific.⁵⁹ Boosting London not only was the ability to work out an entente with the Ottomans and the Dutch but good relations with the continent’s giant—Russia—too.

As London grew corpulent from the business of a growing merchant class, the English became more ambitious in their overseas adventures.⁶⁰ In some ways the formation of the Muscovy Company in 1555 served as a model for the expansionism of the Turkish Company—later the Levant Company—in 1581 and the English East Indian Company and the commercial colonialism that beset what became Virginia a few decades later.⁶¹ Interestingly, one of the first families of London’s settler colonies, the Van Cortlandts, for whom a major park in the Bronx continues to be named, had roots in Russia. Oloff Stevense Van Cortlandt arrived as a soldier in North America in 1638. Of noble ancestry, he was lineally descended from the Dukes of Courtland in Russia, but eventually his family became tied by marriage to other grandees in what became New York State, including the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, the Jays, the Livingstons, and the Barclays.⁶²

As Russia was expanding eastward and Western Europeans were expanding southward to Africa and westward to the Americas, gobbling land and resources as they proceeded, Japan entered two centuries of self-imposed isolation, methodically massacring missionaries seen as the first wave of an invasion, until the nation that was the major result of westward colonialism and enslavement, the United States, pried open the archipelago in 1853.⁶³ Word may have reached Japan that in 1565 the Spanish had occupied what they called the Philippines, and a few decades later the Dutch colonized what became Indonesia.

In sum, the stars were aligning for London’s merchants, as Russia was distracted eastward and the Ottomans sought ties with England (and vice versa) to countervail Spain.

HENCE, AN ACCUMULATION OF factors propelled England into North America—Virginia, more specifically—in the early seventeenth century. The lust for wealth, the competition with Spain and the Ottoman Turks, and related factors led to this settlement project in what became Virginia. In the late sixteenth century, Sir Walter Raleigh ventured to South America, dazzling Londoners with the potentialities of all sorts, wealth not least, unveiled,⁶⁴ providing a path to reach the eminence of Spain by dint of emulation of its skill in enslaving the unwary. Sir Simon D’Ewes was among those who backed settlements in North America, particularly in order to exploit timbers and pelts and fish—and to block the so-called Papists. Doing so would prevent their antagonists from exploiting same, garnering funds by which England could be invaded again.⁶⁵

In 1609, the English Virginia Company, which had established Jamestown in Virginia two years earlier, moved to dispatch settlers across the Atlantic with more vigor.⁶⁶ Initiating centuries of contestation between Madrid and London, Spain as early as 1611 was pondering destruction of the new settlement in Virginia.⁶⁷ Of course, the indigenous were not necessarily thrilled when invaders wandered into their bailiwick, leading to severe conflict,⁶⁸ at both ends of a colonial chain from Massachusetts to Virginia.⁶⁹

BUT WHY WERE BERMUDA AND VIRGINIA early targets for settlement? In a sense, London was taking the path of least (European) resistance in that a good deal of the Caribbean had been gobbled up by Spain already, not to mention a good deal of the Americas generally. Despite seeking to conciliate the Ottoman Turks so as to better confront Spain, both of these European powers continued to irritate London during this era.⁷⁰ Seeking to oust the Dutch from the Malay Peninsula produced results as dismaying as attempts to oust Madrid from the Western Hemisphere.⁷¹ It was during the decisive year of 1619 that the Dutch East India Company captured what became Jakarta and burned it to the ground, providing resources for this European power that brought it to the top table.⁷²

Indeed, a betting man in 1624 would have wagered that the winner of the century in diffusing their tongue globally would be the Dutch. They had arrived on the African coast in 1592 and established Pernambuco and New Netherland by 1624, seemingly outstripping the English.⁷³ As early as 1624, the Dutch were hauling tobacco from Virginia,⁷⁴ helping to inculcate in the minds of some colonists the value of Pan-Europeanism—or what became the “whiteness” project.

At the same time, Captain John Smith was complaining about Dutch and Spanish incursions into Virginia,⁷⁵ suggestive of the weakness of London’s position. (Smith, who escaped Ottoman Turks by beheading his captors, knew something about a weakened position.)⁷⁶ Yet London’s success was partly derived from Continental Europe being sucked into what became the Thirty Years’ War, which weakened England’s rivals at a propitious moment. Just as the culmination of the U.S. Civil War led to an offensive against Native American polities, this European inferno contributed in inception and conclusion to the same result. Though it may not have been realized at the time, London’s colonial success was also vouchsafed when in 1628–29 Spain suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the Dutch, one of the most profound setbacks for Madrid since they were turned back from England in 1588. Spain then was bogged down in Italy and, quite simply, had taken on too many foes.⁷⁷

In fact, His Catholic Majesty, King Philip of Spain, spent every day of his forty-four-year reign at war—against the Dutch (1621–1648); against the French (1635–1659); and against London (1625–1630 and 1654–1659); and, generally, on the Iberian Peninsula (1640–1668), including Portugal. U.S. imperialism should take note that even the ostensibly strongest powers, which certainly Madrid was in the seventeenth century, can quickly find themselves being not-so-strong powers after being involved in seemingly ceaseless war.

The point here is that the Dutch and Spanish were denuding each other in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, which also allowed England to rise.

Also benefiting London was the reality that France continued to reel from the impact of the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which generated tremendous religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics while attempting to grant basic rights to the former.⁷⁸ At the same time, unlike Paris, London was not consistent in observing the “Freedom Principle,” the notion that the enslaved became free upon arriving on French soil. This was the case especially when it mattered in the late sixteenth century, when Paris consistently ruled in favor of Africans seeking their freedom, a trend in which London wavered until 1772 with the celebrated decision of Lord Mansfield, which in turn helped to convince wary North American settlers that counterrevolution was the preferred route to escape the logic of abolitionism. Thus the internal religious conflict in France made it difficult for Paris to turn its attention fully to what was becoming its eternal foe across the Channel, which also propelled London’s rise. This included anti-Jewish fervor: issued during the same year as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Code Noir—or slave code—reeked with religious intolerance, enjoining colonial officials to “chase all the Jews who have established residences from our isles” and barred the practice of any non-Catholic religion by either masters or the enslaved.⁷⁹

IN 1618 KING JAMES I GRANTED a royal charter to the Company of Merchants, who were trading in Africa, leading to the first London stronghold on the Gold Coast; the first English trading post was constructed at Kormantine that same year.⁸⁰ Enslavement of Africans took a notional leap forward when “Twenty Negars” arrived in Virginia in August 1619, inaugurating a new era in settler colonialism and slavery alike.⁸¹ However, as we have seen—at least going back to the depredations of Sir Francis Drake—there were enslaved Africans in the precursors of the thirteen colonies that rebelled against London in 1776 well before 1619.

However, London’s entrance into the ghastliness of the slave trade was not as straightforward as it appears in retrospect. As late as 1620 an English explorer in the upper waters of the Gambia River was offered bonded laborers by an African merchant. He replied that “we were a people who do not deal in such commodities, nor did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes,”⁸² a defiant attitude that had disintegrated by century’s end, as we have seen.

Enslavement of the indigenous is another story altogether. By 1622, it was not Spaniards but the indigenous of North America who rebelled and almost wiped out the adolescent settlement.⁸³ And this conflicted tension, driven by the enslavement of the indigenous, was yet another factor impelling the settlers to seek a different supply of bonded labor, one that was unfamiliar with the local landscape and less capable of rallying the neighbors of the settlers to wipe them out.

At this point, enslavement not only ensnared Africans and Native Americans but Christian Europeans as well. A census in Virginia in 1625 identified only twenty-three Africans,⁸⁴ suggesting that even with the incentive of seeking an alternative to enslavement of the indigenous, other factors would have to arise to bring on increased enslavement of Africans.⁸⁵

Nonetheless and perhaps not coincidentally, the previous downplaying of the African Slave Trade began to retreat in the early years of the seventeenth century when the settlement in Virginia was formed. A statute in Bermuda in 1623, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world, denied the right of Africans to engage in free movement or to participate in trade and to bear arms.⁸⁶

Limiting the mobility of Africans and denying their right to be economically independent and to defend themselves by martial means should have indicated to the settlers the innate debility of their project. Instead it was also in the early 1620s that Londoners were to be found on the River Gambia with one of them lasciviously observing that “the women amongst them are … excellently well bodied.” These flesh peddlers should have contemplated more intensively the implications of encountering forty armed men; at least the chronicler “took special note of the blade of … sword[s].”⁸⁷

Instead, by February 1627 there was the arrival of 80 settlers and 10 enslaved Africans in Barbados.⁸⁸ Revealingly, although this was an English settlement from its inception, it had a Pan-European patina, which meant that as Europeans became a distinct minority the seeds were already planted for the emergence of a “white” identity politics to confront a growing African population (a similar process unfolded on the mainland). A leader of the initial settlement was Sir William Courteen, a rich London merchant of Flemish descent, who had a wide range of interests in Amsterdam and trade contacts in what became Surinam. From the beginning, there were close ties between Dutch, French, and English in Barbados.⁸⁹

From the outset there was a basis for moving toward a “whiteness” that transcended ethnic, then religious boundaries. From the outset, one glimpses how the mutual interest in exploiting Africans and the indigenous in the Americas not only generated “whiteness” but also fomented the lessening of religious conflict that had so devastated Europe. In the early stages of French colonialism in the Caribbean there were Catholic Irish, Dutch Calvinists, and Portuguese Jews, all with a mutual interest in enrichment at the expense of “others.”⁹⁰

However, this too was not a straightforward process. Settlers began receiving land grants on the eastern shore of Virginia in the early seventeenth century These came to include the African Anthony Johnson and his sons John and Richard who were to hold about 800 acres of land in Northampton County. He had arrived in Virginia as a slave in 1621, apparently from Angola, an indicator of London’s ever closer ties to Portugal, an early colonizer in Africa. Seeking to elude being taken over by its larger Iberian neighbor, Lisbon and its relationship with England solidified. There is some doubt if so-called durante vita enslavement—slavery for life as a racial birthmark—existed in Virginia at that moment.⁹¹ Yet by the end of the century it was increasingly difficult for the likes of Johnson to climb the class ladder, as intervening events—the seizure of Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the seizure of Manhattan from the Dutch in 1664, and the resultant formation of the Royal African Company in 1672—served to ossify the equivalence of African and slave, which amounted to a grand downfall for Native Americans now subject to the rapacity of land hungry settlers, with said territory then stocked by a growing cascade of enslaved Africans.

As the prospects for the likes of Johnson were falling as the seventeenth century unfolded, the prospects of Maurice Thomson, born in London in the early years of the century, were rising, and he would soon be known as England’s greatest colonial merchant. Like many merchants, he bet heavily on Oliver Cromwell’s revolt against monarchy, an expression of the shoots of capitalism seeking to break through the concrete of feudalism. But before that he became a major planter in Virginia, receiving a massive land grant near what is now Newport News in 1621, just as Johnson was departing a slave ship from Angola. Thomson himself was involved deeply in the pre-feudal institution that was slavery, now hitched to the star of a rising capitalism, transporting bonded Africans to the Caribbean. Straddling the major nodes of the colonialism that was to propel capitalism, he also invested heavily in the fur trade of Canada.⁹²

The rise of Thomson and the decline of Johnson was a synecdoche for the contrasting fates of England and colonialism on the one hand and Africans and Native Americans on the other. As the latter was declining, the former was rising, with the two phenomena being inextricably linked.