Читать книгу The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism - Gerald Horne - Страница 8

CHAPTER 2

No Providence for Africans and the Indigenous

Between 1629 and 1645, thousands of religious dissenters, notably Puritans, migrated to the Americas to escape tyranny. But just as men, women, and children from England endured bondage in North Africa while London abjured abolitionism, the Puritans and other so-called dissenters proceeded to impose a tyranny on the indigenous, dispossessing them, enslaving them, murdering them.¹

Although indigenes and Africans were the primary victims, in a manner that would bedevil settler colonialism for centuries to come, other settlers too were disfavored. For example, Roger Williams and his spouse arrived in New England from London on February 5, 1631, slated to reside in Massachusetts Bay, before moving to the separate colony in Plymouth, where they lived about two years. Sometime in 1633 they moved to Salem in the jurisdiction of their original point of arrival. In October 1635 the Massachusetts Bay General Court, which in this reputed “democracy” held all legislative, executive, and judicial power, sentenced Williams to banishment after he spoke out against attempts to punish religious dissension and against the brutal confiscation of the land of the indigenous. Eventually, the authorities sought to ship him back to Europe. He escaped by January 1636 into the wilderness, where he was succored only by his indigenous allies and finally settled in an area he termed “Providence.” Despite a subsequent coloration of “liberalism,” what became Rhode Island was also land confiscated from the indigenous, exposing the contradictions of “progressive” settler colonialism.²

Williams himself facilitated the enslavement of indigenes,³ despite their rescuing him from the wrath of Massachusetts Bay. Of course, it was not as if Massachusetts Bay were sui generis. In the New Haven Colony in Connecticut, the community was centered on the church and the word of the minister was law. Dissent was not permitted. Potential informants were everywhere. Any person so bold as to question the minister risked being brought before the General Court and banished, or worse.⁴

It is still true that from the inception, settlements—to a degree—evaded the religious snarl of Europe. This was not necessarily because settlers were more enlightened. It was more because the perils of subduing Native Americans meant that the colonial elite could not be too choosy in selecting allies. Still, since the so-called Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an alleged Catholic conspiracy in predominantly Protestant England, anti-Catholicism had become almost normalized. James VI of Scotland inherited England, Wales, and Ireland and the Channel Islands from his cousin Elizabeth but was perceived as much too conciliatory toward Catholics. This conciliation did not necessarily go down well and, in light of centuries of conflict between England and Scotland depositing a reservoir of mutual hatred and suspicion, this was bound to cause problems for his rule. Conciliation toward Calvinists—or Presbyterians—was not necessarily helpful either, given their prominence in Edinburgh. Catholics were a minority in England, perhaps 5 percent of the population, but they inspired a disproportionate popular hatred and fear as they included many prominent adherents (including James’s spouse and son and many of their courtiers), as well as some presumed extremists, for example, the group led by Guy Fawkes.⁵ Ultimately, many of these Catholics were to flee to what became Maryland, as London did exhibit flexibility in deciding who could populate settlements. But again, it was not enlightenment that dictated this choice but the necessity to corral settlers of whatever hue to subdue the indigenous. However, lingering anti-London resentment in North America helped to fuel the 1776 revolt.

London’s policy seemed to be support of exporting such presumed antagonists to the colonies, which could backfire if and when these opponents chose to ally with the Crown’s antagonists abroad. Thus, by 1634, certain privileges were granted to arriving Irish and Scots in Massachusetts Bay, who would have been disfavored in London.⁶ In other words, homeland bigotry had to yield in the face of subjugating the indigenous.⁷

This exportation policy carried over to disgruntled Africans who routinely were shipped from, say, the mainland to the Caribbean—or vice versa—which also allowed for allying with the Crown’s antagonists in the new venue of oppression.

Thus it was in the early 1630s that a Catholic, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, sought a charter from the Crown in the territory that became Maryland. Virginia protested vigorously, but to little avail⁸ as the Crown in seeming anticipation of the new era of republicanism and its complement, “whiteness,” did not sustain these objections.⁹ It was not preordained that this request would be fulfilled for anti-Catholicism had yet to disappear from London. “We must fortify ourselves both abroad and at home,” said Sir Edward Giles, since “Papists increase and grow, braving and outfacing,” their “chief aim” and target being “England and in England [targeting] the King and the Prince.”¹⁰ Contrary to today’s suspicion, it was not as if Englishmen became more enlightened once they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. It was more that the light of fires set by indigenous arsonists and embattled Africans helped to convince these settlers that larger racial stakes loomed that surpassed religious bigotry.

These Catholics were responding to a set of repressive laws in London that were inviting them to depart, a precursor of the rise of the violently anti-Irish Oliver Cromwell.¹¹ In 1633, departing from the Isle of Wight, were emigrants bound for North America. Perhaps appropriately, the sources of fear that accompanied them along the way included apprehension about Turkish pirates determined to enslave them, just as they intended to enslave those they would encounter in North America. They landed in Barbados, then Montserrat where they met a colony of Irishmen who had been banished from Virginia because of their Catholicism. Then it was on to the Chesapeake. St. Mary’s County, which they helped to establish, was from its first settlement by Europeans a Catholic county.¹²

Apparently aware of the hostility that surrounded them, not only in Virginia but among Africans and the indigenes too, the early Marylanders sought to remove religion as an issue of contestation,¹³ as if they were saying, “No one here but us European settlers.” And yes, this ecumenical approach set the stage for an entente with the so-called Catholic powers, that is, Paris and Madrid, that led directly to the anti-London revolt of 1776. As early as 1638 Whitehall—official London—was complaining about being ignored by the region that became known as New England,¹⁴ as thousands of miles away that part of the colonies charted a new path.

As in the case of Roger Williams, the idea of “progressive” settler colonialism was a contradiction in terms, and an utter misnomer. It did not take long for the Jesuits—the typical advance guard for the colonialism of predominantly Catholic nations such as France—to seek special privileges for themselves in Maryland, which ignited a bitter struggle.¹⁵ It is not easy to seize land on which another people reside, oust them, then shout from the rooftops about alleged democratic principles. Thus, this Catholic refuge became one of the first mainland colonies to recognize slavery as a matter of law; as was now typical, being persecuted was no guarantee that your group would reject persecution of others. The Marylanders were no less harsh toward the Piscataways, the Chapticos, the Nangemy, the Mattawoman, and other indigenes in a manner that mimicked the harshness of their New England counterparts in their relationship to the Pequot.¹⁶

It was not just religious dissenters who were being shipped abroad, however. Food riots in England rose from twelve between 1600 and 1620 to thirty-six between 1621 and 1631, with fourteen more during the months stretching from 1647 to 1649. The hungry were willing to risk arriving in a war zone, which assuredly was a fair description of North America, and were willing to dispossess those who stood in the way of their sating their growingly voracious appetites.¹⁷

The participants in food riots then became a vast pool of potential indentured servants. This form of labor was deemed initially to be a roaring success. Between 1625 and 1650 perhaps 60,000 contract laborers set sail for the Caribbean, with Barbados being a primary destination. Rapidly this small island, which even today has only about 285,000 residents, became the most densely populated area in the world, with hellish and inhumane working conditions besides. These dissidents were at times joined by rebellious Irish, which was not ideal for producing island calmness, raising the perpetual possibility of mass mutiny.

The situation demanded an alternative, soon to be delivered by more bonded Africans. Despite their best efforts, the Dutch, busy supplying Brazil, were not in an ideal position to satisfy the unquenchable appetite for enslaved Africans. Still, the Dutch tried, and reaped the whirlwind as a result. Dutch slave ships became notorious for engendering mutinies. Out of the 1,500 slaving voyages under the Dutch flag during this period, more than three hundred were rocked by slave revolts, a very high proportion.¹⁸

BY 1637 THE SO-CALLED PEQUOT WAR had erupted in New England, as settlers inflicted numerous atrocities upon indigenes in order to oust them from their land.¹⁹ Settlers had to worry that indigenes would ally with their European competitors—notably the French and Spanish—and liquidate them, which seemed to increase English ferocity. “Resist both forraigne enemies & the natives” was the watchword as early as 1629,²⁰ and if there were a slogan for colonial settlements and the early United States, which inherited the initial barbarity, this was it. Since many of the so-called Pilgrims spoke Dutch—they had migrated from the Isles to England’s antagonistic neighbor before settling in North America—this intensified the ordinary nervousness of London, then involved in what seemed to be an endless cycle of conflict with Holland. Since the Netherlands also opened the door to those who were Jewish fleeing Spanish inquisitorial terror, the Dutch, even more so than the North American republicans, should be seen as pioneers in developing overarching racial identities in order to facilitate colonialism, a process that took the name of “whiteness” on the west bank of the Atlantic.²¹ It was also the opportunistic Dutch who pioneered in forging ties with persecuted French Protestants—Huguenots—creating a kind of Protestant mercantile international that was important in the rise of both the sugar industry and capitalism itself. Intriguingly, it was precisely the Dutch who built the highest stage of white supremacy at the southern tip of Africa, just as it was the Catholics—for example, the French elite—and not the English Protestants who allowed their enslaved to be baptized: many of these Africans received catechism lessons and were married legally.²² The Dutch also exemplified the value of what came to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Their war with Spain, roughly from 1569 to 1648, stimulated its arms industry, which in turn sped the pace of overseas conquest. By the time of New Netherland’s founding, the Dutch republicans were manufacturing an estimated 14,000 muskets annually, most of them for export, a figure that grew larger year by year. No other European nation came close to this level of production until decades later. Furthermore, Dutch gunsmiths were introducing technological innovations to their weapons that made them even more attractive to those who might quarrel with English colonists—the Iroquois foremost among them. This also helped to stimulate a trade of slaves for guns that decimated Native American groupings, opening their lands for a massive land grab by European settlers.²³

Consider also that there were Dutchmen resident in the critical colony that was Barbados, as early as the 1630s.²⁴ Consider as well that English tobacco growers endured a crisis of overproduction in 1636, leading to a search for alternative crops, and like manna from heaven Dutchmen arrived in 1637 with sugarcane, technology, capital, and slaves, a process that was to be repeated again in the 1650s after Hollanders were ousted from Brazil by the Portuguese.²⁵ Many of these “Hollanders” were actually Spanish Jews who had fled to Recife, inaugurating a “Golden Age” of sorts for them—though not for those they enslaved—before fleeing as the Portuguese made a comeback in 1654.²⁶ When, in August 1641, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from Luanda, Angola, and in 1642 obtained a monopoly of the external slave trade from there, this was ultimately of benefit not only to New Amsterdam but, as things evolved, became an unanticipated gift to London’s settlements too.²⁷

The Dutch slave trade got off to a flying start, with 25,000 Africans soon being shipped to Brazil. This was occurring as the English were just settling into the Caribbean, and given the nature of Africans as commodities, it was ineluctable that many of these bodies would wind up in the Caribbean, converting these islands into a darling of empire. The demand for labor grew as the demand for crops produced there grew concomitantly, including export crops such as tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and indigo, all thought to be optimally grown in the tropics.²⁸

It was unrealistic, however, to expect a proper settler colonialism to depend for its labor supply upon a competing empire, particularly when the Netherlands and England seemed to be embroiled in what seemed to be a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sir Benjamin Rudyerd told Parliament as much in 1641, as he demanded more spending on vessels, also a necessity if England were to avoid a replay of 1588. “As we are an island,” he asserted, “it concernes our very being to have [a] store of ships to defend us and also our well being by their trade to enrich us.” No matter how sliced and diced, the route to prosperity was propelled by vessels. “Now let us consider the Enemy we are to encounter, the King of Spaine” in this limited instance; what made him strong is “his Mines in the West Indies,”²⁹ and if England were to become stronger the Crown would also need “mines” worked by slaves, procured from Africa, requiring more ships.

There was a kind of domino theory in process in the seventeenth century that was to benefit London. Though surely it was not their intention, Dutchmen were a kind of stalking horse for England, weakening Spain over the decades, then ousting the Portuguese from the northeast coast of Brazil between 1630 and 1654 and extending tolerance to Catholics and Jews, providing a model for a kind of Pan-Europeanism that was to redound to London’s benefit when it battered the Dutch into submission within the following decades, which provided a Pan-European model for republicans in North America in the following century.³⁰

Those fleeing inquisitorial Madrid also helped to bolster the so-called Muslim Corsair Republic of Saleh, 1624–66, in North Africa. Historian Jonathan Israel has limned the “Jewish role” in this project, which involved a corresponding role for their comrades in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. As the Netherlands went into decline, not least because of its battering by London, English settlements were to become the beneficiaries of this enterprise, along with the pragmatic religious tolerance it subsumed, which represented a step forward toward a kind of Pan-Europeanism so useful to the borderless boundaries that capitalism was to demand. However, as this enterprise was unfolding, this North African project was able to instill fear and loathing in Englishmen and Spaniards alike. Arguably, the embrace of the fleeing Jewish community in North Africa provided an incentive for London to do the same, lest the “Corsair Republic” become stronger, to England’s detriment.³¹

Throughout the 1630s, England’s Guinea Company, a forerunner of the Royal African Company that was to ravage Africa, had been mainly concerned with the direct import of redwood, elephant’s teeth, hides of all sorts, and above all, gold. But as new opportunities emerged with the arrival of settlements in such sites as Bermuda, Barbados, and Providence Island, the company by the early 1640s sought to reorient toward the slave trade, perhaps the most lushly profitable business of all. This was part of a larger reorientation in that by the late 1620s most of the main London companies spearheaded by merchants had collapsed. The major spurt of colonial economic development that took place over succeeding decades was executed by a new group of traders from outside the circle of this earlier circle of merchants. This roiling, however, was to provide the seedbed of the civil wars in England that were to erupt in the early 1640s, which meant so much for the subsequent dispossession of the indigenes and the enslavement of Africans.³²

For in a premature version of the “creative destruction” that was said to characterize capitalism,³³ the cornucopia of opportunities opened by the new realm of settler colonialism created new elites as it displaced old ones, with the latter often unwilling to leave center stage willingly.

Thus a number of the men who sided with Oliver Cromwell within a few years in his conflict with the Crown had laid the foundations for capitalism and republicanism in Massachusetts. This lengthy list included Vincent Potter, who actually fought against the Pequots in the 1630s; Hugh Peter, a Puritan and a prime mover in the founding of what became Harvard University during that same conflicted decade; Winthrop’s nephew, George Downing; and Owen Rowe, a merchant with ties to Virginia and Massachusetts and Bermuda alike.³⁴

By 1641 Massachusetts Bay, in large part because the authorities wanted to define the legal status of the hundreds of indigenous Pequot captives then in bondage, passed one of the first laws peculiar to the enslaved in London’s colonies. Some of these captives wound up in Bermuda, the Caribbean, the Azores, Tangier, and possibly even Madagascar. “We sent them to Bermuda,” boasted John Winthrop, as if that were the sole destination. Despite their subsequent preening of being a sector of settler colonialism bereft of enslaved Africans, there is actually evidence of the presence of this group as early as 1633.³⁵

Because enslaved indigenes were for the most part cheaper than the price of an enslaved African—perhaps a quarter to a tenth of the cost of the latter—there was a powerful incentive to enchain them, which also brought the added bonus of ousting them from their land.³⁶ Of course, enraged indigenes were not ideal neighbors, which meant that mainland settlers eventually would have to settle for enslaved Africans as the least bad option.

The cycle endured by indigenes is instructive when contemplating their twin in immiseration, the African. From 1630 to 1650 the status of the indigenous under the heel of those who were to term themselves New Englanders cycled from contract workers to servants to perpetual slaves.³⁷ As early as 1640 colonial courts in Virginia began constructing racial identities to determine who could be enslaved and who could be enslaved for life. What was to become the “Old Dominion” was tailing after Bermuda, Barbados, and St. Kitts, as these islands continued to set the pace for settler colonialism.³⁸ Critically, Virginia mandated a law in 1640 “preventing Negroes from bearing arms,” perhaps an indication of worry about in which direction these weapons would be pointed.³⁹

Invading a territory and seeking to enslave the current residents is a guarantee for a lengthy insecurity. This is especially the case given the speed of the demographic debacle: the indigenous population fell from an estimated 144,000 before 1616 to about 30,000 by 1670.⁴⁰ Making these so-called New Englanders even more vulnerable was the fact that for London this settlement was a sideshow. More settlers defined as “white” resided in the Caribbean and the surrounding islands (about 40,000) in 1650 than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England settlements (23,000) combined. And the great majority of these lived in Barbados.⁴¹

The main event was in the Caribbean. This would not change appreciably until the mid-eighteenth century, which suggested that the Royal Navy would be more prone to be concerned about challenges to Barbados, not Boston. As early as 1627, the now eminent New Englander John Winthrop sent his son to Barbados for betterment, economic and otherwise. There the Winthrop grubstake grew accordingly, which suggested further that even New Englanders were more concerned about the security of the Caribbean, as opposed to their own backyard. Winthrop was busily selling wine in St. Christopher’s, a Barbadian neighbor. Since letters from New England sailed to London via Barbados, this was indicative as to what was the main arena and what was the periphery. This lasted until the 1770s when the North American settlements were on the verge of secession. Moreover, Winthrop and his fellow New Englanders faced keen competition not only from London traders but even more from the Dutch, who seemed to be the rising power then. Undaunted, Winthrop sought to establish a foundation for New England manufacturing based on Caribbean cotton, but in an early sign of a rationale for secession, this was resisted by London. But England and New England could agree on the necessity of increasing enslavement in the Caribbean, with those ousted from their land in North America and Africans dragged across the Atlantic becoming the chief victims of this inhumane process. New England quickly became a chief supplier of food for the Caribbean, along with horses, casks, and barrels for rum too. The latter product was traded for enslaved Africans.⁴²

From 1630 to 1640 at least twenty ships are known to have sailed between New England and Barbados, Bermuda, Providence Island, St. Kitts, and Tortuga, returning with cotton, tobacco, sugar, tropical produce—and the enslaved. Again, the preeminent Winthrop family of Massachusetts Bay are a stand-in for this commercial relationship: when young Samuel Winthrop moved from Tenerife to Barbados and eventually Antigua, the Winthrops, centered in England and Massachusetts, extended their trade from Rhode Island and Connecticut to the Caribbean.⁴³

It would be an error to ascribe fiendish barbarity to Western Europeans alone, even settlers. The Winthrops were rising as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe was establishing a record for rapacity that continues to astonish. When Magdeburg fell in 1631, women were subjected to mass rape and 30,000 were butchered indiscriminately and the city was put to the torch. Religion—not race, the raison d’être for barbarism in the Americas—was at issue. By 1639 the city now known as Chennai was taken by the British East India Company in the face of stiff resistance.⁴⁴ Reverberations from this mass violence could not help but spread and was in turn reinforced by contemporaneous trends in the Americas and Africa.

Nevertheless, the symbiotic relationship between ferocious island slavery and New England emerged clearly in 1630–31 when Puritans from the latter established a colony on Providence Island, a process which, revealingly, involved ousting Dutch privateers, a harbinger of things to come. Though London’s settlements were not necessarily a single unitary formation, it would have been unwise for those in, say, Virginia, to ignore events in the waters surrounding the southeast quadrant of North America. Hence, as the settlement in Providence Island was being organized, the laws of Virginia showed a sudden increase in the number of regulations constraining the activities of enslaved Africans.⁴⁵

The population of the enslaved on the island exploded after 1634, allowing subsequent generations of New Englanders to look down their noses piously and hypocritically at slavery,⁴⁶ even though their economy had been buoyed by enslavement of the indigenous, while being an extension of a slave-owning Caribbean. As was London’s tendency, this colony allowed for piracy, with Englishmen parasitically preying on the Spanish Empire.⁴⁷

Dauntlessly, settlers pursued the dangerously inhumane course of slavery on Providence Island in the face of fierce resistance by the enslaved. In March 1636 it was decided that “Negroes” were “to be disposed into families and divided amongst officers and industrious planters,” though, it was cautioned, “a strict watch” must be “kept to prevent plots or any danger to the island being attempted.”⁴⁸ A year later the investors in Providence Island were complaining that there were “too many Negroes in the island” with a fervent plea for “directions concerning them.” It was urged that “some” should be “transported to Virginia and the Somers Islands,”⁴⁹ meaning Bermuda. But this was simply exporting problems, a perilous version of musical chairs.

Providence Island did not have many options. The investors had many reasons, they announced, for “disliking so many Negroes in the island,” principally because of their “mutinous conduct.” Their presence was becoming unproductive since it was mandated that “whoever keeps a Negro shall maintain a servant one day in the week upon the public works.”⁵⁰ “Restraint of buying Negroes” was mandated, but a central directive was one thing, compliance was quite another.⁵¹

It did not take long for investors to order that the “taking in of Negroes” be “excused,” though it was well recognized that there was an abject “danger of too great a number.” Somehow they wanted to “send 200 English to be exchanged for as many Negroes,” swapping slaves for settlers or indentured servants, but it was unclear as to who would volunteer willingly to arrive in a kind of war zone. Yet the rule crafted was “to two English men in a family, one Negro may be received and no more.” Barring Negroes altogether was apparently out of the question; instead, the superfluous advice was rendered that “special care … be taken” to avoid at all costs “the Cannibal Negroes brought from New England.” Instead, the recommendation was “buying Negroes from the Dutch,” though placing coin in the pockets of antagonists was hardly a sound solution.⁵² Besides, what was to keep the sly Dutch from smuggling their agents into the island under the guise of selling the enslaved? This may serve to illuminate why many of the vanquished Pequots wound up being enslaved on Providence Island and Africans from there wound up in New England.⁵³

On 1 May 1638—in anticipation of the late nineteenth-century salutations to laborers worldwide—the enslaved of Providence Island executed the first slave rebellion in any English colony. Thereafter, frightened oppressors engaged in a fire sale of Africans, which indicated that this settlement’s shelf life was to be limited. In possible response, in 1638 the first known attempt to “breed” enslaved Africans happened in Boston, as if in anticipation of twenty-first-century bio-engineering, to produce slaves and become less dependent on the market.⁵⁴

Providence Island was soon to be overrun and destroyed by Spaniards (not the Dutch), but just before that investors were revealing their dilemma. “Laid aside” were “thoughts of selling their Negroes,” said the investors, though their presence would not enhance settler security when the inevitable Spanish invasion occurred. “If the number be too great to be managed,” they said disconsolately, “they may be sold and sent to New England or Virginia.”⁵⁵ But like many investors before and since, they held on to this asset too long and lost when marauders dispatched from His Catholic Majesty arrived.

The inherent frailty of island settlements was an inference drawn from the fate of Providence Island. Yes, mainland settlements had their own problems, but as of that moment, New England and Virginia were surviving. The destruction of this island colony, however, sent an ominous signal about the destiny of Barbados and its neighbors. Were island settlements harder to defend than their mainland counterparts? Was it easier to deliver aid to hurricane wracked mainland settlements, as opposed to their island counterparts? If both queries were answered affirmatively, this was further reason for a great trek to the mainland, which was a condition precedent for the emergence of what became the United States of America.

THE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL relationship between New England and London’s island colonies meant that the Crown could afford to import more enslaved Africans. The population of the latter in Barbados jumped from about 2,000 in the 1630s to over 20,000 by the 1650s. The mainland also benefited from this boom, as a trickle of migrants to Jamestown in 1607 became a stream by 1629, then a flood by the 1640s: 100,000 were said to have arrived during the seventeenth century.⁵⁶

The mainland was a satellite floating in the orbit of the Caribbean. The so-named West Indies were probably far more key to New England’s prosperity than New England was to the Caribbean.⁵⁷ This allowed more latitude for the mainlanders and more opportunity to collaborate with the Crown’s opponents, particularly in French Hispaniola, an exercise that eventuated in a unilateral declaration of independence in 1776 that was to be backed by Paris.

Though London’s emphasis on the Caribbean made sense in the short term, in the longer term the North American mainland held more potential for exploitation compared to small islands. In the latter, Africans would soon become the majority, making security problematic at best. Yes, the mainland delivered security threats too, but a retreat from islands across open seas was more difficult than across land. Similarly, it was easier to build linked settlements in a chain-like fashion in the vast mainland than across disparate islands of varying size.⁵⁸

Part of the problem was on the mainland during this period. A major reason was the tyranny of the Massachusetts theocracy, which repelled many besides Roger Williams. Instead of wandering into the wilderness and founding a Providence, others fled to the warm embrace of the more cultivated and congenial Caribbean, underlining the continuing importance of these settlements. Though increasingly surrounded by bonded labor on the verge of revolt, the islands seemed to be more inviting than a colder Boston.⁵⁹ Besides, opportunities and concessions were easier to obtain in the Caribbean, even though Europeans were increasingly being outnumbered by Africans, as opposed to Boston, which would not endure this dicey fate.

Meanwhile, as the migrants from the Isle of Wight indicated, Europeans on the open seas continued worrying about being taken by the Ottoman Turks and their proxies. As we have seen, this bracing experience did not tend to make these Western Europeans more sensitive to enslavement but, to the contrary, seemed to spur them along this road.⁶⁰ It was “worse than the Egyptian bondage,” complained one Londoner speaking of what occurred in Morocco. “What misery can be more than for a man or woman to be bought and sold like a beast”—said with seeming indifference to what English merchants were doing in the Americas and Africa.⁶¹ It was as if the mantra was “be an enslaver or a slave.”

The settlements delivered wealth along with storminess in the form of revolts by bonded labor and the “creative destruction” delivered by the rise of new centers of capital. At the same time, London was being pressed on all sides by the Dutch and the Spaniards, as well as the French and the Ottoman Turks. (As for the French, the considerable unrest across the Channel was bound to have an impact in what became known as the British Isles.⁶² And, as so often happened, rebellion in mostly Catholic France often meant corresponding revolt in mostly Catholic Ireland.)⁶³ This was not a prescription for steadiness, a reality that would become clear when civil war erupted and a monarch was beheaded by comrades of Oliver Cromwell, some of whom had whetted their seemingly bottomless appetite for violence in battles on the North American mainland. The violence that had become normative ignited cycles of revenge, which was not ideal when merchants sought to muster settlers for colonial occupation, though many were still smarting from religious, class, and ethnic repression and licking their wounds.⁶⁴ When the tenure of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, expired and royal restoration occurred, the clock was not turned back. Instead, the merchants and those who flexed their increasingly powerful muscles in temporarily deposing the Crown moved aggressively to weaken the Spanish (taking Jamaica) and weakening the Dutch (taking Manhattan), both of which set the stage for an increase in the arrival of enslaved Africans, who brought with them more wealth, and more storminess as well.