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
