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.
CHAPTER 1
Approaching 1492 | Approaching Apocalypse
Did
