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
