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.
CHAPTER 3
The Rise of the Merchants and the Beheading of a King
Oliver Cromwell was “the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century,” said Theodore Roosevelt in the midst of a fiery philippic against the Lord Protector’s foe in Madrid, words that simultaneously rationalized Washington’s knockout blow against the Spanish Empire, which had recently been administered in Cuba and the Philippines. Roosevelt was completing what Cromwell had begun.1 That the embodiment of U.S. imperialism would salute an anti-monarchist Puritan should be seen as logical. The republicanism that Cromwell foreshadowed would erupt in 1776. The republicanism that evolved in North America found it difficult at best to corral the Pan-Europeanism that set it in motion (witness the anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of early nineteenth-century New York, for example). Likewise, Cromwell’s anti-monarchical project, engaging in bloody anti-Irish pogroms, created the template for republicans staring down the indigenous and slave revolts in the Americas.
In short, England and the immediately surrounding territories were rocked by internecine martial conflict between the early 1640s (actually as early as 1639) and the late 1650s, when Cromwell passed from the scene and the monarchy was restored about a decade after the king had been beheaded in 1649. In short, 1640 to 1660 transformed the Isles; though Cromwell died, neither Cromwellian republican nor merchant capital was subdued altogether, and this led in 1688 to their roaring comeback, when the monarch was placed on a glide path to becoming a figurehead. The emerging primacy of those captivated with the idea of captivity of Africans and Native Americans were then to rise on the curious platform of being tribunes of “enlightenment” and progress, an ideological victory so grand that even those who supposedly sought to overthrow the capitalist draper in the deceitful finery of republicanism accepted this fundamental canard.
The losing side in this titanic European conflict had a justifiable fear that they would become bonded laborers, particularly in the Caribbean, which gave them an incentive to fight with ferocity, just as it normalized what was unfolding in any case: enslaving Native Americans and Africans. By 1642 a quarter or even a third of the adult male population in the regions surrounding London were in arms at one time or another, according to one estimate. Casualties, as a result, were quite high; as a percentage of the English population, they were higher than for the British dead during the First World War. The figures for Scotland were higher, and for England, much higher still. Unremarkably, foreigners found these Europeans to be rude, aggressive, and violent.2 Testimony from indigenes and Africans doubtlessly would have been even more denunciatory.
Another estimate claims that 10 percent of all adult males—about 140, 000 out of a population of five million—were armed.3 Yet whatever the actual figure, the cruel reality was merciless murder in the streets and in the fields, creating a dislocation that made faraway Barbados or the deceptively named New England seem like paradise by comparison. Moreover, the relentless bloodletting also created a labor deficit in the Caribbean, swelling in importance with every passing day, thereby contributing to a growing mania for more enslaved Africans. (This would be a problem throughout the era of the slave trade. By 1642 the Dutch, still a major force in this dirty business, were accusing Africans in Africa of “criminal matters,” that is, “conspiring against the sovereignty” of the Netherlands and being “rebellious or seditious” besides.)4
The ousting and beheading of a monarch was the most direct expression of the anti-monarchism involved, but this conflict was also an adjunct of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, then lurching to a close. There were pent-up tensions brought by class displacement, as newly enriched merchants with wealth based in colonies displaced their less blessed counterparts. There was also religious cum ethnic conflict, denoted as mostly Catholic Irish versus mostly Protestant England. And much more. The ostensible religious conflict included the unavoidable point that gold and silver from the Americas were enabling Spain, and the time had come to deny Madrid this revenue and redirect it toward London. Moreover, the impending end of the Thirty Years’ War indicated minimally that the long years of steady Habsburg advance had ended, creating a vacuum that London could well fill.5
