was a prime beneficiary of this systemic cruelty. England had a 33 percent share of the slave trade in 1673 and 74 percent by 1683. Of that dreadful total, the Royal African Company, under the thumb of the Crown, held a hefty 90 percent share in 1690, but with deregulation and the entrance into this sinfully profitable market by freelance merchants, this total had shrunk to 8 percent by 1701. This political and economic victory over monarchy by merchants also undergirded the “popular” politics they represented, which eventuated in a republicanism that scored its paradigmatic triumph in 1776. As scholar William Pettigrew has argued forcefully, the African Slave Trade rested at the heart of what is still held dear in capitalist societies: free trade, anti-monarchism, and a racially sharpened and class-based democracy.11 To put it another way, the weakening of monarchy which was essential to the emerging republicanism was driven in no small way by the desire of certain merchants to weaken the monarch’s hold over the lushly lucrative African Slave Trade.12
However, the surging merchants so essential to the fomenting of the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688, which was a kind of Magna Carta for racialized bourgeois democracy, contained aching contradictions beyond the obvious of being immersed in flesh peddling. In order to undermine Madrid, London in the late sixteenth century commissioned pirates to hound the vessels groaning with wealth purloined from the Americas. These swashbucklers found sanctuary in Jamaica, particularly in 1655, a true turning point that marked the decline of the ousted Spanish Empire and the rise of its London-based counterpart. But this was just one more catastrophic success for the Crown as powerful colonists then began to undermine a proper colonialism by seeking to break the bonds of “imperial preference” and trade with any they so chose, including London’s fiercest foes, thus setting the stage for 1776 and a profound loss for Great Britain.13 The contradictions did not end there as piracy not only facilitated the slave trade, particularly after London moved to crush it, but infused the capitalism that emerged in the republic with the ethos of the gangster.14
Similarly, as the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new god, with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.15 Management theorists have sanctified capitalism in much the same way that clergymen of yore sanctified feudalism. Business schools are cathedrals of capitalism. Consultants are its traveling friars. Just as the clergy in the days of feudalism spoke in Latin to give their words an air of authority, the myrmidons of capitalism speak in a similarly indecipherable mumbo-jumbo. To this day, a Reformation—akin to Martin Luther’s of 1517—has been delayed in arrival.16
Actually, reducing the present to capitalism is somewhat misleading since today’s status quo represents a complex mélange of vestiges of slavery—the still exploited African population in the United States and elsewhere—capitalism, and the feudalism from which it emerged.
Moreover, underdevelopment, particularly in Africa, is not only a product of the depopulation of the halest and heartiest delivered by the ignominious slave trade. It is the almost casual destruction of Africa, as when Vasco da Gama whimsically bombarded Mogadishu in the late fifteenth century—then continued his rapacious journey—followed shortly thereafter by one of his comrades leaving in his wake a trail of blood along the Swahili coast, not to mention the brutal reconfiguration of what is now Eritrea, leaving tensions and contradictions that have yet to be resolved.17
Like a seesaw, as London rose Africa and the Americas fell. As one scholar put it, “the industrial revolution in England and the cotton plantation in the South were part of the same set of facts.”18 (The only friendly amendment to this aphorism would be to include the 17th century so-called “sugar boom” as an antecedent of both.) More to the point, as yet another wise writer put it, “without English capitalism there probably would have been no capitalis[t] system of any kind.”19 As early as 1663, an observer in Surinam noticed that “Negroes [are] the strength and sinews of the Western world.”20 The enslaved, a peculiar form of capital encased in labor, represented simultaneously the barbarism of the emerging capitalism, along with its productive force.
The continent that was compelled to contribute to this process (those now known as “African-American”) arguably has yet to recover from the slave trade and the concomitant colonialism that accelerated in the seventeenth century, which in turn has marked this population wickedly with the stain of slavery. Surely, if one seeks to understand how and why it is that so many Africans reside in North America speaking a language with roots in Western Europe, an intimate understanding of the seventeenth century is a requisite.
ENSLAVED AFRICANS CONSTITUTED two-thirds of the total migration into the Americas between 1600 and 1700.21 These forced migrants can be viewed, metaphorically and actually, as currency, helping to enrich certain Englishmen, aiding their nation’s rise from second-class status to global empire. Their arrival in the Americas represented a horrific leap for constructions of “race” that can be said to precede this bloody century.22
Of course, there are derivatives of London’s extended reach that cannot be downplayed. During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and continuing into following centuries, Europeans advanced the technology of war-fighting vessels, a boon for the elite of the British Isles.23 The flintlock musket pioneered in the first few decades of this pivotal century made possible not only the ability of the English—but French and Dutch, too—to impose their will, on Africans not least. The sword bayonet made its appearance during the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, and it too was instrumental in the subjugation of entire nations.24 By the end of this fraught century, some 600,000 flintlocks were being sold in central France alone. Between 1600 and 1750 the rate of successful handgun fire multiplied by a factor of ten. Technological advances—including the invention of ramrods, paper cartridges, and bayonets—made guns cheaper, better, quicker, and more deadly, all to the detriment of those to be enslaved on London’s behalf.25 The development of the astrolabe and the caravel were key to the development of navigation and the encounter with the Americas, as well as the plunder of Africa.26
The continuing immiseration that gripped all too many in the British Isles was also a recruiting broadside, magnetically conscripting young men—and some disguised young women—to join the military and wield these weapons against “others.” The “English succeeded as colonizers,” says one historian, “largely because their society was less successful at keeping people content at home.”27 The wealth generated, in a circle devoid of virtue, allowed for the creation of standing armies that could then compel multiplication of the wealth accumulating in England’s coffers, extracted from Africa and the Americas.
It was during the 1600s, driven by seemingly unceasing conflicts between and among them, that European powers developed not just muskets but also countermarch drilling, whereby the front row of gunners fire off their charges, then march to the back of the formation in order to reload. An island monarchy, England had a felt need to develop a formidable navy, which included broadside ships with multiple tiers of cannon and capacity to sail close to the wind. Another innovation that guaranteed rising European power was the building of thick walled forts with angled bastions that often provided defenders with an advantage over far superior numbers.28
With no land frontier to defend, at least not to the same degree as continental rivals such as Spain and France, London disproportionately devoted its military expenditure to the navy, which had untoward consequences for Africa and the Americas. Thus, even though the French in 1700 had almost three times more men in service, London was steadily exceeding Paris in colonial conquest.29
A problem with London’s armed forces was the perceived unreliability of the neighboring Irish.
