Richard Gott has a point when he concludes that “the rulers of the British Empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.”45 Of course, a friendly amendment would also include their brethren in North America in this hall of infamous shame. Indeed, the forces unleashed by the rise of London, then New York, proved little less than apocalyptic for Africans and the indigenous of North America.46
In North America the colonialism implanted bloodily involved racialization, which meant the denial of the right to have rights, making millions—Africans particularly—denizens of a society but not of it, that is, permanent aliens, a status that has not entirely dissipated to this very day, indicating its profundity. Ultimately, this is a description of what “race” means,47 a pernicious concept that emerged forcefully, coincidentally enough, in the seventeenth century as colonialism was gaining traction.48
This serves to explicate why the eminent Ghanaian scholar A. Adu Boahen has termed the slave trade “an unpardonable crime, a crime unmitigated by any extenuating circumstance.”49 And certainly not extenuating is the racially stained and deformed republicanism and capitalism that is at times seen implicitly as a justification for the genocide.
For, other than Native America, Africa was the primary victim of the apocalypse unleashed with full fury in the seventeenth century. Joseph E. Inikori is doubtlessly correct when he suggests that the African Slave Trade continues to reverberate, distorting African economies and contributing to today’s underdevelopment.50 By way of comparison, imagine if China today began sending vessels to the Pacific Coast of North America, kidnapping the youngest and healthiest; can you imagine the subsequent impact on the United States and Canada?
Inikori has been among those who have pointed to the enslavement of Africans as being essential to the rise of capitalism.51 Similarly, the construction of the relatively new racial identity that was “whiteness”—and its complement white supremacy—took off as the African Slave Trade itself was reaching a new stage.52
Besides enslavement and the wealth it brought, which facilitated development of the productive forces that then delivered military firepower, London was a beneficiary of the decline of competing powers. There are a number of landmark years in this bloody century of ascendancy, and one is assuredly 1683 when the Ottoman Turks were turned back at Vienna, which vouchsafed the security of points west—London not least—and marked the continuing decline of the Ottomans. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from Africa through Europe into Central Asia, was a virtual British protectorate, a reality buoyed by the fact that even before 1683, Istanbul was a cauldron of instability as sultans were murdered, executed, and otherwise deposed in the decades stretching from 1617 to 1703. With the breathing space this provided, London could more readily and easily turn its fuller attention to Africa and the Americas.53
THE JESUITS ARRIVED IN THE HORN of Africa as early as 1557, the usual advance guard adumbrating the arrival of armed force, then colonialism. The technological trends that were sweeping through Europe did not leave East Africa unaffected. Firearms first arrived in Ethiopia in the fifteenth century; by the 1620s there were 1,500 muskets in the country; by the 1670s guns were common there.54 Moreover, as early as 1542 the Ottomans in Yemen were arming Ethiopians, the target of incursions by London’s chief European ally, the Portuguese, who already had established a toehold in East Africa. When the Ottomans suffered a severe setback in 1683, this weakened Africa simultaneously.55 With the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Europeans were panicking, with the Pope sending an envoy to Persia with the aim of galvanizing an attack on the Turkish rear, which accompanied another plan to persuade the Christian Abyssinians to distract the Sultan with an attack on Egypt.56
To be sure, piracy from North Africa that reached the shores of England and led to Christian enslavement in Turkish slave markets did not magically cease in 1683. It continued up to and including the early years of the North American republic. However, it was during that fateful year that a kind of peace was brokered between France and Algeria. Prior to that, London had created a fund of 20,000 pounds for the purpose of ransoming captives, which at the time numbered in the hundreds in North Africa.57 However, with pressure eased on Western Europe as a result of the setback to the Ottoman Turks and the decline of murderous continental conflict with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, London was poised to yoke what had been a present though not dominant trend—slavery—to an ascending capitalism, converting societies with slaves to slave societies. This process took hold most notably in North America, then the United States of America.
More important, a migration from societies with racism to racist societies was required in order to boost the now dominant slavery. Thus, simply ruling slavery illegal without a focused and conscious assault on racism was bound to allow this pestilence to fester and morph, as it has done in the United States since 1865.
One estimate posits that somewhere between one million to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved on the Barbary Coast between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a figure dwarfed by the number of Africans enchained by Europeans, to be sure. This list included Seth Southall, a future governor of the South Carolina colony who was captured by North African pirates en route from London to North America and held in bondage for more than a year. It is reasonable to infer that such experiences did not make North American settlers more sensitive to the bitter experience of enslavement but instead convinced them of the necessity of normalizing this violent process, which redounded to the detriment of Africans. Moreover, the religious cast of the North African experience—Muslims enslaving Christians—similarly helped to desensitize settlers to the violent process of enslaving non-Christians, that is, Africans.58 The scholar Jean Houbert reminds us of the oft ignored point that “settler colonialism” was “categorically different from non-settler colonialism.”59 How true. The former often entailed a bloody ethnic cleansing, frequently amounting to racialized genocide—that dwarfed similar processes in “non-settler colonialism” not to mention more contemporaneous versions.
This desensitizing is also revealed by the depredations of the English Civil War and the Thirty Years’ War, which had sent many fleeing to North America in the first place. Those who witnessed mass rape and beheadings were hardly well placed to display humanitarianism, especially toward Native Americans and Africans, which incipient racialization was placing beyond the pale in any case. Moreover, helping to propel migration to the wilds of North America was the felt need to elude the distinct possibility of enslavement by Muslims. When New England settlers began to sell Native Americans into Turkish slave markets, it can be seen as not only a way to execute “ethnic cleansing” while clearing a tidy profit but also to sate the seemingly vast appetite overseas for the enslaved.60
Arguably, this rough dispossession of indigenous North Americans would have been even more sweeping but for actions that took place in sites like Jamaica. There, in late 1676, the authorities sought to bar the “Indian inhabitants of New England,” recently “imported to this island”; they were deemed to be a “great hazard and danger” to stability, particularly when combined with the already raucous Africans.61
To that point, London had been bedeviled by the “Muslim Threat,” despite myriad efforts to placate the Ottomans. John Smith, who was to become a kind of hero to settlers in Virginia, had been captured by Muslims—later escaping—though he pointedly observed that “they,” meaning his captors, “use the Hungarians, Russians, Wallachians and Moldovian slaves (whereof they have plenty) as beasts,”62 a treatment then doled out to Africans, coincidentally enough, in untold numbers in North America.
Thus London’s contacts with the Levantine and Mediterranean Muslims were numerous, and Turks and Moors were to be found on English soil as traders, diplomats, and even as pirates as early as the 1500s. This was not only because Muslims, who had occupied a good deal of Spain for centuries until weakening dramatically
