Madrid and thus a potential ally by London, particularly after His Catholic Majesty’s attempt to overthrow the English regime in 1588 had been blunted serendipitously. Then the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605 unleashed a new wave of anti-Catholicism, with “Papists,” thought to be part of Madrid’s ubiquitous design, heightening ultra-religiosity.63
Helping to propel England, on the other hand, was the simultaneous threat of internal and external plotting, real and imagined, by Catholics against the Crown and the established faith of Protestantism, along with a massive royal debt that was a partial product of seeking to repel this challenge. This led to an attempt in 1585 to colonize what became Virginia.64 That Paris was deeply in debt at the same time suggests both that London was not alone in its misery but would face rigorous competition for the bounty of colonialism.65 Singled out as the culprit was Spain, which had flooded Europe with silver, serving to deflate currencies, and then compelled its neighbors to spend heavily—and incur debt—from fighting Madrid-induced wars.66
Thus there was a burgeoning Muslim community in Elizabethan London, which may have contributed to religious sensitivity. This openness to Islam was partly a response to nervousness engendered by the Muslim takeover of Constantinople in 1453. This land grab was thought to augur an unavoidable advance and prompted the search for a new route to the riches of Asia, which led to the seizure of the Americas by the Europeans. Surely the parallels between Protestantism and Islam were hard to discount; the former’s rejection of clerical authority and belief in the inner light corresponded to the Islamic rejection of intermediaries between the believer and Allah.67
LONDON WAS LATE TO THE COLONIAL feast but quickly made up for lost time by helping to weaken the Dutch, early arrivers. London had assisted the eminence of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century as the sea-bound nation faced an existential challenge from Spain. In response, the cornered Dutch opened their doors for the arrival of Spanish Jews, along with fleeing Catholics and even Puritans from England, helping to form a model of Pan-Europeanism—or a precursor to “whiteness”—that influenced the limited republicanism that was to take hold in North America in 1776.
Indeed, one of the themes of this book is not only how enslaving colonialism forged “whiteness” and a Pan-European concord in order to overawe rebellious Africans and indigenes, but how it also served as a basis for a kind of “enlightenment” to attract Europeans to these war zones. Thus, in the French Caribbean, those who happened to be Jewish enjoyed rights they did not have in Paris, precisely because of the desperation wrought by the ceaseless search for those who could be defined as “white.” On the other hand, this trend did not proceed without backsliding; in 1683 the Jesuit denunciation of supposed Jewish dominance of local commerce and of Jewish slaveholders allegedly refusing Christianity to their bondsmen led to a royal order expelling them from Martinique. They were given one month to depart and a similar wave of persecution beset French Huguenots,68 allowing English Protestants to benefit, as they pioneered in developing “whiteness” and white supremacy and passed on this enriching skill to their rebellious progeny in what became the United States.
Thus, by 1700 there were fourteen Huguenot churches in West London, as these Protestants fled France after Paris forbade their religious liberty, ordered the destruction of their churches, and declared them Catholic. One of this persecuted grouping, John Houblon, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm and until 2014 his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned fifty-pound banknotes: this image neatly encapsulated the ties linking Pan-Europeanism, religious liberty, and an ascending capitalism, lessons all developed further by the North American republic.69
The self-inflicted wounds imposed by rivals also explain the rise of London in the seventeenth century, a point that U.S. patriots may want to consider today in light of the rise of China.
The decline of the Ottoman Turks was no direct fault of London, which had sought to align with Muslims to check the foe that was Madrid. The continuing decline of Amsterdam and Rotterdam was only somewhat different. As noted, there were those in London who sought to aid the Netherlands in its decades-long conflict with Spain, but this was like fattening a sheep for slaughter, for the gains garnered by the Dutch as it successfully beat back Spain were then seized by London as Amsterdam fell into a centuries-long decline. This became apparent with the Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–54, which weakened the Netherlands in the prime area of controlling Atlantic trade routes.70 That is, Dutch slavers were undermining the price of English-shipped slaves from West Africa, so a squadron of English warships attacked and captured two West African ports used by the Dutch, then took Manhattan in turn. This contributed to a naval war that lasted until 1667.71
A turning point in London’s lengthy jousting with Madrid was Spain’s ouster from Jamaica in 1655. This had manifold consequences. England could not be indifferent to the fact that this great victory was aided immeasurably by the defection to their side of feisty Africans disgusted with Spain’s misrule along with a goodly number of those who were Jewish and understandably apprehensive about what the ongoing Inquisition portended. As this defeat was being inflicted, others who were Jewish were fleeing Brazil, where they had sheltered under the cloak of Protestant Netherlands as Catholic Portugal had surged back into control of this vast territory. That is, after 1654, almost all the remaining Dutch and Jewish merchants fled Recife, with many decamping to the Caribbean; many had begun fleeing South America heading northward as early as 1645. This group then fled to Jamaica, Barbados, and other English colonies, bringing with them the expertise that contributed mightily to a sugar boom, which in turn contributed to an acceleration of the African Slave Trade, so that this bloody commodity could be produced more readily.72 There was also an influx from Recife to Manhattan, serving to buttress colonialism there too.73
As sugar began to boom, the felt need for more enslaved Africans rose. In anticipation of this noxious trend, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa had been issued a charter in 1660 in London, accelerating the trade in Africans, which led directly to the organizing of the Royal African Company, under the thumb of the Crown, in 1672.74
The taking of Jamaica, however, was not a victory for Africans. It led to an even more voracious appetite for enslaved African labor in order to produce the fabulously profitable crop that was sugar. This, as much as anything else, contributed mightily to the heightening of the already degraded status of Africans, as a by-product and rationalization of their enhanced reputation. Similarly, the Irish and other dissidents who had been conscripted into working in the fields of the Caribbean receded gradually in numbers, as they could now be promoted to be overseers or soldiers to keep this larger group of Africans in check. Out of this crucible emerged the renewed and more toxic racial identity that was “whiteness,” which also involved an alliance among Europeans of various class backgrounds, all bound by petrified unity in reaction to the prospect of a slave rebellion that would liquidate them all.
After the triumph of republicans in 1776, these victors were able to forge Pan-European unity as they swept across a continent; the prospect grew accordingly that the poorer among this group could profit from the pillaging of Cherokees (and countless other indigenes) and Mexicans and Hawaiians. This noxious cross-class unity, in other words, metastasized as it traversed North America, where it became unified by the prospect of excluding, if not plundering, those not inducted into the hallowed halls of whiteness, a trait manifested as recently as November 2016.
As the wealth of London’s possessions in the Caribbean proliferated, it helped to buoy the North American settlements, then viewed as not as valuable. Ultimately, the unforgiving racial ratios of the Caribbean helped to induce a “Great Trek” to the mainland—particularly South Carolina—where growing wealth helped to ignite a lurch toward independence in 1776, then an invigorated desire to enchain more Africans—and increased wealth even further as these slaves were compelled to develop land seized from Native Americans.
With the restoration of Charles II in London in 1660 and the companion defeat of the
