of bourgeois liberties, which even today many of African and indigenous descent in North America hardly enjoy, notably in due process of law before being executed by an officer of the state. This rationalization of crime makes it all the more difficult to overcome the odious legacy of tragic events of recent centuries. But what is similarly revealing is that those who heartily castigate and declaim the crimes of socialism, a system that led directly to the liberation of millions of Africans and “darker peoples” from the domination of the routinely praised North Atlantic powers,90 lose all sense of proportion when they simultaneously downplay and warp what was required to build the United States and “modernism” and a supposed “democracy.”
Future historians may very well conclude that an explanation for this abject hypocrisy is that too many could not see beyond the deliverance of poorer Europeans from the barbarism they endured on their home continent to a sympathy with those victimized in the process. Ultimately they could not overcome the poisonous snare of white supremacy. That is, the seeds of the fiasco of an election in November 2016 in the United States, where the less affluent of European descent, including more than half of the women of this group, found their tribune in a vulgar billionaire, has roots in the cross-class coalition that spearheaded colonial settlement in the seventeenth century at the expense of the indigenous and enslaved Africans.
In other words, it is not premature to contemplate life after capitalism in what is now the United States,91 the disastrous result of November 2016 notwithstanding. When this monumental task is undertaken, however, never to be forgotten is that those who were victimized in the first instance—enslaved Africans and the indigenous—need to be compensated and made whole (somehow) as this elongated process unfolds.
This is a book about the events in the seventeenth century that led to the creation of what is now called the modern and advanced world. It concerns the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and the ultimate expression of the two: capitalism. These events mostly unfold on the eastern seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain. Though the mode in these pages is decidedly historical, I am seeking to shed light on the contemporary moment, wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.
CHAPTER 1
Beginning
Though slow to the colonial banquet that was enslavement, England was not altogether unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the eleventh century.1 Scotland, for example, was filled with English slaves.2
This was an aspect of the larger point: at the height of its power, the Roman Empire, which once controlled England, trafficked in hundreds of thousands of slaves annually; in the previous millennium, slavery and the slave trade were rampant, a praxis in which the Vikings and Scandinavians excelled, often preying on the English and other Europeans. When the Islamic world boomed in the eighth century, there was a sharp rise in the demand for slaves.3 During that era, more than a millennium past, one trader alone boasted of selling more than 12, 000 enslaved Africans in Persian markets.4 Yet this slavery, as horrid as it was, did not reach the dimensions of the racial slavery that took off in the seventeenth century.
This older version of slavery was tied intimately to war, with the former being the fruit of the latter. This did not bode well for Africa, as Western Europeans developed the weapons of war.
The fifteenth century marked the onset of a newer kind of slavery: by 1441, Portuguese pirates had seized Africans for sale and by 1470 Spaniards had begun to do the same. It was in 1482 that Portugal began construction of a large fort to facilitate trade in Africans.5 By the middle of the fifteenth century, enslaved Africans formed as much as 10 percent of Lisbon’s population.6
The leaders of the Iberian Peninsula had a first movers’ advantage in reaching the Americas and sailing to Africa, which then allowed Spain to press England, forcing London for reasons of survival, if nothing more, to seek to follow in Madrid’s footsteps. Simultaneous with Columbus’s voyage was the launching of the Inquisition, which, ironically, also provided an advantage in that it provided the framework for a centralizing institution, essential for the process of state building.7
Most notably in the 1490s, this form of hateful commerce accelerated, when Christopher Columbus and his band of cutthroats began to dispatch Tainos from the Caribbean to the slave markets of Europe. Columbus’s first business venture in the Americas involved sending four boatloads of indigenes to Mediterranean slave markets. Others followed in his footsteps, including the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. These powers all participated in this dirty business, but infamy in this regard was held by Madrid, which was to indigenous slavery what England and the United States were to African slavery.8
Appropriately, Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to the continents across the Atlantic from Europe, was a slave trader, too. Columbus’s voyage, as noted, had been driven by the takeover of Constantinople in 1453 and a few years later the Ottomans were seizing Aegean islands, as churches were converted to mosques and children were taken into slavery. Columbus’s Genoa showed that the acts of the Turks were not that unusual since this Italian town exemplified the belief that slavery was a legitimate business and thus allowed significant investment in the odious commerce that brought young men, women, and children from the Black Sea and sold them to buyers in Muslim Spain or Egypt. Unlike Venetians, who paid their galley rowers, Genoese staffed their war galleys with the enslaved. The Genoese pioneered in enslaving Africans, though the Portuguese were also premature in this regard, and by 1452 had received a papal dispensation for it. Columbus, as a consequence, was well positioned to turn his trailblazing journey into a new zenith in slave trading, particularly since his crew consisted of leading criminal elements, who over the centuries were to be leaders in this dirty business.9 With the arrival of the Spanish on the American mainland in the early 1500s, the commerce in Africans can be said to have increased dramatically there.10 Between 1500 and 1550 the Portuguese took at least 1,700 slaves per year out of Africa and more than half ended up in São Tomé.11
Tiny Portugal, with a population today of about nine million, was enmeshed in an overstretch almost from the beginning of its thrust into overseas navigation that was to reach into the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. Lisbon found it necessary early on to rely on laboring Africans for various tasks. An African pilot, Esteban Gomez, sailed up what became the Hudson River abutting Manhattan in 1525, while another African became the first non-indigenous resident of this valuable island.12
But just as Lisbon and Madrid were tightening their respective grips on vast swathes of territory abroad, the Ottoman Turks had moved into Egypt and deeper into the Balkans, causing Erasmus to announce in the first half of the sixteenth century that this was leading to an epochal clash since “the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky.” The future, he predicted, would belong either to the Muslims or to the Christians because it could not belong to both.13 When the Ottomans were blocked at Vienna in 1683, it seemed that the only sun that mattered was the one that soon was never to set on the British Empire, and then later the secessionist appendage in North America.
However, European encroachment was resisted fiercely by the Africans. Soon the Portuguese were at war in West Africa, with three hundred of these Europeans massacred in one fell swoop in 1570 alone. The Africans had gathered in the forest and watched carefully as these invaders decamped before killing them all. On another occasion they severed the invaders’ heads from their bodies, leaving their bodies on the beach, then placed their skulls on wooden stakes.14 A few years later, Portuguese again fell victim to angry West Africans, as the invaders were slaughtered once more.15
Since Africans often rebelled vociferously against enslavement, this caused Europeans in response to offer more inducements to those recruited to confront
