The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne

       Introduction

      It should not have been deemed surprising when in 1977 Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations—Andrew Young, a former chief aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—asserted audaciously that London “invented” racism. Instead, the pastor-cum-diplomat was pelted ferociously in a hailstorm of invective,¹ as he backpedaled rapidly. Actually, London had a point it did not articulate: if anything, its bastard offspring in Washington, in the government the envoy represented, was probably more culpable for the continuation of this pestilence,² as it lurched into incipient being in the 1580s in what is now North Carolina and gravitated toward a model of development that diverged from those spurred by the Ottomans and Madrid, then rebelled in 1776 to ensure this putridness would endure.³ How and why this deadly process unfolded in its earliest stage rests near the heart of this book.

      Still, Ambassador Young, an ordained Protestant minister, would have better served historical understanding (besides providing useful instruction to predominantly Protestant London) if he had reflected on the point that the rise of this once dissident and besieged sect in the North American settlements led to the supplanting of religion as an animating factor of society with “race,”⁴ a major theme to be explored in the pages that follow.⁵ Certainly “whiteness”—effectively, Pan-Europeanism—provided a broader base for colonialism than even the Catholicism that drove Madrid. Historian Donald Matthews has observed that white supremacy in any case—a ruling ethos in London’s settlements, then the North American Republic—had a religious cast, indicative of its tangled roots, with lynchings of Negroes emerging as a kind of sacrament.⁶

      Ambassador Young would also have better served understanding if he had had the foresight to reflect the penetrating view of the eminent scholar Geraldine Heng, who has argued that at least by the thirteenth century, England had become “The First Racial State in the West,” referring to the pervasive anti-Judaism that then prevailed. And just as it became easier to impose an expansionist foreign policy that propelled colonialism, given the experience with the Crusades, likewise it became easier to impose the racism that underpinned settler colonialism and slavery, once anti-Judaism became official policy in London. As U.S. Negroes were to be treated, the Jewish community in England was said to emit a “special fetid stench,” while bearing “horns and tails” and engaging in “cannibalism.” Religion was deployed “socio-culturally” and “bio-politically” to “racialize a human group” in England in a manner eerily similar to what was to unfold in North America. Certainly, there are differences that distinguish anti-Judaism from anti-Negro bias. The persecuted in England were “unable to own land in agricultural Europe,” but in response, “Jews famously established themselves as financiers,” a status generally unavailable to Negroes, though the ban on landowning was. Interestingly, though this murderous bigotry is understandably associated with Madrid, which dramatically expelled the Jewish community in the hinge year that was 1492, it was London that was the first European country to “stigmatize Jews” as “criminals”—another parallel to U.S. Negroes—and the “first to administer the badge” this community was forced to wear. England was the first to initiate “state-sponsored efforts at conversion” and, more to the point vis-à-vis Spain: “the first to expel Jews from its national territory.” Then it was the prevailing religion, says Heng, that “supplied the theory and the state and populace supplied the praxis” of bigotry, analogous to the deployment of the “Curse of Ham” and racism targeting U.S. Negroes. Fear of “interracial sexual relations” was then the praxis in London, just like it was subsequently in Washington.⁷ Ironically and perversely, London’s earlier bigotry positioned England to capitalize upon Madrid’s later version, by appealing to Sephardim and the Jewish community more broadly that had been perniciously targeted by the Spanish Inquisition.

      THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the predicates of the rise of England, moving from the periphery to the center (and inferentially, this is a story about their revolting spawn in North America post-1776). This is also a book about the seeds of the apocalypse, which led to the foregoing—slavery, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (and the precursors of capitalism)—planted in the long sixteenth century (roughly 1492 to 1607),⁸ which eventuated in what is euphemistically termed “modernity,” a process that reached its apogee in North America, the essential locus of this work. In these pages I seek to explain the global forces that created this catastrophe—notably for Africans and the indigenous of the Americas—and how the minor European archipelago on the fringes of the continent (the British isles) was poised to come from behind, surge ahead, and maneuver adeptly in the potent slipstream created by Spain, Portugal, the Ottomans, even the Dutch and the French, as this long century lurched to a turning point in Jamestown. Although, as noted, I posit that 1492 is the hinge moment in the rise of Western Europe, I also argue in these pages that it is important to sketch the years before this turning point, especially since it was 1453—the Ottoman Turks seizing Constantinople (today’s Istanbul)—that played a critical role in spurring Columbus’s voyage and, of course, there were other trends that led to 1453, and so on, as we march backward in time.⁹

      In brief, and as shall be outlined, the Ottomans enslaved Africans and Europeans, among others, as contemporary