The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
America, as a result of the Manila galleon trade. This form of “globalization” is in a sense a euphemism for the roots of capitalism.46
By 1500, China accounted for an estimated 25 percent of the world’s output of goods and services and England for about 1 percent, but by 1900 as an outgrowth of slavery and rapacious colonialism, those numbers had been virtually reversed.47
We continue to reside in the shadow of this important century—the sixteenth—as globalization accelerated and the state was strengthened. Not accidentally, it was then that John Harrington, described recently as the “cynic-in-residence” in Queen Elizabeth’s court, opined: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason,”48 a statement that also reflected the overthrow and weakening of various unsustainable polities in the name of the new force created by “globalization.”
STILL, DESPITE THE ONRUSH of the global, the ruler in Madrid was not known as “His Catholic Majesty” by accident, for religion, or more precisely, Catholicism, was privileged. “Religious adherence was more important as a test of loyalty than ethnicity”—or race—according to an analysis of the Spanish settlement in St. Augustine, Florida: “Slaves, therefore, received different treatment here than in English or even other Spanish colonies” in part because protecting the wealth of Cuba and Mexico was the primary goal,49 not least by dint of slave-constructed fortifications and in part because religion was overdetermined.
This telescoped disquisition about Florida brings into sharp relief major themes of this book: the firm implantation of settler colonialism in what is now the United States—including the enslavement of Africans—originated in today’s “Sunshine State” and, as shall be seen, in New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment.” The history of Virginia and New England, which wrongly deems either or both to be the seedbed of settler colonialism in what is now the United States—and, in the long run, the United States itself has to be adjudged with this point firmly in mind. Thus, armed Africans in Spanish Florida played an expansive role, in a way that would have been difficult in Virginia or Massachusetts, for example.50 London, the “second” colonizer and their republican successors, grappled assiduously with the formidable problem of how to defang embattled and armed Africans in Florida, leading to ruinous nineteenth-century wars.
Thus, the armed Africans of northern Florida were an obvious counterpoint to the enslaved Africans languishing across the border in what became London’s settlements in Georgia and South Carolina, forcing Britain to expend blood and treasure to extirpate this “threat,” which it did by about 1763, which was then followed by the rebellious settlers intervening more forcefully in Florida over the next half-century or more, until the matter was resolved by the creation of the “Sunshine State” in the slaveholders’ republic. London, then Washington, decided not to build on the “St. Augustine exception” created by Madrid but to strangle it instead. It was left to London, then Washington, to leapfrog Madrid altogether by developing a sturdier axis of colonialism, namely “whiteness,” the privileging of “race” over religion, a process (again) extended by Britain’s erstwhile stepchild in 1776, allowing for the incorporation more readily and easily of a growing number of European immigrants, with little room to compromise with a “Free Negro” population.51
THERE WAS A CONTRADICTORY APPROACH to Africans by Spanish colonizers. There were so-called Black Conquistadors, for example, Juan Garrido, instrumental in the creation of “New Spain” or Mexico, and Sebastian Toral, who obtained his freedom because of his role in the siege of Yucatan, and Juan Valiente, who helped to conquer Guatemala, then settled in Chile. On the other hand, there was a history congruent with subsequent slave revolts within the slaveholders’ republic, for example, that of Miguel in 1553 in the gold-rich region of Venezuela; similar rebellions erupted in like gold mining regions in today’s Colombia in the late sixteenth century. It is possible that thousands of the enslaved murdered their masters and foremen and hid in the mountains and forests, constructing palenques and various forms of marronage that proved difficult to eradicate. Near that same time, in Cuzco in Peru, enslaved Africans and indigenes—in contrast to the Black Conquistadors—formed a rebellious contingent led by an indigene, Francisco Chichima. Due north in Vera Cruz, a citadel was formed in the 1580s by Nanga (Yanga), possibly of Akan or West African origin. About three decades later, the settlers effectuated a kind of entente with these rebels. Perhaps as a partial result, legislation enacted by the monarchs in Madrid and Lisbon were more demanding of masters and more humane toward the enslaved than their peers in London, Paris, The Hague, and especially Washington.52
In a sense, Madrid took religion too seriously, seemingly oblivious to the rising notion that settler colonialism required “race” more than religion. Madrid assumed that it could both enslave and empower Africans, whereas the ultimately victorious republicans begged to differ. I argue that this difference between Madrid and London is to be found in religion, not necessarily because Catholicism was more “progressive” than Protestantism,53 but more so because the former was a more centralized faith, better able to enact and enforce edicts, as opposed to the fissiparous latter. Decentralized Protestantism was a better fit than rigid Catholicism, perhaps by virtue of the fabled “absence of mind” in forging a settlement project that relied more heavily on a construction of “whiteness” or the ingathering of various and disparate European ethnicities. Similarly, the heralded “religious liberty” that characterized the republican secession in the late eighteenth century coincidentally allowed for a Pan-European mobilization to crush rebellious Africans and indigenes alike.
AS THE TIME APPROACHED TO colonize what became St. Augustine in 1565, the monarch in Madrid was told that “there are many Negroes, mulattoes and people of evil inclination in the islands of Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and others nearby. In each of these islands,” said conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles disconsolately, “there are more than thirty of them to each Christian. It is a land where this generation multiplies rapidly,” and, besides, “in possession of the French” most notably, “all of these slaves will be set free,” since “to enjoy this freedom, the Negroes will help them against their own masters and rulers, for them to take over the land. It will be a very easy thing to do with the help of the Negroes.”54 This was perceptive, and combined with Madrid’s self-defeating religious sectarianism, which hindered the necessity to build, à la London, a “whiteness” project, crossing theological borders, left few alternatives beyond seeking to co-opt Africans, creating a “Free African” population that could be armed, an endangering process that certain settlers may have deemed to be a cure worse than the illness.
This was part and parcel of the elongated process whereby religion was supplanted by “race” as the animating axis of society, which reached its zenith in the Americas, especially Protestant-dominated North America. For as the late doyen of historians Herbert Bolton once averred, “In the English colonies the only good Indians were dead Indians.”55 But this induced morbidity did not occur to a similar degree in, for example, French settlements in North America. After all, London coveted the land of indigenes for settlement, while Paris was more intrigued by the trade in furs and a military alliance with the indigenes against other European powers such as London. Thus, says the scholar W. J. Eccles, Perfidious Albion “had to displace—that is destroy—the Indians” and France was more interested in seeking to “preserve them, in order to achieve their aims.”56 Furthermore, as a nineteenth century California leader put it, “the success of Britian as a colonizing power was ascribable to its strict policy of racial separation and that the failures of France and Spain”—and Portugal too, it might have been added—“were due to the absence of such a policy….” 57 And the hateful Jim Crow policy installed in the revolting spawn of London in Washington further bolstered this malignant analysis.
Paris was the wild card in terms of European powers, willing to work with indigenes—and Africans too—against their competitors. On 10 July 1555, Jacques de Sores (at times known as Soria), described as “the most heretic Lutheran,” attacked Havana, which was defended in turn by a force of 355, including 220 indigenes, 80 Africans, and only 35 Spaniards, the numbers a hint as to how dependent the colonizers were at fraught moments. This “heretic Lutheran” was a kind of John Brown of