The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. Gerald Horne
a corresponding role for their comrades in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. As the Netherlands went into decline, not least because of its battering by London, English settlements were to become the beneficiaries of this enterprise, along with the pragmatic religious tolerance it subsumed, which represented a step forward toward a kind of Pan-Europeanism so useful to the borderless boundaries that capitalism was to demand. However, as this enterprise was unfolding, this North African project was able to instill fear and loathing in Englishmen and Spaniards alike. Arguably, the embrace of the fleeing Jewish community in North Africa provided an incentive for London to do the same, lest the “Corsair Republic” become stronger, to England’s detriment.31
Throughout the 1630s, England’s Guinea Company, a forerunner of the Royal African Company that was to ravage Africa, had been mainly concerned with the direct import of redwood, elephant’s teeth, hides of all sorts, and above all, gold. But as new opportunities emerged with the arrival of settlements in such sites as Bermuda, Barbados, and Providence Island, the company by the early 1640s sought to reorient toward the slave trade, perhaps the most lushly profitable business of all. This was part of a larger reorientation in that by the late 1620s most of the main London companies spearheaded by merchants had collapsed. The major spurt of colonial economic development that took place over succeeding decades was executed by a new group of traders from outside the circle of this earlier circle of merchants. This roiling, however, was to provide the seedbed of the civil wars in England that were to erupt in the early 1640s, which meant so much for the subsequent dispossession of the indigenes and the enslavement of Africans.32
For in a premature version of the “creative destruction” that was said to characterize capitalism,33 the cornucopia of opportunities opened by the new realm of settler colonialism created new elites as it displaced old ones, with the latter often unwilling to leave center stage willingly.
Thus a number of the men who sided with Oliver Cromwell within a few years in his conflict with the Crown had laid the foundations for capitalism and republicanism in Massachusetts. This lengthy list included Vincent Potter, who actually fought against the Pequots in the 1630s; Hugh Peter, a Puritan and a prime mover in the founding of what became Harvard University during that same conflicted decade; Winthrop’s nephew, George Downing; and Owen Rowe, a merchant with ties to Virginia and Massachusetts and Bermuda alike.34
By 1641 Massachusetts Bay, in large part because the authorities wanted to define the legal status of the hundreds of indigenous Pequot captives then in bondage, passed one of the first laws peculiar to the enslaved in London’s colonies. Some of these captives wound up in Bermuda, the Caribbean, the Azores, Tangier, and possibly even Madagascar. “We sent them to Bermuda,” boasted John Winthrop, as if that were the sole destination. Despite their subsequent preening of being a sector of settler colonialism bereft of enslaved Africans, there is actually evidence of the presence of this group as early as 1633.35
Because enslaved indigenes were for the most part cheaper than the price of an enslaved African—perhaps a quarter to a tenth of the cost of the latter—there was a powerful incentive to enchain them, which also brought the added bonus of ousting them from their land.36 Of course, enraged indigenes were not ideal neighbors, which meant that mainland settlers eventually would have to settle for enslaved Africans as the least bad option.
The cycle endured by indigenes is instructive when contemplating their twin in immiseration, the African. From 1630 to 1650 the status of the indigenous under the heel of those who were to term themselves New Englanders cycled from contract workers to servants to perpetual slaves.37 As early as 1640 colonial courts in Virginia began constructing racial identities to determine who could be enslaved and who could be enslaved for life. What was to become the “Old Dominion” was tailing after Bermuda, Barbados, and St. Kitts, as these islands continued to set the pace for settler colonialism.38 Critically, Virginia mandated a law in 1640 “preventing Negroes from bearing arms,” perhaps an indication of worry about in which direction these weapons would be pointed.39
Invading a territory and seeking to enslave the current residents is a guarantee for a lengthy insecurity. This is especially the case given the speed of the demographic debacle: the indigenous population fell from an estimated 144,000 before 1616 to about 30,000 by 1670.40 Making these so-called New Englanders even more vulnerable was the fact that for London this settlement was a sideshow. More settlers defined as “white” resided in the Caribbean and the surrounding islands (about 40,000) in 1650 than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England settlements (23,000) combined. And the great majority of these lived in Barbados.41
The main event was in the Caribbean. This would not change appreciably until the mid-eighteenth century, which suggested that the Royal Navy would be more prone to be concerned about challenges to Barbados, not Boston. As early as 1627, the now eminent New Englander John Winthrop sent his son to Barbados for betterment, economic and otherwise. There the Winthrop grubstake grew accordingly, which suggested further that even New Englanders were more concerned about the security of the Caribbean, as opposed to their own backyard. Winthrop was busily selling wine in St. Christopher’s, a Barbadian neighbor. Since letters from New England sailed to London via Barbados, this was indicative as to what was the main arena and what was the periphery. This lasted until the 1770s when the North American settlements were on the verge of secession. Moreover, Winthrop and his fellow New Englanders faced keen competition not only from London traders but even more from the Dutch, who seemed to be the rising power then. Undaunted, Winthrop sought to establish a foundation for New England manufacturing based on Caribbean cotton, but in an early sign of a rationale for secession, this was resisted by London. But England and New England could agree on the necessity of increasing enslavement in the Caribbean, with those ousted from their land in North America and Africans dragged across the Atlantic becoming the chief victims of this inhumane process. New England quickly became a chief supplier of food for the Caribbean, along with horses, casks, and barrels for rum too. The latter product was traded for enslaved Africans.42
From 1630 to 1640 at least twenty ships are known to have sailed between New England and Barbados, Bermuda, Providence Island, St. Kitts, and Tortuga, returning with cotton, tobacco, sugar, tropical produce—and the enslaved. Again, the preeminent Winthrop family of Massachusetts Bay are a stand-in for this commercial relationship: when young Samuel Winthrop moved from Tenerife to Barbados and eventually Antigua, the Winthrops, centered in England and Massachusetts, extended their trade from Rhode Island and Connecticut to the Caribbean.43
It would be an error to ascribe fiendish barbarity to Western Europeans alone, even settlers. The Winthrops were rising as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe was establishing a record for rapacity that continues to astonish. When Magdeburg fell in 1631, women were subjected to mass rape and 30,000 were butchered indiscriminately and the city was put to the torch. Religion—not race, the raison d’être for barbarism in the Americas—was at issue. By 1639 the city now known as Chennai was taken by the British East India Company in the face of stiff resistance.44 Reverberations from this mass violence could not help but spread and was in turn reinforced by contemporaneous trends in the Americas and Africa.
Nevertheless, the symbiotic relationship between ferocious island slavery and New England emerged clearly in 1630–31 when Puritans from the latter established a colony on Providence Island, a process which, revealingly, involved ousting Dutch privateers, a harbinger of things to come. Though London’s settlements were not necessarily a single unitary formation, it would have been unwise for those in, say, Virginia, to ignore events in the waters surrounding the southeast quadrant of North America. Hence, as the settlement in Providence Island was being organized, the laws of Virginia showed a sudden increase in the number of regulations constraining the activities of enslaved Africans.45
The population of the enslaved on the island exploded after 1634, allowing subsequent generations of New Englanders to look down their noses piously and hypocritically at slavery,46 even though their economy had been buoyed by enslavement of the indigenous, while being an extension of a slave-owning Caribbean. As was London’s tendency, this colony allowed for piracy, with Englishmen parasitically preying on the Spanish Empire.47
Dauntlessly,