The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Settler Colonies . In the northern colonies of Britain and France, such as those in New England and Quebec, settlement colonies developed, largely without slaves, in which Europeans constituted the great majority of the population. By the late eighteenth century, people of European descent comprised about 80 percent of the population of British North America, far higher than in any of the Latin American colonies, where Europeans were generally a distinct minority. In this respect, North America resembled Siberia, where Russians and Russian culture likewise overwhelmed the indigenous people. British settlers sought both to escape the religious, political, and social restrictions of England and to transplant many elements of European culture in what was to them a New World. Authorities in Virginia wanted to limit horse racing to “men of the better sort,” while laws in Massachusetts forbade ordinary people from wearing fine clothes that implied a higher social status. But the vastness of the territory and the easy availability of land gradually eroded sharp class distinctions and created a more flexible and fluid society with more individualism and opportunity for social mobility than had existed in the “mother country.”

  “Mixed-Race Colonies.” A second kind of colonial society developed in the highland areas of Mexico and Peru, home to the Aztec and Inca empires. In these areas of great wealth and more concentrated population, Spanish colonizers merely replaced the existing hierarchy with their own authoritarian rulers, who made use of various forms of forced labor in extracting mineral wealth, in agricultural production, and in workshops. These native laborers, often grossly abused and exploited, made possible the great highland estates, some producing for export, others providing cattle and grain to sustain the cities and mining areas. Other Indian laborers toiled to premature death in grueling mines, such as those at Guanajuato in north-central Mexico and Potosi in present-day Bolivia, where the enormous output of silver fueled much of the emerging world economy. Such miners were sometimes kept underground from Monday to Saturday evening, with their wives bringing them food. When wage labor began to replace forced labor in the seventeenth century, perpetual indebtedness and high taxes kept native workers in low-paying jobs, often living little better than slaves. In these regions, a substantial minority of white settlers, primarily male, ruled a large Native American population and intermarried with them to produce a mixed-race group known as mestizos.

  Plantation Colonies . Perhaps the most novel of all colonial societies grew up around the plantation economies in the tropical lowlands of the Americas. This kind of agricultural production, organized in large-scale units and worked by slaves, had been pioneered in the Mediterranean as Europeans learned about sugarcane from Arabs during the Crusades and created plantations to produce this very laborintensive product. As they moved out into the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, they established sugar producing plantations on offshore islands such as Madeira, the Canaries, and Sao Tome and from there transferred them to the Americas, especially the Caribbean, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Guatemala and in the southern colonies of British North America. Producing sugar initially and then coffee, tobacco, indigo, rice, and cotton, the plantations themselves operated largely with African slave labor supervised by a relatively small group of white owners and managers. Thus, a wholly immigrant society emerged in which Africans vastly outnumbered Europeans, while Native Americans in these areas had largely died out or been pushed out. The extremely harsh conditions under which the slaves worked made it difficult to form stable families or even to survive very long. Brazilian slave owners coldly calculated a slave’s life expectancy at only seven years. This meant that slave populations, except in North America, rarely became self-reproducing, requiring plantation owners to buy new slaves on a regular basis. And unlike the original sugar plantations in the Mediterranean, where slaves came from many places, including Muslim North Africa and Slavicspeaking regions around the Black Sea, in the Americas slavery took on its unique exclusive association with Africa.

  American plantation societies were novel as well in their highly internationalized system of production. Europeans from Spain, Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands supplied the capital and managerial expertise, exercised complete political control, and reaped the profits of the system. Africa supplied the workers in return for European manufactured goods. The plantations themselves were specialized units that operated in an almost industrial pattern of highly disciplined work; they produced, for the first time in world history, for a mass market in Europe; they imported much of their food and supplies; and they relied heavily on the use of credit to keep this vast network of international transactions going. In these ways, the plantation system pioneered major elements of a modern globalized economy, even while maintaining the ancient pattern of slavery as the basis for the entire enterprise.

  North American Differences . Within the world of Atlantic plantations, those in the southern colonies of British North America were unique in several ways. First, a far smaller number of slaves were imported into North American colonies, about 6 percent of the total compared to 40 percent to the Caribbean, 37 percent to Brazil, and 15 percent to mainland Spanish America. Thus, unlike many Latin American territories, people of African descent remained a minority in most North American plantation societies. But slaves there became self-reproducing as they did not in most of Latin America, thus requiring the importation of fewer new slaves. Some historians have suggested that this may have diluted the African cultural heritage of slave communities in North America and rendered them less likely to rebel or run away compared to their Latin American counterparts. Finally, North American plantation societies, despite considerable racial mixing, never developed the various “mixed-race” categories and distinctions that were widely recognized elsewhere in the Americas. The children of Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved mistress Sally Hemmings were regarded as black rather than mestizo. The racial divide was sharper in North America, and the white antipathy toward Africans as black people, not just as slaves, was more pronounced.

  The colonies that became the United States evolved differently than those of Spanish America. They were founded a century later and in a region that lacked the dense native populations, great empires, large cities, and precious metals that seemed to give the Spanish colonies such initial advantages. Indeed, when the British constructed their first buildings in Jamestown in 1607, the Spanish had already established nearly a dozen major cities, two great viceroyalties in Mexico and Peru, many universities, hundreds of churches and missions, and a sophisticated network of regulated commerce. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the North American colonies by contrast were widely regarded as something of a backwater in terms of population, commercial potential, and their role in the world economy. Yet precisely these “backward” colonies became the wealthy, politically stable, global superpower of the twentieth century, while the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies long remained divided, impoverished, and politically volatile.

  The Impact of Empire

  Whatever their particular features, all of these American empires had a far more profound impact on indigenous societies than did the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, or West African empires. Part of this difference is reflected in the brutal facts of rapid conquest and in catastrophic population declines. Furthermore, the export economies of the Americas, producing precious metals and agricultural goods for a European market, led to extensive demands for land and labor that dispossessed millions and thoroughly disrupted traditional societies. This disruption contributed much to the wide acceptance of Christianity, which was force-fed to the dispirited Native American populations, especially in Spanish America. Many no doubt felt that their own gods had deserted them as did the Mexica poet who asked plaintively after the Spanish conquest, “Have you grown weary of your servants? Are you angry with your servants, O Giver of Life?”8 Neither the Ottomans in Europe nor the Mughals in India nor the Chinese in inner Asia made such a concerted effort to bring a new religion to their subject peoples. Bu
t as Christianity was adopted, it was also modified as native peoples interpreted it through the lens of their own beliefs. The cross, for example, was similar to the Mayan tree of life and to the prayer sticks of the Pueblo, and while Christian churches were built on the remains of destroyed temples, American Indians assimilated Christian saints and feast days into their traditional gods and celebrations.

  The environmental impact of European intrusion into the Americas was likewise remarkable. Fur trappers in North America largely eliminated beavers and drastically thinned the herds of deer. The walrus and the bowhead whale largely vanished from the North Atlantic in the wake of European fishing, while still-abundant codfish diminished in size. Settlers and plantation owners began the deforestation of the Western Hemisphere and plowed its prairies for the first time. In the absence of natural predators, the animals of Europe—sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and pigs—reproduced spectacularly both in domesticated settings and in the wild. Their arrival and the dramatic increase in their numbers, coinciding with the sharp decline in the native human population, marked a dramatic change in the ecology of the Americas. European plant life—both crops and weeds—colo-nized the Americas along with their human carriers. When Charles Darwin visited Argentina and Chile in the 1830s, he was amazed at the spread of the wild artichoke. “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.”9

  Africa and the Atlantic World

  The making of an Atlantic world occasioned two of the great tragedies of modern world history—the destruction of Native American populations and the Atlantic slave trade. The second of these processes deeply engaged African societies, particularly along the western coast of the continent during the four centuries between roughly 1450 and 1850. African individuals were the chief victims of this horrendous traffic, some 11 million of whom were shipped to the Americas and uncounted millions more who died in the process of capture and during the horrors of the Middle Passage.10 But African societies, unlike those in the Americas, were not subject to European conquest or colonial rule in early modern times. They retained their political independence, and their political and economic elites were active participants in the slave trade. This tragedy unfolded quite differently from that which befell Native Americans.

  Origins of the Atlantic Slave Trade

  Demand . As a relationship of commerce rather than conquest, the slave trade had its origins in a unique combination of demand and supply. The demand, of course, came from the European plantation economies in the Americas desperately in search of workers and seeking to imitate the slave labor solution pioneered on earlier plantations in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands. Native Americans died in appalling numbers, creating the labor shortage, while Europeans, initially employed as indentured servants, could increasingly claim that being “white” or Christian should exempt them from forced labor. Africans were attractive candidates to fill the void because they were skilled farmers, herders, and miners and because they possessed substantial immunity to both European and tropical diseases. They were also, relatively speaking, close to the Americas, and European seafaring technology made their transportation across the Atlantic economical.

  Supply . They were also available. This question of supply is perhaps more difficult to understand than that of demand. Why would African societies willingly sell their own people to strangers? One answer is that, for the most part, they did not perceive the question in this way. In the early modern era, no common identity as Africans existed on the continent. The West and central African region targeted by the slave trade was divided among several larger kingdoms, such as Benin and the Kongo; many “microstates” or chief-doms; and a large number of lineage-based societies without any state structure at all. Dozens—even hundreds—of languages were spoken, though trade, migration, intermarriage, and warfare had created substantial connections among these diverse peoples. Those individuals funneled into the slave trade were in general outsiders or marginal to their societies—prisoners of war, criminals, impoverished folks “pawned” by their families in times of debt, or desperate people fleeing famine or oppression. These were people without the protection of a lineage or kinship group, which formed the basis of most African societies.

  African Slavery . Furthermore, slavery was a long-established institution in most African societies, just as it had been in many other agricultural civilizations in the Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Russia, China, and elsewhere. For centuries, a small number of slaves had been sent across the Sahara to North Africa and across the Indian Ocean to various Middle Eastern and South Asian destinations. Most African slaves, however, remained in Africa. They worked the estates of kings and other wealthy people. Most were treated as members of their master’s family or lineage. As such, they or their descendants might become people of influence as court officials, soldiers, or traders. Their lives were very different from what was to become the fate of slaves in the Americas. They did not work on plantations or mines; they had protected places in a society that they knew and understood.

  At first, Europeans bought Africans who were already slaves. But as the European demand for slave labor in the Americas increased, fewer were available for purchase. As the price of slaves increased fivefold between 1680 and 1840, African slave traders hunted farther inland and militarized coastal states mounted expeditions for the express purpose of capturing slaves for sale to America. Long accustomed to market transactions involving products and people, African elites—both official and private—proved willing and able to supply the external demand for slaves on the basis of their own economic and political interests.

  The Slave Trade in Operation

  The actual operation of the slave trade was broadly similar to that of the spice trade in Asia. European merchants established competing trading posts along the West African coast, from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. Some of these trading posts were fortified, others were merely a few buildings to store goods and to keep slaves waiting for transshipment, and elsewhere still, Europeans simply traded from their ships anchored offshore.

  Europeans exercised even less political control in Africa than they did in Asia. There was little existing oceanic trade to capture and control, as they tried to do in the Indian Ocean. Fortifications along the West African coast provided protection from European rivals rather than from African adversaries. Where Europeans established permanent trading stations or “factories,” it was with the permission of local African rulers and usually involved the payment of rent, tariffs, and fees of various kinds.

  An assault of an African by a European could be treated harshly. In one such case in the 1680s, a British agent tried to defend such an assault. He went to explain what happened to the king of Niumi, who was sitting under a tree surrounded by his slave bodyguards. Evidently, the king wanted an apology, not a debate:

  One of the grandees [slave-bodyguards of the king], by name Sambalama, taught him better manners by reaching him a box on the ears, which beat off his hat, and a few thumps on the back, and seizing him, disarmed him together with the rest of his attendance . . . and several others, who together with the agent were taken and put into the kings pound and stayed there three or four days till their ransom was brought, value five hundred bars.11

  The inland trade, involving the capture, provisioning, and transporting of slaves to the coast, was almost entirely in the hands of African political and social elites, who were often in bitter competition with one another for the trade goods—textiles, metalware, firearms, decorative items, alcohol, and tobacco—that Europeans offered in exchange for human merchandise. With the exception of a vague Portuguese control over Angola, nowhere in Africa did the trade in slaves lead to the kind of territorial empires common in the Americas. And with the exception of a small Dutch outpost in South Africa, nowhere in Africa did Europeans settle in large numbers as they did in the Western Hemisphere.

  Counting the Cost

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sp; Lost People . The impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa was both profound and uneven. Demographically, it removed millions of people, mostly men in their prime working years, and severely retarded the normal growth of African populations at a time when European and Asian populations were beginning their modern growth spurt. And it introduced a number of new diseases, though without the catastrophic impact experienced in the more isolated Americas. On the other hand, new American crops, especially maize and cassava, probably increased the food supply and partially offset the population losses from disease and export.12

  Political Variations . The participation of African societies in the slave trade and its impact on them varied greatly depending on their social and economic organization, proximity to inland trade routes, the local political condition, population density, and other factors. Some small societies, targeted for extensive slave raiding, were virtually destroyed. Large kingdoms, such as the Kongo, were torn apart as outlying provinces and ambitious individuals established their own trading connections with European merchants. In 1526, the king of the Kongo, Nzinga Mbemba, wrote a pleading letter to the king of Portugal, describing the damage which the slave trade was inflicting on his kingdom: