Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  In the United States, by contrast, elaborate efforts were made to prohibit (or at least deny the legitimacy of) such unions. This was partly a practical consequence of another difference. When the British emigrated to America, they often took their womenfolk with them. When Spanish and Portuguese men crossed the Atlantic, they generally travelled alone. For example, of the 15,000 names recorded in the ‘Catálogo de Pasajeros a Indias’, a list of Spanish passengers who embarked for the New World between 1509 and 1559, only 10 per cent were female. The results were not difficult to foresee. Scientists led by Andrés Ruiz-Linares have studied individual mitochondrial DNA samples from thirteen Latin American mestizo populations in seven countries from Chile to Mexico. The results show clearly that, right across Latin America, European men took indigenous and African women as mates, not the other way round.93 Case studies of places like Medellín in Colombia – where the population is often regarded as ‘purely’ Hispanic – support this finding. In one sample, Y-chromosome lineages (inherited from the father) were found to be around 94 per cent European, 5 per cent African and just 1 per cent Amerindian, whereas mitochondrial DNA lineages (inherited from the mother) were 90 per cent Amerindian, 8 per cent African and 2 per cent European.94

  It was not that miscegenation did not happen in North America. It did. Thomas Jefferson is only the most famous American to have fathered children by one of his slaves. There were approximately 60,000 mulattos in British America by the end of the colonial era. Today between a fifth and a quarter of the DNA of most African-Americans in the United States can be traced back to Europeans. But the model that took root in the colonial period was essentially binary. An individual with even a ‘drop’ of African-American blood – in Virginia, a single black grandparent – was categorized as black no matter how pale her skin or Caucasian her physiognomy. Interracial marriage was treated as a punishable offence in Virginia from as early as 1630 and was legally prohibited in 1662; the colony of Maryland had passed similar legislation a year earlier. Such laws were enacted by five other North American colonies. In the century after the foundation of the United States, no fewer than thirty-eight states banned interracial marriages. As late as 1915, twenty-eight states retained such statutes; ten of them had gone so far as to make the prohibition on miscegenation constitutional. There was even an attempt, in December 1912, to amend the US constitution so as to prohibit miscegenation ‘for ever’.95

  The Racial Structure of the New World, 1570–1935

  NOTE: Data on mixed-race populations unavailable.

  It made a big difference, then, where African slaves went. Those bound for Latin America ended up in something of a racial melting pot where a male slave had a reasonable chance of gaining his freedom if he survived the first few years of hard labour and a female slave had a non-trivial probability of producing a child of mixed race. Those consigned to the United States entered a society where the distinction between white and black was much more strictly defined and upheld.

  As we have seen, it was John Locke who had made private property the foundation of political life in Carolina. But it was not only landed property he had in mind. In article 110 of his ‘Fundamental Constitutions’, he had stated clearly: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ For Locke, the ownership of human beings was as much a part of the colonial project as the ownership of land. And these human beings would be neither landowners nor voters. Subsequent law-makers strove to maintain this distinction. Section X of the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740 authorized a white person to detain and examine any slave found outside a house or plantation who was not accompanied by a white person. Section XXXVI prohibited slaves from leaving their plantation, especially on Saturday nights, Sundays and holidays. Slaves who violated the law could be subjected to a ‘moderate whipping’. Section XLV prohibited white persons from teaching slaves to read and write.

  The profound effects of such laws are discernible in parts of the United States even today. The Gullah Coast stretches from Sandy Island, South Carolina, to Amelia Island, Florida. People here have their own distinctive patois, cuisine and musical style.96 Some anthropologists believe that ‘Gullah’ is a corruption of ‘Angola’, where the inhabitants’ ancestors may have come from. It is possible. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, a very high proportion of all the slaves transported to the Americas – perhaps as many as 44 per cent – came from the part of Africa contemporaries called Angola (the modern country plus the region between the Cameroons and the north bank of the Congo River).97 A third of the slaves who passed through Charleston were from Angola.98 Most of these were taken from the Mbundu people of the Ndongo kingdom, whose ruler, the ngola, gives the modern country its name. They ended up scattered all over the Americas, from Brazil to the Bahamas to the Carolinas.

  That there are still discernible echoes of Angola in South Carolina – including traces of the Kimbundu language – is in itself significant. The people living here are directly descended from Angolan slaves and not much has happened to dilute their gene pool. The survival of Gullah culture testifies to the remarkable endurance of the colour line in states like South Carolina. By contrast, Angolans who were sent to South America had a significantly better chance of escaping from the prison of enslavement – sometimes literally, in the case of the fugitives from Pernambuco who founded their own independent colony of Quilombo, also known as Little Angola, in Palmares, deep in the jungle of the north-east Brazilian state of Alagoas. At its height, this little kingdom had a population of more than 10,000 and an elected chief, the ‘Ganga Zumba’. Established in the early 1600s, it was not conquered by Portuguese forces until 1694. The fate of ‘Gullah’ Jack Pritchard, an Angolan slave who planned to launch an uprising against the buckra (whites) in Charleston in 1822, was very different. He was hanged. Ironically, the Land of the Free looked like being, for around a fifth of its population, the Land of the Permanently Unfree. North of the Rio Grande, slavery had become hereditary.

  In the end, of course, the anomaly of slavery in a supposedly free society could only be resolved by war between the pro-slavery states of the South and the anti-slavery states of the North. Only British naval intervention on the side of the Confederacy could have defeated the upholders of the Union and that was never very likely. Yet, although the Civil War ended slavery, many Americans continued to believe for more than a century that they owed their prosperity to the dividing line between white and black. As early as the 1820s, Edward Everett would write in North American Review:

  We have no concern with South America; we have no sympathy, we can have no well founded political sympathy with them. We are sprung from different stocks … Not all the treaties we could make, nor the commissioners we could send out, nor the money we could lend them, would transform their … Bolivars into Washingtons.99

  To a later generation of white supremacists, segregation was the key reason why the United States had prospered, while the ‘mongrel’ peoples of Latin America were mired in poverty (not to mention, in some cases, communism).

  With the rallying cry ‘Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’ Alabama Governor George Wallace put racial separateness at the heart of the American success story as recently as 1963, in his inaugural gubernatorial address:

  This nation was never meant to be a unit of one … but a united of the many … that is the exact reason our freedom loving forefathers established the states, so as to divide the rights and powers among the states, insuring that no central power could gain master government control …

  And so it was meant in our racial lives … each race within its own framework has the freedom to teach … to instruct … to develop … to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers … but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers … then the enrichment of our lives … the freedom fo
r our development … is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government … and we stand for everything … and for nothing.

  Such arguments were far from unappealing at the time: 10 million voters (13.5 per cent of the total) voted for Wallace and his American Independent Party when he ran for the presidency in 1968.

  Yet the idea that the success of the United States was contingent on racial segregation was nonsense. It was quite wrong to believe, as Wallace did, that the United States was more prosperous and stable than Venezuela or Brazil because of anti-miscegenation laws and the whole range of colour bars that kept white and black Americans apart in neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, colleges, workplaces, parks, swimming pools, restaurants and even cemeteries. On the contrary, North America was better off than South America purely and simply because the British model of widely distributed private property rights and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism. Far from being indispensable to its success, slavery and segregation were handicaps to American development, their legacy still painfully apparent in the social problems – teenage pregnancy, educational underachievement, drug abuse and disproportionate incarceration – that now bedevil so many African-American communities.

  Today, a man with an African father and a white mother – a man who would have been called a casta in Simón Bolívar’s day – is the President of the United States, having defeated a decorated war hero of classic Scotch-Irish origin even in the state of Virginia. That is something that would have seemed a fantastically remote possibility as recently as thirty years ago, when I first visited the American South. It is easy to forget that, as late as 1967, for example, sixteen states still had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It was only with the Supreme Court judgment in the aptly named Loving v. Virginia that legal prohibitions on interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional throughout the United States. Even then, Tennessee did not formally repeal the relevant article of its constitution until March 1978 and Mississippi put off doing so until December 1987. American racial attitudes have changed profoundly since that time. A whole time-honoured complex of words and thoughts can no longer publicly be uttered.

  At the same time, the people in the streets of many North American cities increasingly resemble those in South America. Continuing migration from Latin America, especially Mexico, means that in forty years’ time non-Hispanic whites will probably be a minority of the US population.100 By that time the country may be practically if not legally bilingual. And American society is also becoming racially blended as never before. The US census distinguishes between four ‘racial’ categories: ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Native American’ and ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’. On this basis, one in every twenty children in the United States is of mixed origin, in that their parents do not both belong to the same racial category. The number of such mixed-race couples quadrupled between 1990 and 2000, to roughly 1.5 million. Seen in this light, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 appears far less surprising.

  Meanwhile, one of the most dynamic economies in the world is that of multi-coloured Brazil. The key to success in Brazil – still among the world’s most unequal societies – has been long-overdue reform to give a rising share of the population a chance to own property and make money. After more than a century of over-reliance on protectionism, import substitution and other forms of state intervention, most of Latin America – with the sorry exception of Venezuela – has achieved higher growth since the 1980s with a combination of privatization, foreign investment and export orientation.101 The days when the region’s economies veered between hyperinflation and debt default appear to be receding into the past. In 1950 South America’s gross domestic product was less than a fifth of US GDP. Today it is approaching a third.

  Five hundred years since the process of conquest and colonization began, in other words, the yawning divide between Anglo-America and Latin America finally seems to be closing. Throughout the Western hemisphere, a single American civilization is finally emerging – a kind of belated fulfilment of Bolívar’s original pan-American dream.

  This, however, is to anticipate a great deal. For the high tide of theories of racial distinction was not in fact in the nineteenth century but in the first half of the twentieth. To appreciate why it was that race became such a preoccupation of the West’s interaction with other civilizations, we must now turn to Africa itself, which was to become the focal point of European imperial expansion in the period. In the speech with which this chapter began, Churchill – whose own imperial career had started in the Sudan and South Africa – asked a question that was in many ways central to the lives of an entire generation of empire-builders: ‘Why should not the same principles which have shaped the free, ordered, tolerant civilization of the British Isles and British Empire be found serviceable in the organization of this anxious world?’ Civilization as he understood it had successfully taken root in North America – as successfully in those parts that remained under British rule as in the United States. It had flourished in the arid wilderness of Australia. Why not in Africa, too?

  In America four European powers had tried their hands at planting their civilizations in foreign soil (five if we count the Dutch in Guiana and ‘New Amsterdam’, six if we count the Swedes in Saint-Barthélemy, seven including the Danes in the Virgin Islands, and eight with the Russian settlements in Alaska and California), with widely varying degrees of success. In the race to do the same in Africa, there were to be even more competitors. And Britain’s biggest rival in this race turned out to be the country it had so successfully eclipsed in America: France.

  Medicine

  Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word ‘civilization’. Its true test lies in the fact that people living in it make bodily welfare the object of life … The people of Europe today live in better-built houses than they did a hundred years ago … Formerly, they wore skins, and used spears as their weapons. Now, they wear long trousers, and … instead of spears, they carry with them revolvers … Formerly, in Europe, people ploughed their lands mainly by manual labour. Now, one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam engines and can thus amass great wealth … Formerly, men travelled in wagons. Now, they fly through the air in trains at the rate of four hundred and more miles per day … Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill … There are now diseases of which people never dreamt before, and an army of doctors is engaged in finding out their cures, and so hospitals have increased. This is a test of civilization … What more need I say? …

  This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Muhammad this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age … It must be shunned.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  It is a people which by its sons (Robespierre, Descartes, etc.) has done much for humanity. I do not have the right to wish it evil.

  Senegalese student

  BURKE’S PROPHECY

  From the middle of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, the West ruled over the Rest. This was the age not just of empires but of imperialism, a theory of overseas expansion that justified the formal and informal domination of non-Western peoples on both self-interested and altruistic grounds. Empire meant ‘living space’ for surplus population. It meant secure export markets that a rival power could not enclose behind tariffs. It meant higher returns on investment than were available at home.1 Empire could also have a political function, sublimating the social conflicts of the industrial age in a gung-ho mood of patriotic pride, or generating placatory pay-offs for powerful interest groups. But it also meant the spread of civilization, a term used with increasing frequency to describe the whole complex of distinctly Western institutions we have already encounte
red in the preceding chapters: the market economy, the Scientific Revolution, the nexus of private property rights and representative government. It also meant the spread of Christianity, for in the process of empire-building missionaries were nearly as important as merchants and military men (see Chapter 6).

  Of all the Western empires, by far the biggest was Britain’s. From Grant Land, the northernmost extremity of Canada, to the sweltering shores of Georgetown, Guiana, and on to Graham Land in the Antarctic; down the Nile to Nyanza, across the Zambezi to the Cape; from the Persian Gulf across all of India to the Bay of Bengal, and on to Burma and Borneo; from Singapore to Sydney – immense swathes of the map of the world, including countless tiny islands, turned the bright-pink hue that a Scotsman’s skin acquires under the tropical sun. By the eve of the First World War, the British Empire covered roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface and embraced around the same proportion of humanity. It also exerted an unrivalled control over the world’s sea-lanes and international telegraph network. Yet Britain was far from being the sole imperialist power. Despite the horrendous cost in human life of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the French resumed imperial expansion within fifteen years of their defeat at Waterloo. Combining old sugar-producing islands like Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique and trading posts like Saint-Louis and Gorée with new possessions in North, West and Central Africa, the Indian Ocean, Indo-China and Polynesia, the French Empire by 1913 covered just under 9 per cent of the world’s surface. The Belgians, the Germans and the Italians also acquired overseas colonies, while the Portuguese and Spaniards retained substantial chunks of their earlier empires. Meanwhile, over land rather than sea, the Russians extended their empire into the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia. The Austrians, too, acquired new territory; after being driven out of Germany by Prussia in 1866, the Habsburgs turned southwards into the Balkans. Even former colonies became colonizers, as the United States seized Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as Hawaii and a handful of smaller Pacific islands.