The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism

by Joyce Appleby

  Good luck and good winds had given the Portuguese a large foothold in South America, Brazil. At first, they concentrated on exporting the famous brazilwood that produced red dye and gave Brazil its name. (Actually Portuguese priests had first called this vast region Holy Cross.) Forests stretched along the southeast coast and inland for several miles. The Portuguese relied upon the Tupi hunters and gatherers to extract the resources from the trees. This turned out to be a temporary labor force, for the Tupi refused to farm. They fled into the recesses of the forests or killed themselves when the Portuguese attempted to coerce them to work. It was more plunder than production, as one scholar commented, and when it was over, the Portuguese in Brazil turned to the sugar production that they had mastered closer to home.7

  Breaches on the Spanish Lake

  Nowhere is the profit-maximizing imperative of capitalism more in evidence than in the sugar sweep in Europe’s New World colonies. Columbus carried sugarcane slips to the Caribbean on his second trip. Spanish authorities back home encouraged their cultivation, but the colonists themselves were more interested in precious metals. It was left to the Portuguese in Brazil to demonstrate the profits to be boiled out of sugarcane once you secured workers to do the drudgery. Sugar growing in Madeira and São Tomé gave the Portuguese a template for establishing plantations in the New World. Over the course of more than three centuries, Brazil imported almost four million slaves, the largest of any European outpost and more than a third of the total sent to the New World. Small wonder that Brazilians, looking out at the mountain in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, could only see a sugar loaf.

  While the pope made Spain accept the Portuguese presence in Brazil, the Council of the Indies in Seville had every intention of keeping the Caribbean a Spanish lake. Alas, Spain’s wars in the sixteenth century had exhausted both the country and the royal treasury, just at the moment when the French, Dutch, English, even the Danish were eager to enter the scramble for New World wealth. Nor could Spanish manufacturers supply the goods that their colonists wanted—surely not as cheaply as the Dutch and English, who were only too willing to smuggle tools, weapons, cloth, and food into the many port cities of the Spanish New World. Spain’s effort to maintain monopoly control only attracted outlaws to the Caribbean. Soon the area was considered “beyond the line”—outside the norms of European civilization and its international treaties. Here Europeans accepted rapes, abductions, plunder, torture, attacks, piracy, and chicanery of every kind, all made the more debased by the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans and Indians.8

  True to their concentration on commerce, the Dutch wanted a toehold on the Spanish Main. Dutch West India Company traders moved from piracy to smuggling and finally to the occupation of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, in 1634. Near Curaçao also was a source of salt, a precious food additive critical to the Dutch herring trade. The company had already established New Netherlands on the North American continent when it purchased Manhattan for goods worth roughly twenty-four dollars. With its natural harbor Curaçao became the center of the Dutch slave trade. With this gateway to Spain’s mainland colonies, the Dutch entered the competition for the Spanish asiento.

  The Spanish had paid little attention to the Lesser Antilles, the so-called Windward and Leeward Islands five hundred miles east of their headquarters on Santo Domingo and Cartagena. The English and French were only too happy to take possession of them, the French settling Martinique and Guadeloupe; the English, St. Christopher, Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, and Nevis. English entrepreneurs began cultivating tobacco with white indentured servants on their islands; but white servants presented social problems, and the supply was uncertain. When their labor contracts ran out in four or five years, the freed men and women had to be given land or work. Far more attractive as a labor force were African slaves, if an export crop could be found to justify their purchase prices. Enter sugar.

  France was continental Europe’s richest and most powerful country, but French entrepreneurs had to contend with an unreformed absolute monarchy in which the capricious use of power threatened the security of their investments. Rather than an integrated market, the internal pathways of French commerce were clogged with tolls to be paid on roads and bridges while most of its peasants lacked the skills and investments to farm well. Yet in the New World the French learned how to produce sugar. The returns grew dramatically during the eighteenth century, but they reached only a small group of favored investors. Heavily taxed, New World sugar plantations postponed a fiscal crisis for the French monarchy until the end of the century.

  The Dutch, French, and English not only intruded on Spain’s Caribbean holdings but also challenged Portuguese slavers, mounting an aggressive campaign to break up the Portuguese monopoly of the West African slave trade. Considering the breadth of the coast from which slaves were bought and the diversity of African rulers to deal with, it was not difficult for latecomers to enter this lucrative trade. Europeans themselves did not penetrate sub-Saharan Africa until the nineteenth century. Rather slave cargoes were gathered at fortified castles or factories, often on offshore islands. Sometimes bands of freelancing armed Africans raided villages and sold their captives to all comers. Along thirty-five hundred miles of coastline from Senegambia to Angola, traders gathered slave cargoes that they sold for European goods. Slave sellers particularly favored guns with which to capture more men and women. Separated by sex for the voyage across the Atlantic, the captives were packed into ships, each person confined to a space of four square feet for a period of eight to twelve weeks. A typical voyage would carry 150 to 400 persons, 12 to 15 percent of whom usually died en route. Revolts broke out in about 10 percent of all voyages, almost always in the first weeks.9

  By the end of the sixteenth century Europe’s sugar refining center had shifted from Antwerp to London; the sugar industry in Sicily retrenched to meet only local demand. The English entered the slave trade with a monopoly firm, the Royal African Company, but by the end of the seventeenth century the time for monopolies had passed. Interlopers complained vigorously, and the trade was thrown open. Liverpool became its center as Nantes was France’s. At its peak in the 1790s, a slave vessel left an English port every other day. After England secured the Spanish asiento in 1713, it dominated the slave trade for a century, until reformers at home brought a stop to the whole awful enterprise.

  Merchants in the English continental colonies, particularly those from Rhode Island and New York, participated in the slave trade along with the slavers that sailed from Liverpool. The northern British colonies also played a major role in provisioning the West Indian colonies, which imported almost everything rather than divert hands and land from producing sugar. They paid for their American colonial imports in molasses, which New Englanders took home and distilled into rum. Sugar went from being a luxury to a necessity in the kitchens of all but the poorest Europeans. The value of sugar imports alone was four times that of the entire commerce with Asian countries.10 Every European country with access to the Atlantic Ocean joined the race for profits from a sweetener that tasted good in tea and puddings, and, more important, could preserve fresh fruits and vegetables all year round.

  The sugar planters, who invested their capital in plantations, worked their slaves and land as hard as possible. They accepted the inevitable decline of soil in the pursuit of quick returns. So profitable was the crop and so cruel the plantation owners that they literally worked their slaves to death. The labor force in the Caribbean had to be replaced about every ten to thirteen years. Far from home, European entrepreneurs shed their manners and morality. Many owners left the management of their property to others. These absentee owners returned home to live in luxury. Few questioned the origin of their great wealth. In England about a dozen of these sugar nabobs sat in the House of Commons. Without their plowing money back into the plantations, the fertility of the soil dropped, creating opportunities to bring new plantations into the market. Brazil was important through most of the s
eventeenth century; Barbados peaked around 1690; Haiti and Jamaica, after 1700. The greatest slave revolt in history brought the heyday of St. Domingue to an end in the second half of the eighteenth century; Cuba prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. While Cuba dominated the sugar industry, slaves could be sold there for thirty times what they had cost in Africa.11 Profits like that would always find takers.

  Slaves in England’s Continental Colonies

  No European country began its explorations of the New World with the intention of bringing slaves from Africa to raise exotic crops for a worldwide market. The turn to slave labor in the three English colonies of Virginia, Barbados, and South Carolina offers a picture of how the transformation happened. Virginia, England’s first colony, was settled in 1607 with the typical high hopes of finding gold and silver. After a decade of disappointment and hardship, tobacco saved the colony after a colonist had hybridized a leaf that could compete with the Spanish leaf. Smoking and chewing tobacco proved so popular in England that this demand triggered a boom back in Virginia. Anyone with access to land planted tobacco.12 The decentralization of decision making, characteristic of the free enterprise system, led to overcropping, and soon there was a glut of the “filthy weed.” When prices dropped precipitously, tobacco came within the budgetary reach of thousands more consumers. A fresh opportunity opened up: making a profit at the new low price by learning how to cut costs.

  Slavery was not essential to raising tobacco. English indentured servants and family farmers had been growing it for several decades, but using slave labor was an alluring alternative for the wealthier planters. A Dutch vessel had brought a score of slaves to Virginia in 1619, but at that early date investing in slaves was not attractive. A few decades later a number of settlers arrived with sufficient cash to establish themselves on larger plots of land. The English king had promoted the slave trade in part to keep the freewheeling Dutch out of their North American colonies. Now English slavers could supply Virginia planters with slaves directly from Africa at a good price. A final inducement to switching from English indentured servants to African slaves came from the fact that servants, after completing their labor contracts, threatened to become an unruly underclass. Governor William Berkeley described the situation when he lamented: “Oh how miserable is that man who must govern a people six parts of seven are poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!” Slaves were more expensive than servants, but they remained in bondage until death and could be kept under better control than ex-servants.13

  When healthier conditions lowered the initially high mortality rate in Virginia, slaves became a better buy than white servants. Virginia now had the makings of a planter elite, men with resources to set up slave-worked plantations. At the same time the mother country began a very lucrative business exporting tobacco to the Continent. A leading Virginia churchman complained about Virginia’s lack of clergy and was rebuked by the British attorney general with “Souls! Damn your souls, make tobacco.” The 10 percent black population in the first decade of the eighteenth century moved quickly to its 40 percent plateau. By then the British navy was convoying home an annual tobacco fleet of three hundred ships. Meanwhile poorer folks moved out of the Tidewater to the Piedmont area, Maryland, North Carolina, or the inland valleys, where they could farm on a smaller scale, putting in a few acres in tobacco to pay for blankets, tools, and utensils.

  Barbados went through a similar transformation when sugar cultivation replaced mixed farming. When men with the means to buy land, slaves, and machinery for growing and processing sugarcane arrived, the poorer settlers looked for another home in the New World. South Carolina received a charter in 1663, triggering a Barbadian exodus of whites and blacks north to the American continent. South Carolinians too started with a mixed economy. Their slaves introduced the open grazing familiar to Africans, but all this changed with the introduction of rice as an export crop. The Africans, especially those who came from the Sierra Leone area, where rice cultivation had long been practiced, understood the elaborate water and special cultivation that rice required. They also identified native herbs with which some poisoned their masters.14 As with sugar and tobacco, rice produced enough profits to attract wealthier settlers who could afford to buy slave labor. By 1720 there were two African slaves for every English settler in South Carolina. As the Virginia planters had done when they adopted slave labor, the Carolina planter elite passed draconian laws controlling every aspect of slave behavior to still their fears of a slave rebellion.

  When American independence brought an end to British subsidies for tobacco, rice, and indigo, the American South was lucky enough to find a new cash crop in cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, invented in 1793, made profitable the short-staple cotton that could be grown throughout the region. Soon the crop spread west to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, embedding slavery in the economy of the new nation. By 1815 southern planters were sending 17 million bales of cotton to the mills of Lancaster and Manchester. By 1860 this total had risen to 192 million bales, and the slave population had quadrupled to almost four million black men, women, and children.

  The Caribbean and American South constituted the underbelly of capitalist expansion with the cruel exploitation of foreign laborers to produce drugs for newly addicted European consumers. The range was impressive. In 1714 the French introduced coffee from Yemen, whence it spread to Haiti and regions in Central America. The Aztecs had drunk cocoa cold and spiced. With sugar available, both cocoa and tea became popular drinks in Europe. Though the Chinese were the greatest producers of tea, it was also grown in the Caribbean. With the exception of sugar, all these crops were drugs. Even sugar, one might say, could be addictive, and of course, fermenting the molasses that gushed from sugarcane vats soon turned into rum. All these intoxicating novelties had been inaccessible to Europeans, whose climate prevented growing the exotic crops of the tropics. European governments also liked these taste enhancers and mood alterers because they could load them with “sin” taxes.15 Moralists complained about their spreading popularity, but their scolding lost traction as the value of individual liberty rose. After all, desire had proved a mighty stimulus to steady work habits when people were left free to choose from the cornucopia of goods available to them.

  A Labor System That Demanded Rationalizations

  The survival of slavery over four centuries compels our attention. What was there in European culture that permitted such atrocities as were committed against Africans as well as the indigenous populations of North and South America? For one, the level of cruelty everywhere in the world at that time made slavery less unusual. A nineteenth-century parliamentary report, for example, coolly described the superiority of adolescent girls over mules for the task of pulling coal carts through the narrow passages of mines. The callousness shown African men and women reflected some of the harsh treatment of all dependents. And then there is that amazing capacity of human beings to justify what they want to do.

  As with our reaction to the starving millions today, “out of sight is out of mind” prevails. A very small percentage of the European population had any contact with slavery. This probably accounts for the milder form of slavery in the American South, where master and slaves lived cheek by jowl. In British America, unlike Latin America with its many mulattoes and mestizos, race became the handle that defenders of slavery seized to legitimate their holding men and women in perpetual bondage.

  Capitalism twisted relations among the races in a particularly ugly way. The reason for this is obvious and obscure at the same time. Capitalism began as a system of production, fueled by an insatiable drive for profit. Places around the world with natural resources attracted investors. These Europeans could bring with them their capital, but not the laboring men and women required to extract or grow those far-flung resources. Instead they had to rely on workers where the resources were, meaning the mobilization of Asians, Africans, Arabs, or Native Americans—people of color. Abroad European entrepreneurs organized labor
to their own advantage, usually with the help of local potentates who were bought off. Europeans judged the new workers by their speed in adapting to their work habits. They were usually found wanting. Europeans filled their letters back home with laments about the laziness and dirty habits of those on whom they depended for labor.

  Rationalizations of slavery alert us to the guilty conscience that hovered over the system. Sometimes scholars make European prejudice against Africans appear as prompting enslavement rather than as furnishing excuses after the fact. Once slavery was in place, there was every inducement to disparage Africans. Their black skin evoked the pejorative imagery and expressions associated with blackness: black devil, black market, blackguard. A wonderfully circular reasoning kicked in as well: The unattractive personal traits that slavery instilled in children and their parents—indolence, insolence, sluggishness, lethargy—were exactly the qualities that were used to justify enslavement. By the end of the eighteenth century a new commitment in Europe to liberty and equality had doomed slave labor, though it was not until 1888 that the last Western country, Brazil, ended it. And nobody wanted to talk about it. A twentieth-century English historian wryly commented that the slave trade appeared in their history books only in connection with its abolition.

  Scholars have argued that slavery in the Iberian colonies operated more benignly because the Portuguese and Spanish were accustomed to the institution and had incorporated slavery into their laws. Their long association with North African Muslims had brought them into sustained contact with people of color. In addition, the Catholic Church adamantly insisted on converting slaves. Portuguese slavers routinely baptized their cargoes before they set sail. The church sanctioned slave marriages, but the Protestants did not. Spanish and Portuguese rules set out very specific terms by which an enslaved person could regain her or his freedom, and custom, law, and religion encouraged masters to manumit their slaves. Slaves also had access to the courts as witnesses and litigants.16