A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (33 page)

The ideas of the Enlightenment did not simply emerge, accidentally, from the heads of certain thinkers. They were at least a partial reflection of changes taking place in the relations between human beings—change which had gone furthest in Britain and Holland.

The central change through the turmoil of the 16th and 17th centuries was that exchange through the market played an increasingly dominant role in the way people obtained a livelihood. The church might burn heretics and the Habsburg armies sack urban centres opposed to their rule. But popes, emperors, princes and lords all required cash to finance their efforts—and this meant that, even while trying to preserve the old order, they helped spread the market forces which would ultimately undermine it.

This was shown most clearly after the conquest of the Americas. Silver from the American mines was key to financing the armies which backed the counter-Reformation. But the flow of that silver was part of a new intercontinental network of market relations. Much of it flowed through intermediaries in north west Europe and out to China, the east Indies and India to buy luxury goods. New international shipping routes—from Manila to Acapulco, from Vera Cruz to Seville, from Amsterdam to Batavia
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and from Batavia to Canton—were beginning to bind people’s lives in one part of the world to those in another.

Market relations rest on the assumption that, however unequal people’s social standing, they have an equal right to accept or reject a particular transaction. The buyer is free to offer any price and the seller free to reject the offer. Mandarin and merchant, baron and burgher, landlord and tenant have equal rights in this respect. In so far as the market spreads, old prejudices based on dominance and deference come under siege from calculations in terms of cash.

The Enlightenment was a recognition in the realm of ideas of this change taking place in reality. Its picture of a world of equal men (although a few Enlightenment thinkers raised the question of equal rights for women) was an abstraction from a world in which people were meant to be equally able to agree, or fail to agree, to buy and sell goods in their possession. The ‘rational’ state was one in which this could take place without arbitrary obstruction.

Yet there were two great holes in the Enlightenment picture as applied in the 18th century—and not just to ‘backward’ regions of Europe such as Castile, Sicily or eastern Europe, but to Britain, the model for people like Voltaire. One was the chattel slavery of the Americas, and the other the wage slavery of the propertyless labourer at home.

A growing amount of the wealth of 18th century Europe came from an institution based on the very opposite of equal rights between buyers and sellers—from enforced slavery. Philosophers might talk abut equal rights in the coffee houses of Europe. But the sweetened coffee they drank was produced by people who had been herded at gunpoint onto ships in west Africa, taken across the Atlantic in appalling conditions (more than one in ten died on the way), sold at auctions and then whipped into working 15, 16 or even 18 hours a day until they died.

About 12 million people suffered this fate.
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A million and half died while making the passage. The death toll on the plantations was horrendous, since the planters found it profitable to work someone to death and then buy a replacement. A total of 1.6 million slaves were taken to the British Caribbean islands in the 18th century, yet the slave population at its end was 600,000. In North America conditions (a more temperate climate and greater access to fresh food) allowed a more rapid expansion of the slave population, through births as well as imports, so that it grew from 500,000 at the beginning of the century to three million at the end and six million by the 1860s. But the death toll was still much higher than for non-slaves. As Patrick Manning points out, ‘By 1820 some ten million Africans had migrated to the New World as compared to two million Europeans. The New World white population of 12 million was roughly twice as great as the black population’.
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Slavery was not invented in the 17th and 18th centuries, of course. It had persisted in small pockets in different parts of Europe and the Middle East through the Middle Ages—as a way of manning the naval galleys of the Mediterranean states, for instance. But it was a marginal phenomenon at a time when serfdom was the main form of exploitation, and the slavery which did exist was not associated with black people more than any other group. Whites could be galley slaves, and the word for slave is derived from ‘Slav’. As Patrick Manning writes, ‘In 1500, Africans or persons of African descent were a clear minority of the world’s slave population; but by 1700, the majority’.
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The change began with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Christopher Columbus sent some of the Arawaks who first greeted him to be sold as slaves in Seville and there were attempts to use American Indians as slaves in the Caribbean. But the efforts were not very successful. The Indian population fell by up to 90 percent as a result of barbarous treatment and epidemics, the Spanish conquerors found it more remunerative to extract tribute and forced labour than to resort to outright slavery, and the Spanish crown—worried that the Indian population would die out and leave it without any labour to work the land—listened to the criticism of Indian slavery from priests who saw the priority as converting the Indians to Christianity.

Crown and colonists alike turned increasingly to a different source of labour—the buying of slaves on the coast of west Africa. Cortés started a plantation manned by African slaves, and even the priest Las Casas, the best known critic of the Spanish treatment of the Indians, recommended African slavery (although he later repented giving such advice).

Slavery took off on a massive scale when Portugal, Holland, England and France began the commercial cultivation of tobacco and sugar in their colonies. These crops demanded a huge labour force, and free immigrants from Europe were not prepared to provide it.

At first the plantation owners utilised a form of unfree labour from Europe. ‘Indentured servants’—in effect slaves to debt—were contracted to work for three, five or seven years for no wages, in return for their passage across the Atlantic. Some were kidnapped by ‘spirits’, as agents for the contractors were known in Britain.
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Others were convicts or prisoners from the civil and religious wars in Europe. The sugar plantations of Barbados had a labour force of 2,000 indentured servants and 200 African slaves in 1638—with an indentured servant costing £12 and a slave £25.
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Since neither the servant nor the slave was likely to live more than four or five years, the servants seemed ‘better value’ to the plantation owners than the slaves.

Merchants and rulers had no moral problem with this. After all, the British navy was manned by ‘pressed’ men—poor people kidnapped from the streets, ‘confined’ in conditions ‘not markedly better than that of black slaves’ before leaving port,
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and facing a death toll at sea as high as that of the human ‘cargo’ of the slave boats they might be escorting.
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An act of parliament gave captains the power to impose the death sentence for striking an officer, or even for sleeping on watch.
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But bond slavery from Europe was not on nearly a big enough scale to supply the labour the planation owners required as the market for tobacco and sugar grew and they turned increasingly to Africa. By 1653, slaves outnumbered indentured servants in Barbados by 20,000 to 8,000.
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Where there were only 22,400 black people in the southern colonies of North America in 1700, there were 409,500 by 1770.

At first the plantation owners treated white indentured servants and African slaves very similarly. In Virginia servants who ran away had to serve double time and were branded on the cheek with the letter R if they repeated the offence. In Barbados there were cases of owners killing servants who became too sickly to work.
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Servants and slaves worked alongside one another, and there was at least one case of intermarriage in Virginia (something which would be inconceivable for another 300 years).

Servants and slaves who worked together and socialised together could also fight back together. Cases of servants and slaves helping each other to run away began to worry the plantation owners. Their concern was highlighted by ‘Bacon’s Rebellion’ in Virginia in 1676, when opponents of the governor and the wealthy planters offered freedom both to indentured servants and to slaves who were prepared to help seize control of the colony. The motives of the rebels were mixed—one of their demands was for war to seize more land from the Indians.
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But their actions showed how poor whites and Africans could unite against the landowners. The response of the colonial landowners was to push through measures which divided the two groups.

As Robin Blackburn records in his history of colonial slavery, the Virginian House of Burgesses sought to strengthen the racial barrier between English servants and African slaves. In 1680 it prescribed 30 lashes on the bare back ‘if any negro or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition to any Christian’. A Virginia act of 1691 made it lawful ‘to kill and destroy such negroes, mulattos and other slaves’ who ‘unlawfully absent themselves from their masters’ or mistresses’ service’. It also decreed that any white man or woman who married ‘a negro, mulatto or Indian’ should be banished from the colony.
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In other words, the planters recognised that far from white and black automatically hating each other, there was a likelihood of some whites establishing close relations with the slaves—and the colonial authorities sought to stamp this out by giving slave owners the power of life and death. It was now that racism began to develop as an ideology.

The prevalence of racism today leads people to think it has always existed, arising from an innate aversion of people from one ethnic background for those from another. Slavery is then seen as a byproduct of racism, rather than the other way round.

Yet in the ancient and medieval worlds, people did not regard skin colour as any more significant than, say, height, hair colour or eye colour. Tomb paintings from ancient Egypt show fairly random mixtures of light, brown and black figures. Many important figures in Roman history came from north Africa, including at least one emperor; no text bothers to mention whether they were light or dark skinned. In Dutch paintings of the early 16th century, black and white people are shown as mixing freely—as, for instance, in Jordaen’s painting ‘Moses and Zipporah’, which shows Moses’ wife as black.
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There was often deep hostility to Jews in medieval Europe. But this was hostility on the basis of religion, as Jews were the only non-Catholic group in a totally Christian society, not on the basis of allegedly inherent physical or mental characteristics. Their persecutors would leave them alone if they sacrificed their religious beliefs. What was involved was irrational religious hatred, not irrational biological racism. This only arose with the slave trade.

The early slave traders and slave owners did not rely on racial differences to excuse their actions. Instead they turned to ancient Greek and Roman texts which justified the enslavement of those captured in war, or at least in ‘just wars’. Providing the owners had acquired their slaves by legitimate means, the slaves were private property and could be disposed of in any way. So it was that John Locke, the English philosopher so much admired by Voltaire, could justify slavery in the 1690s—and, through ownership of shares in the Royal Africa Company, be a beneficiary of the slave trade
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—yet reject the idea that Africans were intrinsically different to Europeans.
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But the old arguments were not well fitted to the scale of the Atlantic slave economy by the mid-18th century. It was hard to claim the slaves were all prisoners from ‘just wars’. People knew they had been bought from merchants in Africa or born as the children of slaves.
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And the slave traders and owners always needed arguments to use with those white people, the great majority, who did not own slaves. In the colonies the smaller farmers were often resentful at the way the slave owners grabbed the best land and, by using slaves at low cost, undercut them. In ports like London escaped slaves often found refuge in the poor slum areas. The traders and owners needed a way of making people despise, mistrust and fear the slaves. The ‘war prisoners’ doctrine hardly did this. By contrast, ideas that those of African descent were innately inferior to those of European descent fitted the needs of the traders and planters perfectly.

Christian supporters of slavery claimed they had found a justification by references in the Bible to the fate of the descendants of one of Noah’s sons, Ham. But there were also attempts at allegedly ‘scientific’ justifications, in terms of the ‘subhuman savagery’ of Africans—for instance in Edward Long’s
History of Jamaica
, published in 1774. Such arguments enabled some thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment to continue to support slavery.
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They could proclaim, ‘All men are created equal,’ and add that non-whites were not men.

Racism did not emerge at once as a fully formed ideology. It developed over some three centuries. So, for instance, the early attitude to the native inhabitants of North America tended to be that they differed from Europeans because they faced different conditions of life. Indeed, one problem facing the governors of Jamestown (Virginia) was that Indian life had a considerable attraction for white colonists, and ‘they prescribed the death penalty for running off to live with Indians’.
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The preference of ‘thousands of Europeans’ for ‘the Indian way of life’ found a reflection in the positive view of the ‘state of nature’ presented by influential writings like Rousseau’s.
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Even in the mid-18th century ‘the distentions later created by the term “red men” were not to be found…Skin colour was not considered a particularly significant feature’.
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Attitudes changed in the late 18th century as European settlers increasingly clashed with the Indian population over ownership and use of land. There was an increasing depiction of Indians as ‘bloodthirsty monsters’, and ‘they were increasingly referred to as tawny pagans, swarthy philistines, copper-coloured vermin and, by the end of the 18th century, as redskins’.
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Racism developed from an apology for African slavery into a full-blown system of belief into which all peoples of the Earth could be fitted as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘red’ or ‘yellow’—even though many Europeans are pinkish red, many Africans are brown, many people from South Asia are as fair skinned as many Europeans, Native Americans are certainly not red, and Chinese and Japanese people are certainly not yellow!

Some 60 or more years ago the Marxist C L R James and the Caribbean nationalist Eric Williams drew attention to the importance of slavery both in creating racism and in developing the economies of Western Europe. In doing so, they built on an argument put by Karl Marx about the link between chattel slavery in the New World and wage slavery in the old.

Their argument has often been attacked since. After all, say the critics, many of the profits from slavery were not invested in industry, but spent on luxury mansions where merchants and absentee plantation owners could mimic the lifestyles of the old aristocracy; and any gains to the economies of north west Europe would have been eaten up by the cost of the wars fought over control of the slave-based colonial trade.
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As one economic history textbook from the 1960s puts it:

But this is to abstract from the very real effects slave-based production had on the economic life of western Europe, and especially Britain, in the 18th century. What is usually called the ‘triangular trade’ provided outlets for its burgeoning handicraft and putting-out industries. Ironware, guns and textiles from Europe were sold in return for slaves to merchants on the African coast; the slaves were transported in appalling conditions (it was financially more remunerative to allow 10 percent to die than to provide conditions in which all would survive the crossing) to be sold in the Americas; and the money obtained was used to buy tobacco, sugar—and later raw cotton—for sale in Europe.
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