In 1497, within half a decade of Columbus’s first return to Spain from America, the Anglo-Italian Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot as he was known in his adopted country, made a discovery of North America, and claimed it for King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch of England. The English westering impulse, after then lying dormant for half a century, gradually revived in a variety of projects, schemes and false starts. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, an interval of peace with Spain having arrived with the accession of James I to the throne, English colonization was an idea whose time had come.1 In 1607 the first permanent English settlement in America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia. By the end of the first third of the century four more permanent Anglo-American colonies had been established: Somers Islands (the Bermudas), 1612; Plymouth (Massachusetts), 1620; Barbados, 1627; and Maryland, 1634.2
The English were confronted with the common twofold problem crucial to success in the Americas: (1) how to secure an adequate supply of labor; and (2) how to establish and maintain the degree of social control necessary to assure the rapid and continuous expansion of their capital by the exploitation of that labor. In each of these respects, however, the English case differed from those of other European colonizing powers in the Americas, in ways that have a decisive bearing on the origin of the “peculiar institution” – white racial oppression, most particularly racial slavery – in continental Anglo-America.
European Continental Powers and the Colonial Labor Supply
The continental European colonizing powers, for economic, military and political reasons, and in some cases because of access to external sources, did not employ Europeans as basic plantation laborers.
Spain and Portugal
The accession in 1516 of Francis I of France and in 1517 of Charles I of Spain, and the installation of the latter as Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1519, set off a round of warring that would involve almost every country in Europe, from Sweden to Portugal, from the Low Countries to Hungary, for a century and a quarter. The Spanish-headed Holy Roman Empire was at the same time heavily engaged in war with the Ottoman Turks until after the defeat of the latter in the Mediterranean naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Portugal, with a population of fewer than 1.4 million,3 was involved in protecting its world-circling empire against opposition from both Christian and Moslem rivals. France was Spain’s main adversary in the struggle over Italy, the Netherlands and smaller European principalities.
These wars imposed great manpower demands on every one of the continental governments seeking at the same time to establish colonial ventures. Belligerents who could afford them sought to hire soldiers from other countries. The bulk of Spain’s armies, for example, were made up of foreign mercenaries.4 Portugal, however, lacking Spain’s access to American silver and gold to maintain armies of foreign mercenaries, had to rely on its own resources.5 So critical was the resulting manpower situation in 1648 that Antonio Vieira, the chief adviser to King John IV, felt obliged to advocate the temporary surrender of Brazil to Protestant Holland as the best way out of the sea of troubles besetting the Portuguese interest in Africa, Asia, America, and, indeed, vis-à-vis Portugal’s Iberian neighbor. Portugal was so depleted of men for defense, he said, that “every alarm” took “laborers from the plough.”6 Even if, despite this circumstance, a ploughman did manage to get to Brazil, he was not to be expected to do any manual labor there: “the Portuguese who emigrated to Brazil, even if they were peasants from the tail of the plough, had no intention of doing any manual work.”7
Bartolomé de Las Casas, concerned with the genocidal exploitation of the native population by the Christian colonizers in the West Indies, suggested that, “If necessary, white and black slaves be brought from Castile [Spain] to keep herds, build sugar mills, wash gold,” and otherwise be of service to the colonists. In 1518, Las Casas briefly secured favorable consideration from King Carlos for a detailed proposal designed to recruit “quiet peasants” in Spain for emigration to the West Indies. The emigrants were to be transported free of charge from their Spanish homes to the colonies. Once there, they were to be “provided with land, animals, and farming tools, and also granted a year’s supply of food from the royal granaries.” But, again, these emigrant peasants were not expected to do much labor. Rather they were to be provided with slaves from Spain. It was specified that any emigrant who offered to build a sugar mill in the Indies was to be licensed to take twenty Negro slaves with him. With his assistants, Las Casas toured Spain on behalf of the plan and received a favorable response from the peasants he wanted to recruit for the project. But as a result mainly of the opposition of great landowners who feared the loss of their tenants in such a venture, the plan was quickly defeated.8 Thus was defined official emigration policy; it assured that Spaniards going to the American colonies were not to be laborers, but such as lawyers and clerks, and men (women emigrants were extremely few) of the nobility or knighthood, who were “forbidden by force of custom even to think of industry or commerce.”9 A few Spanish and Portuguese convicts, presumably of satisfactory Christian ancestry, were transported to the colonies early on, but they were not intended and themselves did not intend to serve in the basic colonial labor force.10
The single instance in which basic plantation labor needs were supplied from the Iberian population occurred in 1493. In that year, two thousand Jewish children, eight years old and younger, were taken from their parents, baptized as Christians, and shipped to the newly founded Portuguese island sugar colony of São Tomé, where fewer than one-third were to be counted thirteen years later.11
In Spain, seven years of plague and famine from 1596 to 1602, followed by the expulsion of 275,000 Christianized Moors in a six-year period beginning in 1602,12 reduced the population by 600,000 or 700,000, one-tenth of all the inhabitants.13 Thus began a course of absolute population decline that lasted throughout the seventeenth century.14 As it had been with the Jews before, the expelled moriscos were officially ineligible for emigration to the Americas, since émigrés were required to prove several generations of Catholic ancestry.15
Holland
For the better part of a century up to the 1660s, Holland, in the process of winning her independence from Spain in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), was the leading commercial and trading country of Europe. Holland’s 10,000 ships exceeded the total number held by the rest of northern Europe combined.16 On this basis the new Dutch Republic developed a thriving and expanding internal economy. Large areas were diked and drained to increase the amount of cultivable land.17 Up until 1622, Dutch cities grew, some at a phenomenal rate; in that year, half of Holland’s population lived in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants.18 The population of Amsterdam alone had grown to 105,000, three and a half times its size in 1585.19 These cities were expanding not from an influx of displaced Dutch peasants, but because urban needs were growing faster than those of rural areas,20 and because Holland’s “obvious prosperity … acted as a lodestar to the unemployed and the underemployed of neighboring countries.”21
Although the casual laborer in Holland was frequently out of work, “unemployment … was never sufficiently severe to induce industrial and agricultural workers to emigrate on an adequate scale to the overseas possessions of the Dutch East and West India Companies.”22 Those who did decide to emigrate to find work “preferred to seek their fortune in countries nearer home.”23 Plans for enlisting Dutch peasant families for colonizing purposes came to little, outside of the small settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, which in the seventeenth century was mainly a way station for ships passing to and from the Dutch East Indies.24 As far as the East Indies were concerned, it was never contemplated “that the European peasant should cultivate the soil himself.” Rather, he would supervise the labor of others.25
France
In seventeenth-century France the great majority of the peasants were holders of small plots scarcely large enough to provide the minimum essentials for survival. The almost interminable religious wars that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had ravaged much of the country, and epidemic disease had greatly reduced the population.26 But while French poor peasants groaned under the burden of feudal exactions, they were still bound by feudal ties to the land;27 they had not been “surplussed” by sheep, as many peasants had been in Spain and England.
The first successful French colonization efforts were undertaken on the Bay of Fundy (1604) and at Quebec (1608). The laborers for the colony’s upbuilding and development were to be wage workers, transported at the expense of the French government or other sponsoring entity, and employed under three to five year contracts. But New France was not destined to become a plantation colony, indeed not even a primarily agricultural colony.28 A century after these first Canadian settlements were established, their population was only ten thousand, including a few persons representing a soon-abandoned notion of supplying the labor needs of Canadian colonies from African sources.29 Some time before the end of the seventeenth century, the French government turned to the idea of Christianizing and Gallicizing the Indians as a means of peopling New France and developing a labor force for it; that plan also failed, however, because the Indians did not perceive sufficient advantage in such a change in their way of living,30 and they had the resources and abilities to be able to fend off French pressure on the tribal order. Indeed, until the establishment of the Louisiana colony early in the eighteenth century, the entire question of supplying labor for French agricultural undertakings became irrelevant for North America.
French participation in the development of plantation colonies was to occur in the West Indies and, as mentioned, in Louisiana. Having begun with Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635, in 1697 the French capped a series of Caribbean acquisitions by taking control from Spain of the previously French-invested western half of Hispaniola under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick.31 In the beginning, wage laborers called engagés, hired under three-year contracts at rates four or five times those prevailing in France, were shipped to serve the labor needs of these colonies.32 The supply of labor in this form seems to have reached its peak, however, well before 1697. Although the total number of engagés is not known, some 5,200 were shipped from La Rochelle, the chief embarkation point, in the period 1660–1710, a rate of around one hundred per year.33 This was numerically miniscule compared to the total number of imported laborers, which was running at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000 per year in the latter half of this period.
The reasons for the relegation of engagé labor to economic insignificance were both economic and political.34 The mortality rate among plantation laborers on St Domingue, whatever their nativity, was such that most did not survive three years.35 However, the obligation to pay relatively high wages to the engagés, be their numbers large or small, coupled with the fact that the French colonies had ready access to African labor supplies, first through the Dutch and later from French businessmen, made engagé labor relatively less profitable, provided that the costs of social control of the laboring population drawn from African sources could be kept satisfactorily low.36
Moreover, the need to recruit large French armies for the wars first with Spain and then with England, and the drain on revenues entailed in their support, rendered politically inappropriate the export of engagés to the French West Indies. Louis XIV finally forbade even the forcible transportation of indigent persons to the American colonies. His chief minister from 1661 to 1683, Jean Baptiste Colbert, declared that he had no intention of depopulating France in order to populate the colonies.37
Other sources of labor
The Spanish and the Portuguese first looked to the native populations to solve their colonial labor problem. The Spanish did so with such spirit that, in the course of a century and a half from 1503 to 1660, they tripled Europe’s silver resources and added one-fifth to Europe’s supply of gold.38 In the process, the fire-armed and steel-bladed Conquistadors almost completely destroyed the indigenous population by introducing exotic diseases, and by the merciless imposition of forced labor in gold mining and in the fields. The native population of Hispaniola was thus reduced from 1 million in 1492 to around twenty-six thousand in 1514, and to virtual extinction by the end of the sixteenth century.39 The same genocidal labor regime in mines and fields simultaneously destroyed the native population of Cuba at a comparable rate.40
Epidemic European diseases – smallpox, measles, and typhus – and forced labor under a system of encomienda and repartimiento41 reduced the population of central Mexico from 13.9 million in 1492 to 1.1 million in 1605.42 The impact of disease and of the mita,43 the equivalent of the Mexican repartimiento, was equally devastating to the Indian population of Peru, which was reduced from 9 million to 670,000 in 1620.44
In Brazil, the Portuguese (and the Dutch as well, during the life of the New Holland colony, 1630–54) also sought to recruit their labor force from the native population. However, they found that, while the people “were prepared to work intermittently for such tools and trinkets as they fancied,” they were unwilling to work for them as long-term agricultural laborers, or as bound-servants.45 In the test of wills that lasted until late in the seventeenth century, the indigenous population was largely successful in avoiding reduction to slavery.46
Thus for two opposite reasons – the accessibility of a native labor force that eventually led to its destruction, and the inaccessibility due to resistance by the native population ensconced in dense continental forests – the Iberians turned to Africa as a source of labor for colonial America. This was a labor reserve with which they, as part of medieval Europe and as colonizers of Atlantic islands, were already somewhat familiar.47 Medieval Europe secured its slaves by trade with southern Russia, Turkey, the Levant and the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea (the ethnic name Slav is the root of the various Western European variations of the word “slave”), as well as by purchasing Negroes supplied by North African Arab merchants.48 Spain enslaved Moslem “Moors” in border regions during the “reconquista” wars against the Arab regime on the Iberian peninsula.49 In the middle of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established direct access to African labor sources by successfully executing a maritime end run around the North African Arabs.50 By the end of that century Portuguese enterprise, with papal blessing,51 had supplied twenty-five thousand Africans as unpaid laborers to Europe, plus one thousand to São Tomé, and seven and a half thousand to islands in the Atlantic.52 In the sixteenth century the African proportion of the slave population increased in Portugal and Spain. In Lisbon, a city of 100,000 people in 1551, there were 9,950 slaves, most of them Africans. In Seville (1565), Cadiz (1616), and Madrid (up to about 1660), the slave population included Turks and Moors, but the largest number were Africans.53 During the very early days of American colonization, a number of American Indians were shipped to be sold at a profit in Spain.54
In 1518, King Charles I of Spain, acting with papal sanction, authorized the supply to Spanish America of four thousand Africans as bond-laborers, for which project he awarded the contract to a favorite of his.55 This was the origin of the infamous Asiento de negros (or simply Asiento, as it came generally to be called), a license giving the holder the exclusive right to supply African laborers to Spanish colonies in the Americas (and to Portuguese Brazil as well during the sixty years, 1580–1640, when Portugal was united with Spain in a single kingdom). At various times it was directly awarded by the Spanish crown to individuals or to governments by state treaty. The Asiento was the object of fierce competition among European powers, especially in the last half of the seventeenth century. Allowing for brief periods of suspension, it was held successively by Portugal, Holland, and France, and passed finally to Britain as a part of the spoils of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–14).56 The Asiento was finally ransomed from Britain for £100,000 in 1750.57
Scholars’ estimates of the total number of Africans shipped for bond-servitude in the Americas under the Asiento and otherwise range from 11 to 15 million.58 Of the 2,966,000 who disembarked in Anglo-America, 2,443,000 went to the British West Indies and 523,000 to continental Anglo-America (including the United States).59 Two other aspects of the matter seem to have been slighted in previous scholarship: first, the significance of this movement of labor in the “peopling” of the Americas; and, second, the implications to be found in the story of this massive transplantation of laborers for the history of class struggle and social control in general in the Americas.
I am not qualified to treat these subjects in any comprehensive way, but I venture to comment briefly, prompted by an observation made by James A. Rawley, whose work I have cited a number of times:
The Atlantic slave trade was a great migration long ignored by historians. Euro-centered, historians have lavished attention upon the transplanting of Europeans. Every European ethnic group has had an abundance of historians investigating its roots and manner of migration. The transplanting of Africans is another matter … [that] belongs to the future.60
As to the first of the questions – the African migration and the “peopling” of the Americas – it is to be hoped that among subjects that belong to the future historiography invoked by Rawley, emphasis may be given to the degree to which the migration (forced though it was) of 10 or 11 million Africans shaped the demographics of the Americas as a whole. It is certain that more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas between 1500 and 1800.61 It would seem that such a demographic assessment might add strength to arguments that place the African-American and the “Indian” in the center of the economic history of the hemisphere, and in so doing sustain and promote the cause of the dignity of labor in general. Such a demographic assessment might be of service in responding to the cry for justice for the Indians from Chiapas (from Las Casas to Subcómmandante Marcos), or to an African-American demand for reparations for unpaid bond-servitude; or in assessing the claim of the “Unknown Proletarian,” in a possibly wider sense than even he intended:
We have fed you all for a thousand years –
For that was our doom you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike of a week ago
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share;
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We have bought it fair.62
Second, with regard to the class struggle and social control in general in the Americas, attention will need to be given to the resistance and rebellion practiced by the African bond-laborers and their descendants, from the moment of embarkation from the shores of Africa63 to the years of maroon defiance in the mountains and forests of America;64 from the quarry’s first start of alarm65 to the merger of the emancipation struggle with movements for national independence and democracy four hundred years later.66
Historically most significant of all was the Haitian Revolution – an abolition and a national liberation rolled into one: it was the destruction of French rule in Haiti that convinced Emperor Napoleon to see and cede the Louisiana territory (encompassing roughly all the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains) to the United States, without which there would have been no United States west of the Mississippi. By defeating Napoleon’s plan to keep St Domingue in sugar plantation slavery, the Haitian Revolution ushered in an era of emancipation that in eighty-five years broke forever the chains of chattel bondage in the Western Hemisphere – from the British West Indies (1833–48), to the United States (1865), to Cuba (1868–78), to Brazil (1871–78). It was in Haiti that the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar, twice found refuge and assistance when he had been driven from Venezuela. Pledging to the Haitian president, Pétion, that he would fight to abolish slavery, Bolivar sailed from Haiti at the end of 1816 to break the colonial rule of Spain in Latin America.67
England and the Colonial Labor Supply
English colonialists were to share the motives and aspirations felt by their counterparts looking westward from the European continent: the search for uncontested access to the fabled treasures of the East; the hope of finding rich gold and silver mines; an eagerness to find alternate sources of more mundane products such as hides, timber, fish and salt; and the furtherance of strategic interests vis-à-vis rival military and commercial powers in the development of this new field of activity.68 Much would be said and proposed also in the name of the defense of one Christian faith (of the Protestant variety in the English case of course). But all endeavors, holy and profane, were to be held in orbit by the gravitational field of capital accumulation.69
In regard to the problem of a colonial labor supply, however, the situation of the English bourgeoisie was unique; this was as a result of developments that are so familiar to students of English history that a brief summary will suffice in the present context. With the end of the Wars of the Roses (1450–85), a convergence of circumstances – some old, some new – launched the cloth-making industry into its historic role as the transformer of English economic life to the capitalist basis.70 Principal among these circumstances were: (1) the emergence of a strong monarchy; (2) England’s relative isolation, compared to the countries of continental Europe;71 (3) improved means of navigation, especially benefiting the coastal shipping so well suited to the needs of an island nation; (4) improved and extended use of water power for cloth-fulling mills, and for other industrial purposes; and (5) the rural setting of the cloth industry, outside the range of the regulations of the urban-centred guilds.
The price of wool rose faster than the price of grain, and the rent on pasture rose to several times the rent on crop land.72 The owners increased the proportion of pasture at the expense of arable land. One shepherd and flock occupied as much land as a dozen or score of peasants could cultivate with the plough. Ploughmen were therefore replaced by sheep and hired shepherds; peasants were deprived of their copyhold and common-land rights, while laborers on the lords’ demesne lands found their services in reduced demand. Rack-rents and impoverishing leasehold entry fees were imposed with increasing severity on laboring peasants competing with sheep for land. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, somewhere between one sixth and one third of all the land in England belonged to abbeys, monasteries, nunneries and other church enterprises. In the process of the dissolution of the monasteries, most of the estimated 44,000 religious and lay persons attached to these institutions were cast adrift among the growing unemployed, homeless population.73 As these lands were expropriated, under Henry VIII the process of conversion to pasture was promoted more vigorously than it had been by their former owners.74 Henry VIII’s return of 48,000 English soldiers in 1546 from a two-year turn in Boulogne tended further to the creation of a surplus proletariat.75 The effect was only partially offset by the participation of regular and volunteer English soldiers in the Dutch war for the independence of Holland from Spain later in the century, and by the Tyrone War in Ireland.76 Generally speaking, the sixteenth century was relatively free of war and plague.77 The population of England is estimated to have grown by 1.3 million in the last six decades of the sixteenth century, to 4.1 million, but by only another 0.9 million in the entire seventeenth century.78 Occurring at a time when employment in cultivation was being reduced more rapidly than it was being increased in sheep raising and industry, this demographic factor added substantially to the swelling surplus of the semi-proletarian and vagrant population.79 During the early decades of the seventeenth century, the oppressive effects of this catastrophic general tendency to increasing unemployment and vagrancy were exacerbated by purely political and cyclical factors, and by market disruptions occasioned by continental wars. In 1614–17, James I – enticed by Alderman Cockayne’s scheme whereby the Crown coffers were to be enriched by five shillings on each of 36,000 pieces of finished and dyed cloth to be exported annually – imposed extremely strict limitations on the export of unfinished cloth.80 The effect was a serious dislocation of trade, and mass unemployment in the cloth industry. English cloth exports fell until in 1620 they were only half the pre-1614 level.81
The man who had been serving for some time as treasurer and chief officer of the Virginia Company, Edwin Sandys, urged the colony’s cause by pointing out that in Britain, “Looms are laid down. Every loom maintains forty persons. The farmer is not able to pay his rent. The fairs and markets stand still …”82 Recovery was slow. In 1624, an investigating committee of the House of Commons reported that there were still twelve thousand unemployed cloth workers.83 A modern scholar has concluded that the next decade did not mark much improvement, noting that the proportion of the people receiving poor relief was greater in the 1631–40 period than at any other time before or since.84 East Anglia, the native region of most of the emigrants to Anglo-America in those years, was at that time especially hard hit by a depression in the cloth trade.85
The English case for colonization came thus to be distinguished from those of Spain, Portugal, France, and Holland in its advocacy of colonization as a means of “venting” the nation’s surplus of “necessitous people” into New World plantations.86 Francis Bacon (1561–1626) favored colonization as a way to “disburthen the land of such inhabitants as may well be spared.” Just who those were who could be spared had been identified some time before by the premier advocate of overseas exploration and settlement, Richard Hakluyt (1552?-1616): it was the surplus proletarians who should be sent. Contrasting England with the continental countries interminably devouring their manpower in wars and their train of disease and pestilence, Hakluyt pointed out that “[t]hrough our long peace and seldom sickness wee are growen more populous … (and) there are of every arte and science so many, that they can hardly lyve by one another.” Richard Johnson, in his promotional pamphlet Nova Britannia, noted that England abounded “with swarmes of idle persons … having no meanes of labour to releeve their misery.” He went on to prescribe that there be provided “some waies for their forreine employment” as English colonists in America.87 Commenting on the peasant uprising in the English Midlands in 1607, the House of Lords expressed the belief that unless war or colonization “vent” the daily increase of the population, “there must break out yearly tumours and impostures as did of late.”88
The English Variation and the “Peculiar Institution”
The conjunction of the matured colonizing impulse, the momentarily favorable geopolitical constellation of powers, the English surplus of unemployed and underemployed labor, coupled with the particular native demographic and social factors as the English found them in Virginia, and the lack of direct English access to African labor sources, produced that most portentous and distinctive factor of English colonialism: of all the European colonizing powers in the Americas, only England used European workers as basic plantation workers. This truly “unthinking decision,”89 or, more properly, historical accident, was of incidental importance in the ultimate deliberate Anglo-American ruling class option for racial oppression. Except for this peculiarity, racial slavery as it was finally and fully established in continental America, with all of its tragic historical consequences, would never have been brought into being.
Essential as this variation in the English plantation labor supply proved to be for the emergence of the Anglo-American system of racial slavery, however, it was not the cause of racial oppression in Anglo-America. The peculiarity of the “peculiar institution” did not derive from the fact that the labor needs of Anglo-American plantation colonies came to the colonies in the chattel-labor form. Nor did it inhere in the fact that the supply of lifetime, hereditary bond-laborers was made up of non-Europeans exclusively. These were common characteristics throughout the plantation Americas.
The peculiarity of the “peculiar institution” derived, rather, from the control aspect; yet not merely in its reliance upon the support of the free non-owners of bond-labor, as buffer and enforcer against the unfree proletariat; for that again was a general characteristic of plantation societies in America.
The peculiarity of the system of social control which came to be established in continental Anglo-America lay in the following two characteristics: (1) all persons of any degree of non-European ancestry were excluded from the buffer social control stratum; and (2) a major, indispensable, and decisive factor of the buffer social control stratum maintained against the unfree proletarians was that it was itself made up of free proletarians and semi-proletarians.
How did this monstrous social mutation begin, evolve, survive and finally prevail in continental Anglo-America? That is the question to be examined in the chapters that follow.