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CHAPTER 3

The Rise of the Merchants and the Beheading of a King

Oliver Cromwell was “the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century,” said Theodore Roosevelt in the midst of a fiery philippic against the Lord Protector’s foe in Madrid, words that simultaneously rationalized Washington’s knockout blow against the Spanish Empire, which had recently been administered in Cuba and the Philippines. Roosevelt was completing what Cromwell had begun.1 That the embodiment of U.S. imperialism would salute an anti- monarchist Puritan should be seen as logical. The republicanism that Cromwell foreshadowed would erupt in 1776. The republicanism that evolved in North America found it difficult at best to corral the Pan-Europeanism that set it in motion (witness the anti-Catholicism and anti- Semitism of early nineteenth-century New York, for example). Likewise, Cromwell’s anti- monarchical project, engaging in bloody anti-Irish pogroms, created the template for republicans staring down the indigenous and slave revolts in the Americas.

In short, England and the immediately surrounding territories were rocked by internecine martial conflict between the early 1640s (actually as early as 1639) and the late 1650s, when Cromwell passed from the scene and the monarchy was restored about a decade after the king had been beheaded in 1649. In short, 1640 to 1660 transformed the Isles; though Cromwell died, neither Cromwellian republican nor merchant capital was subdued altogether, and this led in 1688 to their roaring comeback, when the monarch was placed on a glide path to becoming a figurehead. The emerging primacy of those captivated with the idea of captivity of Africans and Native Americans were then to rise on the curious platform of being tribunes of “enlightenment” and progress, an ideological victory so grand that even those who supposedly sought to overthrow the capitalist draper in the deceitful finery of republicanism accepted this fundamental canard.

The losing side in this titanic European conflict had a justifiable fear that they would become bonded laborers, particularly in the Caribbean, which gave them an incentive to fight with ferocity, just as it normalized what was unfolding in any case: enslaving Native Americans and Africans. By 1642 a quarter or even a third of the adult male population in the regions surrounding London were in arms at one time or another, according to one estimate. Casualties, as a result, were quite high; as a percentage of the English population, they were higher than for the British dead during the First World War. The figures for Scotland were higher, and for England, much higher still. Unremarkably, foreigners found these Europeans to be rude, aggressive, and violent.2 Testimony from indigenes and Africans doubtlessly would have been even more denunciatory.

Another estimate claims that 10 percent of all adult males—about 140, 000 out of a population of five million—were armed.3 Yet whatever the actual figure, the cruel reality was

Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism : The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean, Monthly Review Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4844848. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2019-01-18 08:05:38.

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merciless murder in the streets and in the fields, creating a dislocation that made faraway Barbados or the deceptively named New England seem like paradise by comparison. Moreover, the relentless bloodletting also created a labor deficit in the Caribbean, swelling in importance with every passing day, thereby contributing to a growing mania for more enslaved Africans. (This would be a problem throughout the era of the slave trade. By 1642 the Dutch, still a major force in this dirty business, were accusing Africans in Africa of “criminal matters,” that is, “conspiring against the sovereignty” of the Netherlands and being “rebellious or seditious” besides.)4

The ousting and beheading of a monarch was the most direct expression of the anti- monarchism involved, but this conflict was also an adjunct of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, then lurching to a close. There were pent-up tensions brought by class displacement, as newly enriched merchants with wealth based in colonies displaced their less blessed counterparts. There was also religious cum ethnic conflict, denoted as mostly Catholic Irish versus mostly Protestant England. And much more. The ostensible religious conflict included the unavoidable point that gold and silver from the Americas were enabling Spain, and the time had come to deny Madrid this revenue and redirect it toward London. Moreover, the impending end of the Thirty Years’ War indicated minimally that the long years of steady Habsburg advance had ended, creating a vacuum that London could well fill.5

The rise and fall of Cromwell is best seen as part of a lengthy process that began decades earlier with London’s piratical attacks on the Spanish Empire, providing seed capital for England’s own venture into settler colonialism in Virginia by 1607, fueled by canny investors. By the 1620s, this class was climbing the ladder of prestige and power and by the 1640s it was contributing to the republican cause. After Cromwell, these nascent capitalists made a peace of sorts with certain royals, particularly those involved in forming the Royal African Company. This was in 1672. But by 1679 these maneuvering bandits were complicit in the exclusion of the Catholic Duke of York from succession to the Crown, and by 1688 they had pulled off a “revolution,” that weakened the monarchy, particularly in the commerce in Africans, which opened the door to even more wealth, as well the rationalization of empowering Parliament as against the King. Then finally, in 1776, they pulled off the ultimate coup and exhibited their novel display of patriotism by ousting London altogether from the mainland colonies south of Canada, while convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves, and profit was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.6

THE PRAGMATIC CROMWELL embraced republicanism and a proto-imperialism, which made him a hero to Roosevelt, among others in North America. He not only devastated Ireland7 but escalated the conflict with the Netherlands, a raw maneuver to control Atlantic trade routes and the related slave trade, all the while collecting taxes to propel further conquest.8

The environment was not conducive to peaceful progress. Europe saw only three years of complete peace during the entire seventeenth century, whereas on the southeastern flank, the Ottomans had only ten. The Chinese and Mughal empires were warring almost constantly, as resort to arms became the norm for resolving local and global problems. The two were

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connected, as interstate war often fed intrastate revolt by driving regimes to extract resources from their subjects more forcefully. And intrastate revolts could become interstate wars when alienated subjects summoned foreign intervention on their behalf. Not atypical was the advance of a Cossack army through Ukraine in 1648 that led to an anti-Jewish massacre of 10,000. The following year Cromwell massacred 25,000 soldiers and at least 1,000 civilians (including Catholic priests) at Drogheda in Ireland.

The 1640s possibly saw more rebellions and self-described revolutions than any comparable era in world history. The spores of republicanism were loosed in Catalonia, Naples, and England, collapsing in a matter of days, weeks, and years respectively, suggesting larger trends at play. The frenzy led Catholic gangs to round up Protestant settlers (Scots as well as English) in Ireland and either stab them to death, burn them alive in their homes, or drive them into icy waters where they perished. What is more, this murderousness was reciprocated.

From 1640 to 1660 hundreds of thousands were maimed or rendered homeless, making escape to the Americas seem like a tonic by comparison. Arising in the turmoil were “Diggers,” “Levellers,” “Ranters,” and “Quakers,” many of whom were less than enthusiastic about Cromwell. The rise of the radically egalitarian Levellers in particular was cause enough for merchants to reconcile with royalists.

Yet some trends did not collapse in a heap. Two are of monumental significance to the story here: the ongoing demise of Spain as a great power, a development that led to the loss of Jamaica in 1655, and the Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland, which helped to induce increased migration to the Americas.

These conflicts also had a religious pretext that Cromwell’s dispossessions of the Irish and his comrades’ dislodgement of Native American “heathens” did not conceal. Later Montesquieu was to claim that Islam created despotism, Catholicism created monarchy, and Protestantism created republics, but this clerical gloss was meant to conceal the reality that Protestant London was more and more in the grip of merchants who were willing to exercise any ploy, be it religious, republican, or religious republicanism, in order to gain a dominant market share.9

Tellingly, the displacement of Irish by Cromwell is eminently comparable and even a precedent for Virginia’s dispossession of indigenes, an initiative hastened in 1676 by Nathaniel Bacon, whose revolt was a precursor of 1776.10 Just as Cromwell pursued a virulently anti-Catholic program against the Irish at home and the Spanish abroad,11 republicans in North America pursued a virulently anti-Negro program at home combined with hostility to abolitionist Haiti and Britain abroad.12

Cromwell, in sum, provided a deadly model in Ireland for his compatriots to follow in North America. In 1649 he “ordered” that Irishmen be maltreated acidulously: “Put them all to the sword.” Said Cromwell, “I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms. In the Town … that night,” he added with bloodthirst, “they put to the sword about two thousand men,” with “every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and [the] rest shipped for the Barbadoes.”13

Yet it was this policy of deportation that at times boomeranged spectacularly. Just as

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Cromwell counseled shipping surviving Irish to the Caribbean, Nicholas Foster was lamenting a “late horrid rebellion acted in the island of Barbados” and “their inhumane acts and actions.”14 Foster lamented that “at the time of England’s troubles,” meaning Cromwell’s ascendancy, “we retained peace amongst us” and opted for “neutrality” on Barbados. This did not prevent some from fleeing to London and others grabbing their estates, signaling an unsteadiness that “servants” and the enslaved were eminently capable of exploiting. Those remaining on the island, complained Foster, then began to “act in a very high nature” and with “severity” and “cruelty,” as they began to “prosecute all such persons” in order to “declare their approbations of the Parliaments proceeding against the King; cutting out of tongues, stigmatizing and banishing all such persons.”15

Soon Cromwell’s London replied by sending a formidable fleet to the Caribbean to keep settlements in line, which, as things evolved, was a prelude for sending a formidable fleet to seize Jamaica in 1655.16 Cromwell’s forces completed the process of helping to ensure that those allied with him would preserve power, with an edict that demanded “all … Servants, Negroes and other goods be restored to their right owners, except such servants as had freedome given them.” This latter point was yet another distinction drawn between “Servants” and “Negroes” as the process unfolded of marking the latter as the prime labor force to be exploited.17

Sending Irish and other dissidents to labor in the Caribbean was unwise in any case, providing them with an incentive to ally with London foes in the neighborhood, with mischief in mind. The complaint in Barbados in 1650 was that diverse “acts of rebellion have been committed by many persons,” all conducted “most trayterously by force.” Some of these alleged “traitors” had “usurped a power of Government and seized the estates of many well- affected persons into their hands and banished others, and have set themselves in opposition to and distinct from the state and commonwealth,” leaving no alternative but “suppression of the said rebellion in the said plantations.” But this would be neither simple nor easy, given the “horrid rebellions” and the “notorious robbers and traytors” involved. Quarantine was one answer: “The Parliament,” it was intoned haughtily, “doth forbid and prohibit all ships of any foreign nations whatsoever to come to or trade in traffique with any of the English plantations in America.”18 But why should the Dutch or Spaniards or Frenchmen obey London’s edicts?

This occurred to London, which also issued an ordinance directing Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados, all harboring royalist sentiment to a greater or lesser degree, to curb export ties to “France, Spain, Holland and other forraigne parts.”19 Strikingly, while the roundheads (or Cromwellians) upheld the cause of freedom within the settlement itself, the Cavaliers (or royalists) maintained the political rights of the settlement against the Commonwealth at home.20 Interestingly, the question of home rule versus who should rule at home was to animate the mainland colonies in the run-up to 1776.

In other words, what has been termed the Civil War in England and the surrounding territories had multiple consequences for colonial settlements and the enslavement and land dispossession that it involved. After directing violence against each other, those of the Isles directed this organized force externally, with devastating results for Africans and Native

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Americans.21 Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to suggest that violence directed outward became a substitute for violence directed inward with the ultimate prize—dispossession of the indigenous of the Americas and mass enslavement of Africans—being sufficiently enormous to divert revolt in the islands off the northwestern coast of Europe.

The 1640s witnessed one of the most violent and unsettled eras in the history of Maryland, for example. In 1645 the colony was invaded by a band of privateers—legalized pirates— under the leadership of Richard Ingle, a Puritan, who with the aid of other Protestants (in what would later be termed “sleeper cells”) overthrew the government of Lord Baltimore. As was typical of the times, he looted and plundered Catholics, as once again sectarian differences became a cover for capital gain. The unrest in London was the precondition for the success of this attack. The recurring cycle of what has been termed “revolution and counterrevolution” in this mostly Catholic settlement was characteristic of Maryland’s political climate,22 until 1776, when “counterrevolution” finally triumphed in reaction to Britain’s seeming move toward abolitionism. Ultimately, a kind of civil war in Maryland unfolded until 1657 when Cromwell helped to settle it.23 However, this calmness did not arrive absent much hair-pulling, much of it ignited from Virginia.24

Despite the choppy waters that reached from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea, both Virginia and Barbados enjoyed unprecedented prosperity during the 1640s, and the planters, who often leaned toward the royalists, did not fail to grasp the connection among political independence, free and open trade, and more profitable sales, as opposed to preferential trade agreements that locked these settlements into relationships designed to benefit England above all. The execution of the monarch provided the ultimate excuse, if any were needed, for these settlements to declare their open defiance of London. Just as religion was a pretext for gaining market share, pro-monarchism was a pretext for something similar. By 1650, Barbados, Antigua, Virginia, and Bermuda had risen in revolt, making transparently clear that they would not bend a knee to the usurpers in London.25

Virginia not only proclaimed its allegiance to the monarchy but also outlawed those who thought and acted otherwise. The governors of Bermuda, Antigua, Newfoundland, and Maryland followed suit, and in the Massachusetts Bay region, despite republican sentiment in Boston, only Rhode Island recognized Cromwell’s Commonwealth formally. They were only mimicking Europe, since virtually no government there followed Rhode Island; Russia expelled all English merchants, and royalist exiles murdered diplomats dispatched by Cromwell to Spain and Holland and almost killed another in Russia. Still, when in September 1650 some 3,000 Scottish soldiers died and 10,000 more were imprisoned at the Battle of Dunbar, the Reverend John Cotton of Boston hailed the victory as a sign that God approved of Cromwell, as he wrote a personal letter of congratulation to the Lord Protector and celebrated a special day of thanksgiving. An inspired Cromwell attacked again on the first anniversary of Dunbar, and another 3,000 Scots fell and 10,000 more became prisoners, many of them shipped to colonial settlements.26

Cromwellian London knew that Barbados, Virginia, and Bermuda needed to be reined in by the self-proclaimed commonwealth of England.27 No goods from these outliers were to be

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landed in Boston or Salem since they were “in rebellion [against] the commonwealth.”28 In the meantime, London had its hands full in 1650, seeking to redeem captives seized by “Turkish, Moorish and other pirates.”29

On the other hand, one of the Lord Protector’s most important advisors was George Downing, a member of the graduating class of Harvard in 1642. On September 3, 1651, he was to be found at the pivotal Battle of Worcester, which the Lord Protector, foreseeing its consequences, called his “crowning mercy.” His closeness to Cromwell was signaled in 1657 when he was appointed London’s chief delegate to Holland. He was blamed for the Navigation Act of October 9, 1651, intended to boost England’s shipping force, which was said to have ruined Holland and, in an example of collateral damage that was to inflame republicans in the eighteenth century, was also thought to have almost ruined North American colonies. By 1664, after Cromwell had expired, the nimble Downing was to be found alongside the Duke of York, who was to give his name to territory seized from the Dutch that year, as the two collaborated on an attack on Dutch interests in Africa, site of the growingly profitable African Slave Trade, which the Duke was to regularize soon by way of forming the Royal African Company. Though the future U.S. president, John Adams, was to call him a “scoundrel,” his opportunism, leaping from anti-monarchism to collaboration with royals, was exemplary of the flexibility that allowed an emergent capitalism to combine elements of feudalism—and slavery.30

Indeed, fourteen of Harvard’s first twenty-four graduates—this included Cromwell’s spymaster, Downing—were republicans. This list included the Lord Protector’s favorite preacher, Hugh Peter, and at least seven colonels in his army (including Stephen Winthrop, son of John). John Winthrop rejoiced when Cromwell ascended. Other New Englanders, including Henry Vane, who led the vanquishing of the Pequot, were part of the Cromwell cabal. They were in the vanguard, seeking to kill royalists with their prayers and sending sermons, poems, letters, and treatises of encouragement sailing across the Atlantic. This group included Anne Bradstreet of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who with the venom that had become customary in North America said of the hated royalists and Cromwellian detractors, “destroy and tread them down.”31

Another fanatically loyal and crucial ally of Cromwell—and one of the regicides who signed the death warrant for Charles I—was his cousin, Edward Whalley. He arrived in Boston on July 27, 1660 as royal restoration was in motion.32 Whalley hailed from a prominent family of merchants. His sister resided in New Haven, Connecticut.33 Susanna Winthrop, a member of a founding family in New England, returned to England to aid Cromwell directly and later helped to formulate his “Western Design,” that is, attacking Spain in Hispaniola.34

Most of London’s merchant elite supported the monarchy during the civil wars, but most of those who traded with the colonial settlements supported the monarch’s opponents. In return for their support, these “colonial merchants” demanded protection for their trades against royal privateers, and Cromwell complied by building sleek frigates, suitable for long voyages escorting convoys—in other words, suitable for deepening colonialism.35

By 1652 Cromwell had secured Barbados and forced a royalist capitulation in Virginia; simultaneously the numbers of enslaved increased, perhaps quadrupling in the settlements

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during the 1650s, as the republican scent for profit was unleashed. As for Ireland, colonial merchants had advanced large sums to uphold the Protestant cause there and then demanded the confiscated lands that had been offered as collateral. In August 1652 London authorized land confiscation and condemnation of priests, with the link generating more Irish defections to His Catholic Majesty in Madrid.36 Hence, colonial merchants were essential to two major dispossessions—in North America and Ireland.

DESPITE THE APPARENT FLOW of the tides of history toward African and Native American enslavement, it was not evident in the 1640s that this trend would become so dominant. By 1646 in Massachusetts, there was a castigation of the “sinn of man stealing,” a “vile and odious” practice. There was an “order” for a “Negro interpreter” so that the man in question and others “unlawfully taken” be “sent to his native country of Ginny [Guinea],” along with a “letter with him of indignation.”37 This African “fraudulently & injuriously taken & brought from Ginny” should be “sent home” forthwith.38 This “killing, stealing & wronging of … Negers” was deemed reprehensible.39 Yes, there was concern that those arriving from the West Indies like the complainant at issue might be delivering “plague” and “disease,” and there was no companion effort to halt the arrival of Portuguese ships, notorious for bearing kidnapped Africans. Still, the authorities continued to denounce the “sinn of man stealing.”40 “Send them back … without delay,” it was announced.41 And yes, as denunciation of Guineans was being denounced, the indigenous were being shipped halfway around the world to the Azores and Madagascar. Though shipping indigenes to foreign nations, the settlers in Connecticut ruled that it was “not lawful for any Frenchmen, Dutchmen or person of any foraigne nation … to trade with any Indian or Indians.”42

Also illuminating is that in the Plymouth Colony in 1646 it was ordered that since it was expensive to imprison the indigenous and since “they are [likely] to prove more insolent,” they should be “shipped out” and “exchanged for Negroes.”43 It was this trend that became hegemonic.

This was understandable to a degree, for at that time, in the context of clashes between England and the Netherlands in what was to become Indonesia, London denounced a “friendly correspondence and a mutual assistance against the common enemy, the barbarous Indians,” who were being tasked by the Dutch “to attack English settlers.” With indignation, London added that “this diabolical plot” meant the Dutch “supplied the Indians with arms and ammunition.” Worse, “the French” were the “confederate” of the “Dutch and Indians.”44 The document containing this explosive charge was well circulated in London, as perhaps indicated by the fact that copies can be found in a number of libraries in today’s United States.45 The “blood sucking Dutch,” argued one Londoner, needed to be squashed if England’s settlements were to survive.46

Roughly, this is precisely what occurred. Thus, the Dutch arrived in what is now Mauritius in 1598, and this archipelago seemed a natural site for colonizing by an empire that needed a port between what became its two major colonies: at the Cape of Good Hope and the Malay peninsula. These islands, considered to be part of Africa, were then occupied in 1638 but then

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there was the failed attempt to implant a settlement in 1664—the year Manhattan was lost to London—and, then, was abandoned by 1710 as the Netherlands crept closer to colonial decrepitude.47 As the Dutch fell, the English rose.

Nevertheless, another apparent liberalizing measure may shed light on this solicitude shown for a solitary Guinean. In the midst of contestation between mainland royalists and Cromwellians, the local Massachusetts militia allowed Native Americans, Africans, even Scots to enlist.48 A truer sign was to emerge in New England by 1656 when it was ruled that Africans and indigenes—and only Africans and indigenes—should no longer be trained in the use of firearms.49 This decision came in the wake of another turning point in this story: the ouster by England of Spain from Jamaica in 1655, which opened the door for a skyrocketing of the African Slave Trade and a further downgrading of Africans.

It is useful to distinguish slave-trading interests, often merchants and pro-Cromwell, from planters who deployed small armies of enslaved workers. Planters were often royalists. The merchants often resided in New England and the planters in Virginia. Thus, what became the “Old Dominion” declared emphatically for the Crown. Neighboring and comparable Bermuda had not only acted similarly but had sent emissaries to Barbados demanding the same from colonists there. The seeds of their conflict would explode in civil war in 1861. About 210 years before this fateful year and about 125 years before 1776, a fleet was headed to these rebellious settlements determined to compel allegiance to the new commonwealth.50

Thus when the royalist Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados from England in the 1640s, he found that those of a similar ideological persuasion abounded. In 1646 alone, 12,000 prisoners from the depleting civil wars had been dispatched to this island. This included several thousand Irish who had been taken prisoner or simply kidnapped or, as was said then, “Barbadosed.” Then there were the hundreds of Scots captured at Dunbar and Worcester in the 1650s who were sold in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1650 Barbados had four Europeans for every African, a skewed ratio that would change quickly, engendering murderous conflict with the arrival of boatloads of manacled Africans. By 1660, this island barely contained 27,000 enslaved Africans and 26,000 defined as “white,” and it did not require a seer to divine that something must be done to demarcate a sharp line between and among these laborers. “Racial” categories, perpetually lurking and intermittently operating since the first Africans were seized for Portugal hundreds of years earlier, soon emerged more forcefully.51

Evidently, it was not London alone that was using the Caribbean as a dumping ground for foes and detractors. By 1650 there were numerous Catholics from Europe, besides the English and Irish; there were also Portuguese Africans like Mathias de Sousa, whom Andrew White brought to Maryland. This ethnic and racial stew was making for a combustible brew, on the mainland and islands alike.52

But out of a potential disaster London was able to transform Barbados into a cash cow. By 1649 sugar had virtually eliminated all other crops as a form of payment, becoming a kind of currency. This was a direct outgrowth of a war that began in Pernambuco in 1645, as the Portuguese ousted the Dutch from their sinecure and sent fleeing northward those with

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knowledge of how to make sugar from the blood of Africans. (However, as the following chapter suggests, there is evidence to suggest that sugar had been introduced into Barbados years before this.)

“There is no doubt,” says the historian Stuart B. Schwartz, “that Sephardic refugees from Dutch Brazil who had experience in the sugar trade, as well as in direct contacts before 1650, had an impact on the sugar economy of the island.”53 London, which had helped Holland escape the suffocating grasp of Spain in the late sixteenth century, then benefited as competing powers ganged up on this now retreating empire. But the problematic fate of the Dutch was dwarfed by what befell Africans, for with the advent of the rigorous and brutalizing project of sugar production, more of the enslaved were needed.

Scholar Russell Menard has suggested that what occurred in the Caribbean was a “sugar boom,” rather than a “sugar revolution.”54 Yet this attempt to downgrade the import of what occurred in Barbados then Jamaica, only serves to indicate its far-reaching impact. For sugar was not only used to sweeten tea and coffee, but was for years seen as a marker of sophistication and refinement, ideal for a rising capitalism that exploited such a trend with merciless dedication.

Almost 100,000 from the Jewish community in Spain fled for Portugal in 1492; they found no satisfaction there, however, even after converting to Catholicism. They kept moving, with many winding up on the Brazilian frontier. The family connections they maintained, which often encompassed certain branches of trade, seemed to be designed with the new era of colonialism in mind. The mostly Protestant Dutch welcomed them to Amsterdam just as they welcomed them to Recife, where the Dutch ruled from roughly 1630 to 1654. But then with the Dutch ousted, these sought-after refugees were then welcomed by Protestant London and Barbados.55 And then they were welcomed to Jamaica—post 1655: by 1713 Jamaica was producing more sugar than Barbados and had become London’s wealthiest and most important colony.56

Whether denoted as boom or revolution, sugar became a de facto currency, which was the experience of Heinrich von Uchteritz, a German mercenary captured at the Battle of Worcester and dispatched to Barbados. Questioned by Cromwell himself before his forced departure, he was in a group of 1,300 others: “Each of us was sold for eight hundred pounds of sugar” he recalled, as they were bought by a “Christian, born in England who had one hundred Christians, one hundred Negroes and one hundred Indians” on his sprawling estate, all of whom were “slaves.” But already there were distinctions, as the “Christians” or Europeans were clothed while the others, “the Negroes and Indians” tended to “go about completely naked except for a cloth tied around the privates.”57 Soon the Europeans were to be clothed in the protective cloak of “whiteness,” while the Africans and indigenes were to be devoid not only clothes but rights, demarcated as permanent outsiders, notably in North America.

As sugar took hold in the Caribbean, the fortunes of Africans declined as their numbers rose. Africans remained a minority in Barbados into the 1650s, but by the early 1670s Africans outnumbered Europeans by a ratio of three to two and by three to one by the early eighteenth century.58 But as their numbers rose, the probability of felonious revolt rose accordingly, which was to drive many settlers to the mainland, setting in motion a pro-slavery revolt in 1776.

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As the numbers of Africans surged, Richard Ligon was not the only one who fretted that they might “commit some horrid massacre upon the Christians, thereby to enfranchise themselves and become Masters of the land.”59 It was this fear that rested near the core of slave-based colonialism; that is, that the bountiful crops produced required large numbers of Africans and the idea might occur, as it did in Hispaniola in 1791, that they should simply seize power.60 This fear haunted slave owners, including those in North America who were so concerned about this prospect that it factored into their fateful decision to oust London altogether.61 In Barbados, Ligon noticed that as a direct result of this miasma of fear, the Africans were “not allowed to touch or handle any weapons.”62

Ironically, the decline of the Dutch brought a mixed bag of results for Africans. Obviously, the decline of a serial slave trader is not to be lamented. However, as the Dutch were removed, it made it more difficult for the enslaved to escape from New Netherlands or the Dutch settlements in North America to another jurisdiction, for example, Connecticut, as occurred in 1646, or from Maryland to New Netherland, as also occurred. In short, arbitrage opportunities were reduced as the Dutch faded from the scene.63 Still, when in 1654 the retreating Dutch of New Netherland ousted Swedes from Delaware and then sold them into slavery, knowledgeable Africans may have thought, “better them than me.”64 Again, more enslavers meant more enslaved Africans but, paradoxically, this could create opportunity for indigenes and Africans to play one European power against another. Before the Dutch were ousted by the Portuguese from Brazil, Spain in 1629 had sent a fleet of twenty-four ships and fifteen frigates to this giant nation for the same purpose. Spain intended to oust the English from St. Kitts, too; their successful raid on Tortuga in the 1630s was designed to liquidate the settlement. Such ambitious plans left plenty of opportunity for Africans and indigenes to maneuver.65 And this profound trend was to continue in the eighteenth century and thereafter.

AS SUGAR DROVE COLONIALISM and along with it the arrival of more Africans to the Caribbean, opportunities were opened for bonded labor to ally with one group of Europeans against another. It was in 1652 that policymakers in Barbados passed a statute “against the stealing of Negroes from off this island,” perpetrated by “divers[e] wicked persons” who were not above “promising them freedom in another country.”66 As colonizers escalated the African Slave Trade, they stumbled. Between 1650 and 1710, an average of 40 percent of the Africans imported to Barbados came from the Gold Coast, totaling about 136,000. Many of them were of Akan origin, which facilitated rebellion, given their commonalities. Only Jamaica had a higher total in the British Caribbean. Thereafter, colonizers sought to make aggregates of enslaved Africans more heterogeneous, complicating their bonding for purposes of revolt.67

Room to maneuver was the byword for the Caribbean, especially as the population grew and changed in coloration. Barbados was not unique. Between 1650 and 1660, 50,251 souls from England, Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe arrived in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean. During the same period, 40,726 Africans arrived, mostly in the Caribbean. Though these Europeans outnumbered Africans in the colonial labor supply during the course of the Cromwell era, that is, 1640 to 1660, Africans came to outnumber Europeans much earlier in

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Barbados than in the Chesapeake Bay region, where this demographic imbalance did not arrive until the 1690s, with multiple consequences for the construction of racial identities, particularly whiteness.68

Keep in mind, however, that the comparison above may be misleading because by the mid- seventeenth century the northern English colonies had more slaves than those in the Chesapeake. This ratio was to change in coming decades, enhancing the domination of merchants in New England, just as planters in Virginia came to dominate, harboring a latent conflict that was to explode in yet another civil war two centuries later.69 Yet about eight decades before that war of rebellion, there was another against London that united merchant and planter alike, both of whom knew that more wealth would accrue if they cut loose from British rule. As early as 1652 in Massachusetts, for example, in seeming anticipation of this secession, Massachusetts had begun to mint its own coinage with no mention of England included.70

As was to occur so frequently in the emergent United States when opponents of the status quo were deemed to be mere pawns of presumed foreign foes, the “premature” republicans in London in 1642 charged hotly that the “King, seduced by wicked counsel, doth intend to levy warre against his Parliament; and … the jewels of the Crown which by the Law of the Land ought not to alienate … are either pawned or sold in Amsterdam.”71 This was the foe that England would have to dislodge, it was thought, if the nation were to advance.

Somehow, in the midst of the turmoil of civil war, London found the time to escalate involvement in the African Slave Trade. In a sense, this domestic conflict was derivative of the larger conflict, which was the effort to dislodge competing powers from the Americas and the source of the labor supply: Africa. This effort involved the enhanced hegemony of merchants, which would arrive full force in 1688, which was the predicate to London itself being ousted from its African perch in 1776. There were a reported nineteen English ships buying the enslaved at El Mina in West Africa between 1645 and 1647 and eighty-four between 1652 and 1657. This led inexorably to more Anglo-Dutch conflict, as a beleaguered Africa and the riches it produced became a magnet for European war.72

Hence by 1647 Jan van Delwell, the Dutch Director General at El Mina Castle in what is now Ghana, detected more ships and yachts of other European nations infesting nearby waters, including stalwart competitors such as England, France, Denmark, and Sweden. They too were seeking to enslave Africans to toil in their present and would-be colonies. This increased competition allowed for arbitrage by counter-parties—meaning Africans—as they quickly cut a deal with the Dutch to attack what seemed to be the weakest link, the Swedes, and promptly expelled the bumptious interlopers. Another group of Africans injected themselves in the intense rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese and supported first one, then the other, seeking to weaken both.73

It was also in the 1640s that an English settlement in Madagascar would generate countless numbers of enslaved Africans suitable for island and mainland colonies alike.74 London merchant Richard Boothby upon arrival was mesmerized by the sight of this massive island, asking why not found a settlement here. He was taken by the “comeliness of the Natives though

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naked, yet personable” who were “only black or rather tauney [tawny]”; importantly, “their weapons” were “not dangerous or of great annoyance.” If not a source for slaves, Madagascar could become a watering hole between London and the riches of India and Persia.75 As slave- based colonialism evolved, Madagascar was to play a major role.76 Euphemistically, by 1650 plantations were being plotted there, worked by “Negro servants.”77

But it was not just Africa that was being dragged into a vortex of conflict by rising European powers. By 1652 the Dutch had established an outpost at the southern tip of Africa, a refreshing station en route to the riches of the Malay Peninsula, from which laborers were enchained and brought to what became Cape Town. Some of these bonded laborers were Chinese.78

By helping the Netherlands to escape the grasp of Spain, London had helped to create this budding superpower, which it now proceeded to diminish. Between 1652 and 1674 there were to be no fewer than three Anglo-Dutch wars, with control of colonialism and the slave trade at the throbbing heart of the disputes.79 Floating on a sea of filthy lucre flowing from enslavement and dispossession, London was now poised to deal a staggering blow against Spain by seizing Jamaica in 1655. At once, this provided land for Europeans, often alienated and dispossessed in London itself and Barbados alike, who could now deploy the technology of producing sugar with the compelled labor of Africans. This, in turn, provided a boost for the seizing of Manhattan in 1664, hastening a circle absent of virtue that meant more enslaved Africans and more wealth. But it also meant more Africans in Jamaica who began to revolt, chasing settlers to the mainland, and engaging in the same dirty work until they had accumulated the strength and wealth to oust London in 1776.

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