Slavery, Plunder, Colonialism

SLAVERY

The Haitian Revolution began as a slave revolt in 1791. The French and their allies fought for a decade to regain the colony but lost. It became the first black republic in the Americas in 1804.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. Jefferson was likely the father of several children born by Sally Hemmings, one of his many slaves. Though he was unusually outspoken in his objections to slavery, Jefferson believed that “blacks ... are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”

PLUNDER

In 1519 Cortés told Spain of the fabulous magnitude of Montezuma’s Aztec treasure, and fifteen years later there arrived in Seville a gigantic ransom—a roomful of gold and two of silver—which Francisco Pizarro had made the Inca Atahualpa pay before strangling him. Years earlier the Crown had paid the sailors on Columbus’s first voyage with gold carried off from the Antilles. The Caribbean island populations finally stopped paying tribute because they had disappeared: They were totally exterminated in the gold mines, in the deadly task of sifting auriferous sands with their bodies half submerged in water, or in breaking up the ground beyond the point of exhaustion, doubled up over the heavy cultivating tools brought from Spain. Many natives of Haiti anticipated the fate imposed by their white oppressors: They killed their children and committed mass suicide. The mid-sixteenth-century historian Fernández de Oviedo interpreted the Antillean holocaust thus: “Many of them, by way of diversion, took poison rather than work, and others hanged themselves with their own hands.”

— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was in Italian navigator credited, in popular myth, with having “discovered” the New World in the late 15th century. His four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean prefaced the European conquest of the Americas, as well as the enslavement and massacre of its indigenous peoples; the earliest instances of which were likely prosecuted at his command.

COLONIALISM

Colonial officials inspect African soldiers presenting arms. At the Berlin Conference in 1894, European statesman carved up plans to annex vast territories of Africa into their empires. No Africans were present.

During the 350 years of the industrial age, a good fraction of Europe consumed more than it produced, by the simple expedient of owning most of the world and exploiting it for their own economic benefit. As late as 1914, the vast majority of the world’s land surface was either ruled directly from a European capital, occupied by people of European descent, or dominated by European powers through some form of radically unequal treaty relationship. The accelerating exploitation of fossil fuels throughout that era shifted the process into overdrive, allowing a minority of the Earth’s population, not only to adopt what were, by the standards of all other human societies, extravagantly lavish lifestyles, but to be able to expect that those lifestyles would become even more lavish in the future.

John Michael Greer, The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered, New Society Publishers

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