Apparently aware of the hostility that surrounded them, not only in Virginia but among Africans and the indigenes too, the early Marylanders sought to remove religion as an issue of contestation,13 as if they were saying, “No one here but us European settlers.” And yes, this ecumenical approach set the stage for an entente with the so-called Catholic powers, that is, Paris and Madrid, that led directly to the anti-London revolt of 1776. As early as 1638 Whitehall—official London—was complaining about being ignored by the region that became known as New England,14 as thousands of miles away that part of the colonies charted a new path.
As in the case of Roger Williams, the idea of “progressive” settler colonialism was a contradiction in terms, and an utter misnomer. It did not take long for the Jesuits—the typical advance guard for the colonialism of predominantly Catholic nations such as France—to seek special privileges for themselves in Maryland, which ignited a bitter struggle.15 It is not easy to seize land on which another people reside, oust them, then shout from the rooftops about alleged democratic principles. Thus, this Catholic refuge became one of the first mainland colonies to recognize slavery as a matter of law; as was now typical, being persecuted was no guarantee that your group would reject persecution of others. The Marylanders were no less harsh toward the Piscataways, the Chapticos, the Nangemy, the Mattawoman, and other indigenes in a manner that mimicked the harshness of their New England counterparts in their relationship to the Pequot.16
It was not just religious dissenters who were being shipped abroad, however. Food riots in England rose from twelve between 1600 and 1620 to thirty-six between 1621 and 1631, with fourteen more during the months stretching from 1647 to 1649. The hungry were willing to risk arriving in a war zone, which assuredly was a fair description of North America, and were willing to dispossess those who stood in the way of their sating their growingly voracious appetites.17
The participants in food riots then became a vast pool of potential indentured servants. This form of labor was deemed initially to be a roaring success. Between 1625 and 1650 perhaps 60,000 contract laborers set sail for the Caribbean, with Barbados being a primary destination. Rapidly this small island, which even today has only about 285,000 residents, became the most densely populated area in the world, with hellish and inhumane working conditions besides. These dissidents were at times joined by rebellious Irish, which was not ideal for producing island calmness, raising the perpetual possibility of mass mutiny.
The situation demanded an alternative, soon to be delivered by more bonded Africans. Despite their best efforts, the Dutch, busy supplying Brazil, were not in an ideal position to satisfy the unquenchable appetite for enslaved Africans. Still, the Dutch tried, and reaped the whirlwind as a result. Dutch slave ships became notorious for engendering mutinies. Out of the 1,500 slaving voyages under the Dutch flag during this period, more than three hundred were rocked by slave revolts, a very high proportion.18
BY 1637 THE SO-CALLED PEQUOT WAR had erupted in New England, as settlers inflicted numerous atrocities upon indigenes in order to oust them from their land.19 Settlers had to worry that indigenes would ally with their European competitors—notably the French and Spanish—and liquidate them, which seemed to increase English ferocity. “Resist both forraigne enemies & the natives” was the watchword as early as 1629,20 and if there were a slogan for colonial settlements and the early United States, which inherited the initial barbarity, this was it. Since many of the so-called Pilgrims spoke Dutch—they had migrated from the Isles to England’s antagonistic neighbor before settling in North America—this intensified the ordinary nervousness of London, then involved in what seemed to be an endless cycle of conflict with Holland. Since the Netherlands also opened the door to those who were Jewish fleeing Spanish inquisitorial terror, the Dutch, even more so than the North American republicans, should be seen as pioneers in developing overarching racial identities in order to facilitate colonialism, a process that took the name of “whiteness” on the west bank of the Atlantic.21 It was also the opportunistic Dutch who pioneered in forging ties with persecuted French Protestants—Huguenots—creating a kind of Protestant mercantile international that was important in the rise of both the sugar industry and capitalism itself. Intriguingly, it was precisely the Dutch who built the highest stage of white supremacy at the southern tip of Africa, just as it was the Catholics—for example, the French elite—and not the English Protestants who allowed their enslaved to be baptized: many of these Africans received catechism lessons and were married legally.22 The Dutch also exemplified the value of what came to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Their war with Spain, roughly from 1569 to 1648, stimulated its arms industry, which in turn sped the pace of overseas conquest. By the time of New Netherland’s founding, the Dutch republicans were manufacturing an estimated 14,000 muskets annually, most of them for export, a figure that grew larger year by year. No other European nation came close to this level of production until decades later. Furthermore, Dutch gunsmiths were introducing technological innovations to their weapons that made them even more attractive to those who might quarrel with English colonists—the Iroquois foremost among them. This also helped to stimulate a trade of slaves for guns that decimated Native American groupings, opening their lands for a massive land grab by European settlers.23
Consider also that there were Dutchmen resident in the critical colony that was Barbados, as early as the 1630s.24 Consider as well that English tobacco growers endured a crisis of overproduction in 1636, leading to a search for alternative crops, and like manna from heaven Dutchmen arrived in 1637 with sugarcane, technology, capital, and slaves, a process that was to be repeated again in the 1650s after Hollanders were ousted from Brazil by the Portuguese.25 Many of these “Hollanders” were actually Spanish Jews who had fled to Recife, inaugurating a “Golden Age” of sorts for them—though not for those they enslaved—before fleeing as the Portuguese made a comeback in 1654.26 When, in August 1641, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from Luanda, Angola, and in 1642 obtained a monopoly of the external slave trade from there, this was ultimately of benefit not only to New Amsterdam but, as things evolved, became an unanticipated gift to London’s settlements too.27
The Dutch slave trade got off to a flying start, with 25,000 Africans soon being shipped to Brazil. This was occurring as the English were just settling into the Caribbean, and given the nature of Africans as commodities, it was ineluctable that many of these bodies would wind up in the Caribbean, converting these islands into a darling of empire. The demand for labor grew as the demand for crops produced there grew concomitantly, including export crops such as tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and indigo, all thought to be optimally grown in the tropics.28
It was unrealistic, however, to expect a proper settler colonialism to depend for its labor supply upon a competing empire, particularly when the Netherlands and England seemed to be embroiled in what seemed to be a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sir Benjamin Rudyerd told Parliament as much in 1641, as he demanded more spending on vessels, also a necessity if England were to avoid a replay of 1588. “As we are an island,” he asserted, “it concernes our very being to have [a] store of ships to defend us and also our well being by their trade to enrich us.” No matter how sliced and diced, the route to prosperity was propelled by vessels. “Now let us consider the Enemy we are to encounter, the King of Spaine” in this limited instance; what made him strong is “his Mines in the West Indies,”29 and if England were to become stronger the Crown would also need “mines” worked by slaves, procured from Africa, requiring more ships.
There was a kind of domino theory in process in the seventeenth century that was to benefit London. Though surely it was not their intention, Dutchmen were a kind of stalking horse for England, weakening Spain over the decades, then ousting the Portuguese from the northeast coast of Brazil between 1630 and 1654 and extending tolerance to Catholics and Jews, providing a model for a kind of Pan-Europeanism that was to redound to London’s benefit when it battered the Dutch into submission within the following decades, which provided a Pan-European model for republicans in North America in the following century.30
Those fleeing inquisitorial Madrid also helped to bolster the so-called Muslim Corsair Republic of Saleh, 1624–66, in North Africa. Historian Jonathan Israel has