CHAPTER 1
Beginning
Though slow to the colonial banquet that was enslavement, England was not altogether unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the eleventh century.1 Scotland, for example, was filled with English slaves.2
This was an aspect of the larger point: at the height of its power, the Roman Empire, which once controlled England, trafficked in hundreds of thousands of slaves annually; in the previous millennium, slavery and the slave trade were rampant, a praxis in which the Vikings and Scandinavians excelled, often preying on the English and other Europeans. When the Islamic world boomed in the eighth century, there was a sharp rise in the demand for slaves.3 During that era, more than a millennium past, one trader alone boasted of selling more than 12, 000 enslaved Africans in Persian markets.4 Yet this slavery, as horrid as it was, did not reach the dimensions of the racial slavery that took off in the seventeenth century.
This older version of slavery was tied intimately to war, with the former being the fruit of the latter. This did not bode well for Africa, as Western Europeans developed the weapons of war.
The fifteenth century marked the onset of a newer kind of slavery: by 1441, Portuguese pirates had seized Africans for sale and by 1470 Spaniards had begun to do the same. It was in 1482 that Portugal began construction of a large fort to facilitate trade in Africans.5 By the middle of the fifteenth century, enslaved Africans formed as much as 10 percent of Lisbon’s population.6
The leaders of the Iberian Peninsula had a first movers’ advantage in reaching the Americas and sailing to Africa, which then allowed Spain to press England, forcing London for reasons of survival, if nothing more, to seek to follow in Madrid’s footsteps. Simultaneous with Columbus’s voyage was the launching of the Inquisition, which, ironically, also provided an advantage in that it provided the framework for a centralizing institution, essential for the process of state building.7
Most notably in the 1490s, this form of hateful commerce accelerated, when Christopher Columbus and his band of cutthroats began to dispatch Tainos from the Caribbean to the slave markets of Europe. Columbus’s first business venture in the Americas involved sending four boatloads of indigenes to Mediterranean slave markets. Others followed in his footsteps, including the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. These powers all participated in this dirty business, but infamy in this regard was held by Madrid, which was to indigenous slavery what England and the United States were to African slavery.8
Appropriately, Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to the continents across the Atlantic from Europe, was a slave trader, too. Columbus’s voyage, as noted, had been driven by the takeover of Constantinople in 1453 and a few years later the Ottomans were seizing Aegean islands, as churches were converted to mosques and children were taken into slavery. Columbus’s Genoa showed that the acts of the Turks were not that unusual since this Italian town exemplified the belief that slavery was a legitimate business and thus allowed significant investment in the odious commerce that brought young men, women, and children from the Black Sea and sold them to buyers in Muslim Spain or Egypt. Unlike Venetians, who paid their galley rowers, Genoese staffed their war galleys with the enslaved. The Genoese pioneered in enslaving Africans, though the Portuguese were also premature in this regard, and by 1452 had received a papal dispensation for it. Columbus, as a consequence, was well positioned to turn his trailblazing journey into a new zenith in slave trading, particularly since his crew consisted of leading criminal elements, who over the centuries were to be leaders in this dirty business.9 With the arrival of the Spanish on the American mainland in the early 1500s, the commerce in Africans can be said to have increased dramatically there.10 Between 1500 and 1550 the Portuguese took at least 1,700 slaves per year out of Africa and more than half ended up in São Tomé.11
Tiny Portugal, with a population today of about nine million, was enmeshed in an overstretch almost from the beginning of its thrust into overseas navigation that was to reach into the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. Lisbon found it necessary early on to rely on laboring Africans for various tasks. An African pilot, Esteban Gomez, sailed up what became the Hudson River abutting Manhattan in 1525, while another African became the first non-indigenous resident of this valuable island.12
But just as Lisbon and Madrid were tightening their respective grips on vast swathes of territory abroad, the Ottoman Turks had moved into Egypt and deeper into the Balkans, causing Erasmus to announce in the first half of the sixteenth century that this was leading to an epochal clash since “the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky.” The future, he predicted, would belong either to the Muslims or to the Christians because it could not belong to both.13 When the Ottomans were blocked at Vienna in 1683, it seemed that the only sun that mattered was the one that soon was never to set on the British Empire, and then later the secessionist appendage in North America.
However, European encroachment was resisted fiercely by the Africans. Soon the Portuguese were at war in West Africa, with three hundred of these Europeans massacred in one fell swoop in 1570 alone. The Africans had gathered in the forest and watched carefully as these invaders decamped before killing them all. On another occasion they severed the invaders’ heads from their bodies, leaving their bodies on the beach, then placed their skulls on wooden stakes.14 A few years later, Portuguese again fell victim to angry West Africans, as the invaders were slaughtered once more.15
Since Africans often rebelled vociferously against enslavement, this caused Europeans in response to offer more inducements to those recruited to confront them, including land grants in the Americas and other enticements.
By the first decade of the sixteenth century, Granada—only recently recaptured from Islamic forces and once the center of Moorish civilization on the Iberian Peninsula—was enmeshed in a slave trade that heavily consisted of Africans. Again, this well preceded the push by Englishmen, for at this juncture few from their monarchy had visited Africa, let alone sold and traded its denizens. However, as early as 1530 there were Englishmen bringing enslaved Africans to Brazil, but, again, not in the systematic manner that was to flourish in the following century. The first English voyage to West Africa was said to be made in 1553 by Captain Thomas Windham, accompanied by a Portuguese pilot. By 1562 John Hawkins had seized Africans to sell into bondage,16 with the settlements in Hispaniola as purchasers.17 Allegedly, Hawkins was funded directly by Queen Elizabeth, indicative of the high-level support for slaving.18 Reportedly, along with Windham’s voyage, twenty-seven enslaved Africans wound up in England in 1553.19 Anticipating the various forms of resistance that were to define the slave trade, on one of his voyages Hawkins was traduced by an African leader who had pledged to sell him “prisoners of war,” but instead the leader deceived him by reneging on the arranged delivery. Flesh peddlers often “encountered hostile towns” during their sixteenth-century African forays.20
It was in the sixteenth century that Africans in Panama were convinced to pledge allegiance to Madrid in exchange for autonomy.21 This autonomy could then be leveraged to forge separate deals with the indigenous or competing European powers. It was evident early on that implanting this rapacious colonialism would be no simple task given the rambunctiousness of Africans.
This flexibility by Madrid was an understandable response to the necessity to preserve the obvious accumulated wealth generated by the emerging antagonist that was Spain, along with a reflection of the strength of mercantile interests that was to blossom in a full-bodied capitalism. By 1555 enslaved Africans were brought to what were to be termed the British Isles themselves.22
Moving away from the internal conflict with Irish and Scots that had been wracking England to the external engagement that was to occupy London for decades to come brought a new set of issues. By 1584, Richard Hakluyt, an ideologist of this new engagement, compared offenses of the rival