Supposedly, piracy was introduced into Algiers in the sixteenth century by a Turkish pirate, his aid having been sought to repel the Spaniards then in possession of the surrounding vast North African land. The territory then fell to Turkish rule for scores of years. During this period, reputedly 30,000 Christian slaves were said to have been employed in constructing a harbor in Algiers. The dreaded and formidable strength of the pirates only increased in the seventeenth century. The growth of kidnapping and enslaving of Christians did not seem to make London more sensitive to bondage and probably increased naval spending as a deterrent, which was detrimental to Africa and the Americas.48 By the early seventeenth century, it was estimated that more than 3,000 from the British Isles were engaged in involuntary servitude,49 which is probably an underestimate.
EARLY ON, THE LABOR of the colonial settlers was probably six times more profitable than comparable labor at home, thus encouraging moving west across the Atlantic. The settlements offered a protected market for English manufactures, as well as cheap sources of raw materials that stimulated home production. This, in turn, created products that could be exchanged for enslaved Africans to be deposited in the colonies, thus completing a virtual circle—for London.50
It took a while for the new reality of Africans as seen through a London lens to take hold. By the late sixteenth century, those who were to be called “Negroes” were not always represented as “savages”; the recurrent descriptor after the flourishing slave trade necessitated more dehumanizing language. But the trend inaugurated by Hawkins did mean that Africans were often seen as threateningly unpredictable and potentially hostile, which was no surprise since Africans had reason to believe that Englishmen were intrigued devilishly by the possibility of their enchainment. Of course, the long-term entente with the North Africans had contributed at times to a separate assessment of those referred to as “Moors,” since they often appeared in London as diplomats and ambassadors. Yet those called “blackamoore” in London were sufficiently visible in 1596 that Queen Elizabeth proclaimed there were “already to manie”—or too many—in the realm and seized the opportunity to exchange several for English hostages held in Spain and Portugal. The conflation that was “blackamoors” should not lead to the perception that no difference was drawn between, say, North Africans and those further down the coast stretching into Senegambia and the Gold Coast. The former were thought to be calculating and the latter unreasoning.51 Spain, as the common enemy of Morocco and London, in any case, tended to drive the latter two together.52
There was good reason for anger at Spain in Turkey. It was not just that the Iberian Jewish community, fleeing the Inquisition, was racing into the arms of the Ottomans; it was the reality that Turkey was being swamped by specie—coin—from Spanish America, driving indigenous coins with low silver content from circulation, disrupting the economy and placing the local elite in ill humor as the regime borrowed from personal fortunes in compensation. With this crisis, the Jewish population of Turkey, many of whom were prominent in commerce, left for the Netherlands, where they again came into conflict with Madrid, which was seeking to strangle the nation in the sixteenth century.53
There were other factors contributing to London’s venture into mass enslavement of Africans, besides emulation of the Iberians and the riches delivered by cruel exploitation. Joint-stock trading companies were generally unknown in London in the 1500s but numbered in the hundreds a century later.54 This facilitated investment and limited liability, all useful when the time came to take the plunge into what became Virginia.
Then there was the great inflation of the sixteenth century, with the value of money being worth only half as much as a century earlier, which provided an incentive to accumulate new wealth.55 Fluctuating ties to Russia often threatened to cut off England’s lucrative cloth trade to that nation and Ottoman influx blocked London moving further south and east to Persia, providing more incentive to seek new fields of exploitation in the Americas. In any event, as England began to plunder Spain’s colonies, London’s population swelled from 85,000 in 1565 to 140,000 by the early seventeenth century. As a result and culmination of this trend, the East India Company was founded in 1600,56 promising untold riches from a colonial conquest that was to serve as a model for the invasion of what became Virginia.
London’s buoyancy was also a function of Russia’s growth, at least when ties between the two were on the upswing. For as England was expanding, so was Russia: the latter expanding into northern Asia from 1580 to 1700; as Russia expanded, England benefited from the resultant increased trade, like a bicyclist being dragged along in the wake of the speediness of a lead competitor.57 As matters evolved, there was a complementariness between Russia’s spread east and England’s spread westward to the Americas and southward to Africa, except that Russia had less competition from major powers and competition from China only intermittently.58 “The greatest transformation of the world of the seventeenth century,” says one scholar, “was the explosive expansion of Russian trade and settlement across Siberia….” Thus, by 1639, Russia had reached the Pacific.59 Boosting London not only was the ability to work out an entente with the Ottomans and the Dutch but good relations with the continent’s giant—Russia—too.
As London grew corpulent from the business of a growing merchant class, the English became more ambitious in their overseas adventures.60 In some ways the formation of the Muscovy Company in 1555 served as a model for the expansionism of the Turkish Company—later the Levant Company—in 1581 and the English East Indian Company and the commercial colonialism that beset what became Virginia a few decades later.61 Interestingly, one of the first families of London’s settler colonies, the Van Cortlandts, for whom a major park in the Bronx continues to be named, had roots in Russia. Oloff Stevense Van Cortlandt arrived as a soldier in North America in 1638. Of noble ancestry, he was lineally descended from the Dukes of Courtland in Russia, but eventually his family became tied by marriage to other grandees in what became New York State, including the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, the Jays, the Livingstons, and the Barclays.62
As Russia was expanding eastward and Western Europeans were expanding southward to Africa and westward to the Americas, gobbling land and resources as they proceeded, Japan entered two centuries of self-imposed isolation, methodically massacring missionaries seen as the first wave of an invasion, until the nation that was the major result of westward colonialism and enslavement, the United States, pried open the archipelago in 1853.63 Word may have reached Japan that in 1565 the Spanish had occupied what they called the Philippines, and a few decades later the Dutch colonized what became Indonesia.
In sum, the stars were aligning for London’s merchants, as Russia was distracted eastward and the Ottomans sought ties with England (and vice versa) to countervail Spain.
HENCE, AN ACCUMULATION OF factors propelled England into North America—Virginia, more specifically—in the early seventeenth century. The lust for wealth, the competition with Spain and the Ottoman Turks, and related factors led to this settlement project in what became Virginia. In the late sixteenth century, Sir Walter Raleigh ventured to South America, dazzling Londoners