after Lepanto and could then begin to turn its attention to weakening Spain at the source of its then immense wealth: the Americas. More to the point, all this set the stage for the eclipse of the Ottomans’ equal-opportunity enslaving policy and the rise of London’s—then Washington’s—single-minded focus on bonding Africans and indigenes. A by-product of this lengthy process was the formation of today’s “Latin America,” characterized on this side of the border in a decidedly racialized manner,77 a legacy of the continuing and defining stain of white supremacy in the North American republic.
Thus, a few years after Lepanto, the officially authorized pirate Francis Drake set sail and landed in what was said to be Spanish territory—California—where “New Albion” was declared, making the so-called Golden State, appropriately enough, the “founding site for the overseas British Empire,” according to scholar Robert H. Power,78 and today’s citadel of republican and capitalist hegemony.
IT IS CRUCIAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE that not only did Western European nations, especially England, rise on the backs of enslaved Africans and dispossessed indigenes, but that this too arrested development on a continental scale.79 The story of Mali’s Mansa Musa is now well known, not least the immense wealth that obtained in his golden realm, where Islam prevailed. Actually, most of the gold then circulating in what amounted to global markets and providing currency for the silk and spice roads in antiquity and the Middle Ages came from West Africa, soon to decline vertiginously, as Western Europe rose at its expense.80 The “fame” Musa and his polity generated, especially the gold there, “inundated the fourteenth century,” says one leading scholar. This “left a deep impression,” says François Xavier Fauvelle, to the point that “people were still talking about it half a century later.”81 For millennia, gold has been a means of exchange and a store of value,82 making it hardly coincidental that a great swathe of Africa was pillaged to obtain this mineral.
Ironically, this religious inflected battle with Islam was accompanied by yet another bitterly sectarian conflict, that between Catholics and Protestants (with both having difficulty in overcoming deeply rooted anti-Semitism). This was not simply a theological difference. The Iberians’ “first mover advantage” in looting the Americas, then sanctified by the Vatican in the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the world between Madrid and Portugal, provided London with disincentive to continue adherence to the One True Faith. When Henry VIII broke bonds with Catholicism, ostensibly because of differences over his divorce, this also meant the dissolution of monasteries, an act that filled royal coffers and released timber, stone, and bronze for national defense projects—precisely to challenge Spain. Also empowered were ascending lawyers and merchants who became influential stakeholders in the newer system, an aristocracy that stood to lose all in a return to the old faith and old relationships.83
The abject terror of the horrendous Protestant-Catholic conflict in Europe was in a sense a dress rehearsal and precedent for what was visited upon indigenes in the Americas and their African counterparts. As late as the twentieth century, the lapsed populist turned demagogue Tom Watson of Jim Crow Georgia continued to wallow in the rampant religiosity run amok of the epoch-making St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1570s France, when thousands of Protestants were liquidated by genocidal Catholics. This bloodthirstiness was employed as a rationale for the anti-Catholicism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, illustrating once more the continuing potency of the sixteenth century.84 The soon-to-be Senator Watson apparently did not realize that a kind of reconciliation between once warring Protestants and Catholics on a common altar of “whiteness” and white supremacy was the essential epoxy that bound together those in his own former slaveholders’ republic, a principle enunciated solemnly in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that this attorney knew well.
Catholic Spain’s military prowess was honed in a centuries-long battle with Arabs and Muslims, which was then exercised brutally not just against Protestants but indigenes in the Americas and Africans there too.
Protestant England evolved similarly. The costs of war were immense, exacting a heavy cost in lives and taxes alike. London’s ill-fated French campaign of 1513–14 alone consumed a million pounds, equivalent to ten years’ worth of ordinary revenue. Military expenses between 1539 and 1552 came to about 3.5 million pounds, a million of which was spent on campaigns in Scotland and keeping Boulogne. The 1513 initiative witnessed an English army of 28,000 men joined in France by around 7,000 German and Dutch mercenaries. Simultaneously, a force of more than 26,000 marched speedily to meet King James IV’s army in Northumberland for the slaughter of Flodden. Campaigning on a similar scale took place in 1522, 1544, and 1545. Even the stupendous gain delivered by the liquidation of monasteries was insufficient to cover the expense of warmongering: more taxes were imposed. Thus, England contained a precursor of a military-industrial complex, as towns and parishes stored armor and weapons and coastal works—bulwarks, beacons, and bastions—were constructed for defense. As early as 1468 Southampton had a gun of about 1,000 pounds in weight. Landowners were expected to maintain an armory of sorts. The monarch had no standing army, but every able-bodied man was expected to fight, again making a venture into the wilderness of the Americas seem tame by comparison, a speculation reflected in the high level of desertion and mutiny. Certainly, military experience in Europe proved to be quite useful for London on the battlefields of the Caribbean, Africa, and North America.
London, during the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, endured a much higher proportion of Englishmen than French or Spaniards serving as soldiers at some point during his reign. With regard to Paris alone, there were wars in 1475, 1489–1492, 1512–1514, 1522–1525, 1542–1546, 1549–1550, 1557–1559, 1562–1564, etc. In yet another sixteenth-century idea that has yet to dissipate, per Machiavelli, was that foreign wars defuse domestic conflict. In any case, European elites often sought to depend on mercenaries rather than domestic forces to suppress domestic dissent, with the resultant benefit flowing to these guns-for-hire, serving as yet another boost for a Pan-European identity that could easily morph into “whiteness”—a militarized identity politics, in other words. In any event, London had its hands full seeking to contain Wales, Ireland, and Scotland during the sixteenth century (and before) with settlements and wars in the Americas emerging as not only a safety valve relieving pressure on London but allowing often disgruntled “minorities,” especially Catholics, to stake a claim on the fruits of Empire, thus diverting their anger away from England.85
Necessity is not only the mother of invention but the crucible of warfare is as well. The “discovery” of the Americas raised the stakes for sovereignty with Madrid’s wealth and firepower seemingly threatening the existence of London itself. Coincidentally, post-1500 there was a much ballyhooed “Military Revolution,” which transformed warfare on the old continent, and had the added “benefit” of destabilizing Africa and the Americas. The invention, then proliferation, of gunpowder meant that old medieval city walls could no longer offer adequate protection. New fortifications also meant that wars became longer with many sieges lasting more than a year. The rise of firearms translated into a need to train soldiers. Armies became increasingly professionalized, evolving from bands of mercenaries. Armies expanded in size, meaning more men under arms and militarized societies, as well as militarized thinking, suitable for conquest abroad. Along with dispatching domestic foes to far-flung settlements as disposable colonizers, armies also facilitated the liquidation (or quieting) of domestic opponents. Government debt also rose coincidentally in the sixteenth century, enhancing the power of the state. Spain was an initial beneficiary here as their legendary ruler, Philip II, was at war in every single year of his long sixteenth-century reign.86 But, again, London—then Washington—surpassed Madrid in virtually every one of these important categories.
The repeated attempted invasions of England by Spain—the late sixteenth century notwithstanding—culminated in the game-changing defeat of the Armada in 1588, with London maneuvering adroitly in the slipstream created by Madrid’s propulsion. Certainly 1588 was a true sign of things to come. Historian Geoffrey Parker has argued that the failure of the Armada “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” The future, he asserts, “pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588,” as “Spain began a slow decline and a new world order