been wise to pay attention to Londoners within their ambit, prior to invading. There were English merchants resident in Andalusia from 1480 to 1532, a number of whom were slaveholders actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. One scholar argues, contrary to previous assessments, that 1489 marks the starting point in the English history of African slaveholding. “Englishmen of all social classes from low class to high class, and even to royalty … emerge[d] as slaveowners,” asserts historian Gustav Ungerer, a trend that waxed and waned over the centuries but continued to carry sufficient strength to shed light on the prolonged existence of alliances across class lines among those defined as “white” that exerted itself most recently in the former slaveholders’ republic in November 2016. There was also a goodly number of slaveholders who were Englishwomen too, which may shed light on their descendants’ twenty-first-century voting habits in North America as well.88
YET ANOTHER CONDITION PRECEDENT for the rise of London and the simultaneous decline of Africa and the Americas took place a few years after the failed Armada, in 1591. The site was north central Africa. Morocco, yet another predominantly Islamic nation courted by London, had invaded with England’s assistance the once mighty Songhay Empire. This proved to be a double disaster, with both victor and vanquished emerging weaker, a boon to an ascending “Christian”—if not Protestant—Europe. By destroying the strongest centralized state in sub-Saharan Africa, the Moroccan conquest did irreparable harm to the trans-Saharan routes that had enriched both Morocco and West Africa, and this instability radiated to the aptly (and unfortunately) named Gold and Slave Coasts of Africa, indicative of what was soon to be plundered excessively on the beset continent.89 Morocco’s force of 5,000 was bolstered by Moriscos (Muslims expelled from Spain) and mercenaries, as they proceeded to Gao on the Niger River. Over 80,000 fighters with mere lances and javelins were mowed down systematically by weapons, an outgrowth of the aforementioned “Military Revolution.” In a sad coda to a bygone era—and the commencement of a newer one—they reportedly cried, as they fell, “We are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion,”90 apparently unaware that this newer era was in the long run to sideline religion in favor of conquest and commerce and capitalism. Moroccans had been armed with English muskets in return for saltpeter for ammunition, then soon wielded in what was to be called Virginia in the early seventeenth century. The Moroccan envoy in London was quite close to Anthony Radcliffe, residing at his home for six months at one point; the latter’s daughter, Anne, was a benefactor of what became Harvard University, which once housed a women’s college named in her honor, continuing the resonances from the sixteenth century.91 Relations between England and Morocco were so close—perhaps a key to understanding Shakespeare’s Othello, for example—that less than a decade after the transformative 1591 vanquishing of the Songhay Empire, the two powers were huddling and discussing a joint invasion of their mutual foe, Spain, then followed by a joint ouster of the Spaniards from the Caribbean.92
The Moroccan-English collaboration was not the only factor contributing to the subjugation of Africa and the Americas. By 1420, Europe counted barely more than a third of the people it contained one hundred years before as a result of the disease known as the Black Death. Predictably, the Jewish minority was blamed, leading to terrible violence against them; thus, early in 1348 the rumor arose that this minority in northern Spain and southern France were poisoning Christian wells and thus disseminating the plague.93 This served to lead to the mass expulsion of this minority from Spain in 1492, and, in the longer run, their being incorporated with untoward consequences for Madrid in the Netherlands, Turkey, and, to a degree, in England too. In the shorter term, their diaspora networks proved to be essential to the new era that was arising, purportedly investing in Columbus’s voyage and—perhaps absconding from inquisitorial Madrid—fleeing on his vessels. Some from this Iberian minority were present when São Tomé in West Africa was being subjected to enslavement and sugar production, a pestiferous process then exported to Brazil with devastating consequences for Africans and indigenous Americans both.94 Other “New Christians,” that is, those from the minority subject to an inauthentic conversion, wound up in Cape Verde and Congo with untoward consequences for Africans.95
Still, it was not just a more forthcoming approach to the Jewish community and Islam that served ultimately to catapult London into the first rank of nations. Protestants and their often bewildering array of sects and tendencies—Arminian, Calvinist, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Antinomian, Socinian, Society of Friends (Quakers) et al.—jutted out of Europe, undermining existing beliefs and preparing the ground for a new kind of thinking: capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-Catholicism too, destabilizing the One True Faith—and “His Catholic Majesty” in the bargain, as a previously mighty Gulliver was tied down by an ant-like army of Lilliputians.96
In undermining existing beliefs, Protestants set the stage for the rise of others: racism, not least, a point that Ambassador Young could have mentioned in 1977. In short, the radical decentralization of Protestantism, as opposed to the hierarchical centralization of Catholicism, provided fertile soil for the rise of racism and other “faiths.” Besides, as besieged underdogs in the midst of religious wars, Protestants were poised to make overtures to the Jewish community and Islam alike, as a matter of survival if nothing else but contrary to past praxis,97 and, ultimately, Protestants and Catholics, then the Jewish, were rebranded as “white” republicans, curbing murderous interreligious conflict and ushering in an era of racialized conflict, victimizing Africans and indigenes alike.
Ambassador Young also could have noted that the evolution of settler colonialism in his homeland involved a religious compromise between Protestants and Catholics, then a transition to “race” as they were rebranded as “white” in North America, easing the path for racialized slavery and uprooting of indigenes, which in turn was disrupted by the Haitian Revolution,98 which then gave rise to an emphasis on class as the animating axis of society with the rise of socialism and working-class movements.99 He could have mentioned that English, Irish, and Scots warred against each other but then united as “white” in the colonies to fight “others.” This book is about the earliest stage of this centuries-long process.
CHAPTER 1
Approaching 1492 | Approaching Apocalypse
Did anti-African racism emerge from the Arab world and enslavement of Africans in the Islamic world? Is contemporary racism a function of this encounter with forces eastward, just as today the norm is to use Arab—not Roman—numerals? As far back as the eighth century, this racializing process was unfolding—or so it is said—though, as noted, enslavement in that part of the world did not only encompass Africans. One historian has contrasted the way in which “white mamluks” (European might be a more apt term to affix to this exploited humanity) were treated versus their darker brethren, though the substantial Christian ransom of the former might account for any difference.1 And, in any case, comparing the legacy of racism centuries later in North America, including lynchings and immolations, with what unfolded in what is now Iraq centuries earlier, seems once again to be an extended effort to exonerate perpetrators in London, then Washington: that is, “the Arabs made them do it.” Perhaps English anti-Semitism (or even the German variant) should be laid at the doorstep of Pontius Pilate or post-Constantine Rome, again exculpating London elites. Or, is attenuation or even the chain of causation disrupted in this instance?2
Whatever the case, the fact remains that enslavement of Africans reached a high point under the aegis of London and its descendants, not least because it was turbo-charged with emerging notions of “race” (a term with hazy roots at best in the mire of 1,300 years ago) and the shift from religion as the axis of society, which characterized the post-1492 dispensation.3 For in examining fifteenth-century Valencia, on a peninsula deeply influenced by Muslims for hundreds of years, the scholar Debra Blumenthal argues—correctly, I think—that it is “misleading to label what we see here … as ‘racism’ or even ‘protoracism.’”4
Because the Iberian Peninsula played such an instrumental role in the story of conquest, it is a focus in these pages. Thus, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, neighboring France was a center of selling of Irish and Flemish slaves, while