the city was renamed after the Duke of York, a royal who held a controlling interest in major slaving concerns, did not bode well for Africans. Soon major clans in New York had initiated a brisk trade with pirates in Madagascar, which included a goodly number of enslaved Africans. Dutch rule, whereby the Dutch West India Company owned most of the colony’s enslaved, fell victim to a “democratizing” impulse in which ownership of these unfortunate souls was spread widely among a population that increasingly was defined, and defined itself, as “white,” which, in turn, engendered reactionary anti-African impulses that have yet to be extirpated.79 The likelihood that the English even sold certain Dutch settlers into slavery in the Caribbean helps to underscore the deeply driven enslaving impulse that gripped these conquerors.80
But as slave owning became widespread, it became more difficult to limit slave trading to the aegis of the Crown, and one of the revolutionary demands of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in London was the deregulation of this hateful commerce and the entrance into it of “private” traders.
AS THIS NEW DEPARTURE IN WORLD history was being enacted, featuring Africans as fuel for the enrichment of Europeans, those designated as slaves refused to cooperate willingly. About 1565 the Portuguese built a fort to facilitate enslavement in the Accra area on the Atlantic Coast, despite the opposition of their would-be victims. Eventually, the Africans took the Portuguese by surprise and slaughtered them all.81 As the Dutch and Portuguese fought in Brazil, Africans allied with one side or the other.82 Near that same time, Africans in Santo Domingo told the ascending Dutch that they would aid them in ousting the Spanish.83 Unsurprisingly, the seventeenth century also featured a tidal wave of unrest in Africa, with the infestation of enslavers being a key reason. The forts of the European powers became targets for attack, arson—and worse.84 “Against our will,” complained an enslaver in West Africa in 1663, he and his men were “engaged in an open war” with Africans.85 That same year the authorities in Jamaica saw fit to pass a law mandating that boats of various sizes be properly secured since enslaved Africans were stealing them and seeking to escape, perhaps even back to Africa.86 The seventeenth century was London’s century, but even what was to be eventually denoted as the British Empire suffered setbacks then at the hands of Africans. Vigorous hostility from North Africans foiled the attempt to establish a colonial toehold in Tangiers,87 the formation of which would simply have entailed more misery for more Africans.
As the waning years of this century expired, Africans were on the warpath in one of the critical areas where they had been deposited. In Barbados in 1692 the authorities were wringing their hands about a “conspiracy” of the enslaved, who had “been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable Rebellion, Massacre, assassination and destruction” targeting “all the white Inhabitants.”88
Rebelliousness among those slated for enslavement in Africa and those held captive in the Americas was a factor that restrained the scope of the slave trade, thus restraining the unjust enrichment that characterized London and, ultimately, New York.
Rebelliousness among Africans has yet to disappear from North America and sheds light on why descendants of the enslaved tend to vote most heavily against the political expression of the settler class, a trend manifested most recently in November 2016.
IN SUM, THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY is critical to comprehension of the rise of capitalism and the companion rise of London, then New York. Spain and the Netherlands weakened each other, creating an opening for England, which was able to establish a toehold in what is now Virginia in the early seventeenth century. Buoyed by the wealth brought by dispossession, merchants and nascent capitalists, particularly in New England, backed Oliver Cromwell as the monarchy was symbolically and actually beheaded in the 1640s. The end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 allowed Europeans to concentrate more pointedly on Africa and the Americas. By 1654 the Dutch were driven from Brazil by returning Portuguese and fleeing alongside them were some from the Iberian Jewish community, who had invested heavily in sugar and slaves. They were then welcomed into Jamaica, which in 1655 had been taken from Spain by Cromwell’s forces. By 1660 a royal restoration of sorts had taken place, and arguably the monarchy, playing second fiddle to the rising merchants and capitalists, was already on a glide path to the figurehead status it enjoys today. The Caribbean venture led to a sugar boom and still vaster wealth that was then used in 1664 to attack the Dutch on the mainland, with Manhattan and many of what are now the U.S. Mid-Atlantic States falling. This opened up more land to be stocked with enslaved Africans, particularly in what is now New York City. By 1672 the slave trade was systematized in the Royal African Company under the Crown. By 1683 the Ottoman Turks were halted at the gates of Vienna, providing more breathing space for Western Europeans, allowing them to turn more fully toward plundering Africa and the Americas. Then in 1688, the “Glorious Revolution” marked the deregulation of the slave trade and even more enrichment for merchants—and the dawning of an apocalypse for Africans and the indigenous.
The fierce resistance of the indigenous and the Africans later caused concessions to be granted by the colonial elite ultimately to poorer Europeans, with 1676 and Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia a turning point, creating a cross-class collaboration between and among Europeans that has yet to disappear in North America, the headquarters of settler colonialism.
The interpretation of this epochal 1676 crisis is also revealing, with some on the U.S. left initially interpreting it as a righteous revolt by the poor against the wealthy, eliding the uncomfortable reality that a central demand was a more aggressive colonial offensive to plunder the indigenous and parcel out their land to poorer settlers. Then it was interpreted as a joint uprising by poorer Africans and Europeans against the elite that was foiled by concessions to those defined as “white” to the detriment of those not so designated. I tend to agree with the scholar J. Kehaulani Kauanui, who argues that the uprising “reveals a lost chance for alliance politics between African and indigenous peoples.”89
AS ONE CONSIDERS THE MANY CRIMES committed in the name of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism, what might be most shocking is how these bloody felonies have been rationalized, even justified—even by some who consider themselves to be “radical.” The by-product was supposedly an advancement of the productive forces or the flowering of bourgeois liberties, which even today many of African and indigenous descent in North America hardly enjoy, notably in due process of law before being executed by an officer of the state. This rationalization of crime makes it all the more difficult to overcome the odious legacy of tragic events of recent centuries. But what is similarly revealing is that those who heartily castigate and declaim the crimes of socialism, a system that led directly to the liberation of millions of Africans and “darker peoples” from the domination of the routinely praised North Atlantic powers,90 lose all sense of proportion when they simultaneously downplay and warp what was required to build the United States and “modernism” and a supposed “democracy.”
Future historians may very well conclude that an explanation for this abject hypocrisy is that too many could not see beyond the deliverance of poorer Europeans from the barbarism they endured on their home continent to a sympathy with those victimized in the process. Ultimately they could not overcome the poisonous snare of white supremacy. That is, the seeds of the fiasco of an election in November 2016 in the United States, where the less affluent of European descent, including more than half of the women of this group, found their tribune in a vulgar billionaire, has roots in the cross-class coalition that spearheaded colonial settlement in the seventeenth century at the expense of the indigenous and enslaved Africans.
In other words, it is not premature to contemplate life after capitalism in what is now the United States,91 the disastrous result of November 2016 notwithstanding. When this monumental task is undertaken, however, never to be forgotten is that those who were victimized in the first instance—enslaved Africans and the indigenous—need to be compensated and made whole (somehow) as this elongated process unfolds.
This is a book about the events in the seventeenth century that led to the creation of what is now called the modern and advanced world. It concerns the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and the ultimate expression of the two: capitalism. These events mostly unfold on the eastern seaboard