LITMIR.BIZ

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a path to reach the eminence of Spain by dint of emulation of its skill in enslaving the unwary. Sir Simon D’Ewes was among those who backed settlements in North America, particularly in order to exploit timbers and pelts and fish—and to block the so-called Papists. Doing so would prevent their antagonists from exploiting same, garnering funds by which England could be invaded again.⁶⁵

      In 1609, the English Virginia Company, which had established Jamestown in Virginia two years earlier, moved to dispatch settlers across the Atlantic with more vigor.⁶⁶ Initiating centuries of contestation between Madrid and London, Spain as early as 1611 was pondering destruction of the new settlement in Virginia.⁶⁷ Of course, the indigenous were not necessarily thrilled when invaders wandered into their bailiwick, leading to severe conflict,⁶⁸ at both ends of a colonial chain from Massachusetts to Virginia.⁶⁹

      BUT WHY WERE BERMUDA AND VIRGINIA early targets for settlement? In a sense, London was taking the path of least (European) resistance in that a good deal of the Caribbean had been gobbled up by Spain already, not to mention a good deal of the Americas generally. Despite seeking to conciliate the Ottoman Turks so as to better confront Spain, both of these European powers continued to irritate London during this era.⁷⁰ Seeking to oust the Dutch from the Malay Peninsula produced results as dismaying as attempts to oust Madrid from the Western Hemisphere.⁷¹ It was during the decisive year of 1619 that the Dutch East India Company captured what became Jakarta and burned it to the ground, providing resources for this European power that brought it to the top table.⁷²

      Indeed, a betting man in 1624 would have wagered that the winner of the century in diffusing their tongue globally would be the Dutch. They had arrived on the African coast in 1592 and established Pernambuco and New Netherland by 1624, seemingly outstripping the English.⁷³ As early as 1624, the Dutch were hauling tobacco from Virginia,⁷⁴ helping to inculcate in the minds of some colonists the value of Pan-Europeanism—or what became the “whiteness” project.

      At the same time, Captain John Smith was complaining about Dutch and Spanish incursions into Virginia,⁷⁵ suggestive of the weakness of London’s position. (Smith, who escaped Ottoman Turks by beheading his captors, knew something about a weakened position.)⁷⁶ Yet London’s success was partly derived from Continental Europe being sucked into what became the Thirty Years’ War, which weakened England’s rivals at a propitious moment. Just as the culmination of the U.S. Civil War led to an offensive against Native American polities, this European inferno contributed in inception and conclusion to the same result. Though it may not have been realized at the time, London’s colonial success was also vouchsafed when in 1628–29 Spain suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the Dutch, one of the most profound setbacks for Madrid since they were turned back from England in 1588. Spain then was bogged down in Italy and, quite simply, had taken on too many foes.⁷⁷

      In fact, His Catholic Majesty, King Philip of Spain, spent every day of his forty-four-year reign at war—against the Dutch (1621–1648); against the French (1635–1659); and against London (1625–1630 and 1654–1659); and, generally, on the Iberian Peninsula (1640–1668), including Portugal. U.S. imperialism should take note that even the ostensibly strongest powers, which certainly Madrid was in the seventeenth century, can quickly find themselves being not-so-strong powers after being involved in seemingly ceaseless war.

      The point here is that the Dutch and Spanish were denuding each other in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, which also allowed England to rise.

      Also benefiting London was the reality that France continued to reel from the impact of the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which generated tremendous religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics while attempting to grant basic rights to the former.⁷⁸ At the same time, unlike Paris, London was not consistent in observing the “Freedom Principle,” the notion that the enslaved became free upon arriving on French soil. This was the case especially when it mattered in the late sixteenth century, when Paris consistently ruled in favor of Africans seeking their freedom, a trend in which London wavered until 1772 with the celebrated decision of Lord Mansfield, which in turn helped to convince wary North American settlers that counterrevolution was the preferred route to escape the logic of abolitionism. Thus the internal religious conflict in France made it difficult for Paris to turn its attention fully to what was becoming its eternal foe across the Channel, which also propelled London’s rise. This included anti-Jewish fervor: issued during the same year as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Code Noir—or slave code—reeked with religious intolerance, enjoining colonial officials to “chase all the Jews who have established residences from our isles” and barred the practice of any non-Catholic religion by either masters or the enslaved.⁷⁹

      IN 1618 KING JAMES I GRANTED a royal charter to the Company of Merchants, who were trading in Africa, leading to the first London stronghold on the Gold Coast; the first English trading post was constructed at Kormantine that same year.⁸⁰ Enslavement of Africans took a notional leap forward when “Twenty Negars” arrived in Virginia in August 1619, inaugurating a new era in settler colonialism and slavery alike.⁸¹ However, as we have seen—at least going back to the depredations of Sir Francis Drake—there were enslaved Africans in the precursors of the thirteen colonies that rebelled against London in 1776 well before 1619.

      However, London’s entrance into the ghastliness of the slave trade was not as straightforward as it appears in retrospect. As late as 1620 an English explorer in the upper waters of the Gambia River was offered bonded laborers by an African merchant. He replied that “we were a people who do not deal in such commodities, nor did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes,”⁸² a defiant attitude that had disintegrated by century’s end, as we have seen.

      Enslavement of the indigenous is another story altogether. By 1622, it was not Spaniards but the indigenous of North America who rebelled and almost wiped out the adolescent settlement.⁸³ And this conflicted tension, driven by the enslavement of the indigenous, was yet another factor impelling the settlers to seek a different supply of bonded labor, one that was unfamiliar with the local landscape and less capable of rallying the neighbors of the settlers to wipe them out.

      At this point, enslavement not only ensnared Africans and Native Americans but Christian Europeans as well. A census in Virginia in 1625 identified only twenty-three Africans,⁸⁴ suggesting that even with the incentive of seeking an alternative to enslavement of the indigenous, other factors would have to arise to bring on increased enslavement of Africans.⁸⁵

      Nonetheless and perhaps not coincidentally, the previous downplaying of the African Slave Trade began to retreat in the early years of the seventeenth century when the settlement in Virginia was formed. A statute in Bermuda in 1623, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world, denied the right of Africans to engage in free movement or to participate in trade and to bear arms.⁸⁶

      Limiting the mobility of Africans and denying their right to be economically independent and to defend themselves by martial means should have indicated to the settlers the innate debility of their project. Instead it was also in the early 1620s that Londoners were to be found on the River Gambia with one of them lasciviously observing that “the women amongst them are … excellently well bodied.” These flesh peddlers should have contemplated more intensively the implications of encountering forty armed men; at least the chronicler “took special note of the blade of … sword[s].”⁸⁷

      Instead, by February 1627 there was the arrival of 80 settlers and 10 enslaved Africans in Barbados.⁸⁸ Revealingly, although this was an English settlement from its inception, it had a Pan-European patina, which meant that as Europeans became a distinct minority the seeds were already planted for the emergence of a “white” identity politics to confront a growing African population (a similar process unfolded on the mainland). A leader of the initial settlement was Sir William Courteen, a rich London merchant of Flemish descent, who had a wide range of interests in Amsterdam and trade contacts in what became Surinam. From the beginning, there were close ties between Dutch, French, and English in Barbados.⁸⁹

      From the outset there was a basis for moving toward a “whiteness”

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