#8 Understanding Colonialism: The Key Role of Slavery from 1492 to 1875

Slavery has had a varied history in your history books. Until recently, it was either entirely forgotten or in British history it was proudly proclaimed as extinct after the 1820s. Ignoring the fact that indentureship followed as millions of Indian and Chinese labourers were transported across the world. Now after the recent series of Black Lives Matter protests, the history of slavery is being rewritten. Most history books have downplayed the importance of slavery for the Industrial revolution, again this aspect is being reconsidered. The key for today is that the ideology that underpinned racism which justified slave labour in the USA and much of Europe did not disappear when slavery was abolished. The ideology continued and the discrimination in new forms have continued into the 21st century.

In the first part of this blog, I provide a preliminary understanding of colonial slavery, which was different to all other forms of slavery that had been practised since time immemorial. I go into greater details in later blogs. The second part of the blog provides readers with a timeline of European colonialism. We often forget these days that Western Colonialism occurred over hundreds of years, and has only recently been discarded as the key foreign policy initiative of wealthy and powerful states. As the timeline shows and I explain the second part of this blog, once Britain was defeated by the new American settlers in the 1790s they turned their attention away from the Americas to the Asia.

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Slavery

Much of the historical literature on industrialisation has been written as if the genius of the revolutionary industrialists in Europe was the whole story. The other side of the story is that of the labourers whose work made the colonial plantations so profitable and who in Europe built the canals, roads and railways.

From the beginning of colonial settlement, the need for labourers to work mines for gold and silver and then to work plantations was a major issue. At first, the Spanish attempted to enslave local people; then they imported indentured labourers from the home country, and soon after that black African slavery was established on a scale never seen before.

From 1492 to 1857 - the end of the American civil war - slavery was at the heart of the process. Slavery was not invented by European colonialism; it was as old as history. But European colonial slavery (racial chattel slavery) needs to be distinguished from ancient slavery.

Ancient forms of slavery and debt bondage took many forms. Young people were captured in war and were sometimes forced to row boats in war. Slaves often married into the families that had bought them. We find ancient slaves leading military campaigns. Slaves turn up as traders for their masters. The emperors’ courts in China, India and the Arab world used eunuchs, young men or boys captured in war and enslaved for daily work in the courts of kings.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism. Under chattel slavery the the children of a slave did not belong to the mother. Children were bought and sold just as if they not human beings. Then there was the  scale of chattel slavery, the very heart of the colonial system. Slavery was the essence of new wealth.

Even when it was outlawed, the owners were compensated by the British government, the slaves themselves received nothing.

One eloquent assessment of slavery and the new middle classes comes from C. L. R. James in his famous book The Black Jacobins:

Our present world would have been quite different without slavery. North American infrastructure, agricultural and industrial development were dependent on slavery. Many French and British city ports on the eastern seaboard of Europe grew from the building of slave ships. Citizens of all classes owned slaves in the Americas and were in the end compensated by the national government in the 19th century when they were forced to free their labourers. Slavery was perhaps the key source of the new wealth at the time of the French Revolution and it provided perhaps the key resource for new financial accumulation that fed the industrial era in the 19th century.

Slave trading was outlawed once the Industrial Revolution was underway in the early 19th century by movements led by devout religious campaigners. However, slavery itself continued in the plantations and the racism that underpinned slavery has remained with us to this day. But the use of slaves as free labour was only abolished in North America by the Civil War some sixty years later. In Haiti, Cuba and Brazil, chattel slavery continued even after the civil war. The Industrial Revolution in North America created a new demand for raw cotton on the plantations in the south, which gave a boost for slave labour.

Settlers arrived in the West Indies and South and North America and, in the late 18th century, in Australia and New Zealand. Those arriving there attempted to create conditions similar to those in their home territory. All settlers took land as private property, which was a form of land tenure unknown among most of the world’s peoples. It was not long before local populations began to resist and, as the coming blogs will show, they found themselves losing their lives and their way of life.

The Second Stage of the World Turned Upside Down

To recap, I started these blogs by describing how Europe (specifically, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, the British and the Dutch) had turned the world upside down between 1492 and the 1760 over some 250 years. The European powers invaded the entire American continent, north and south, and had colonised the people and the land, fighting amongst themselves as they did so.

From 1760s to 1945, what I am terming the 2nd phase of the colonial invasions, the Asian Continent was invaded and colonised in an entirely different way.  Future blogs will clarify this last phase where I shall go into considerable details about the manner and character of these colonial ventures. 1492 to 1750 represent the first stage of our present world turning upside down was when Western Europeans destroyed the civilisations of the Americas. The second stage of the world turning upside down has no exact date. Rather, it represents a conceptual tool to illustrate the beginnings of British dominance of India, when Clive invaded Bengal in 1767. This stage marked the beginning of the demise of Spain and Portugal as leading colonisers.

The British had turned their attention to India after their defeat by their colonisers in the thirteen states of North America in 1776. In the late 1750s and early 1760s, Clive of India defeated the Mughal emperors’ forces in several battles, the best-known of which was Plessey. Over the following hundred years, the British conquered the entire India continent, including today’s Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. All this was reinforced, bit by bit, by the privately-owned East India Company. The conquest of China followed, from 1842. Again, Britain invaded so that her traders could continue to sell opium. In both these cases, the destruction of wealthy ancient empires and the impoverishment of the people continued over roughly a hundred years that followed the initial invasions. This destruction and impoverishment created what used to be the so-called ‘underdeveloped nations’ of today’s world, which I detail in later blogs.

The European monopoly companies of the 17th century arose as a consequence of the Spanish American conquests when the ships returned with previously unimaginable wealth. This second stage begins with the British conquest of Bengal in India. The monopoly companies continued as before, but in essence the European powers began to focus on Asia for their new colonial conquests. From that time, we can discern the reversal of global power, although the actual reversal did not begin until India began to be conquered nearly 200 years later.

This reversal can be characterised by the following. In 1600, the western nations bought eastern products such as silk, cotton and spices, and paid in gold or silver. At that time, there was nothing that the east needed that was manufactured by Europe. By 1850, however, this trade had been reversed. India, instead of exporting luxury silks, had begun to buy cheap western cotton goods, and exporting raw cotton. I will come back to this in greater detail when I begin to cover the 19th century in these blogs. The process of impoverishing the Indian subcontinent, is best understood by the reversal of this pattern of  trade. From being an exporter of very quality silks and cottons, India became an importer of the cheapest cotton for the poorest people. Power had swung from the eastern side of the world to the western. Although the story of this shift is relatively well known, the significance of the change is rarely mentioned in public discourse.

The new national monopoly trading companies had been created to capture new trade and wealth; the East India Company was the largest and longest-lasting. The governments who sponsored these companies did so to generate funds to fight domestic wars. The unintended outcome turned out to be the transference of global power from Asia to Europe, as a direct consequence of the colonisation involved.

The trading companies were not intended to serve as mechanisms of colonisation. The genocides in the Americas had begun with the earliest Spanish invasions and continued throughout the 19th century; this is detailed in later blogs. By the end of the 19th century, only a small number of the original indigenous peoples were left; the way they were prepared for private property and industrialisation will be described later on.

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Recommended Reading

I quote CLR James in this blog.

C.L.R James: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Penguin New Ed Edition (31 May 2001)

I will come back to slavery in greater detail in later blog and then provide a good reading list. As you will imagine there is a huge volume of excellent research on slavery so it is important that a few key texts and writers are recommended.

View maps showing various transatlantic slave trading routes here and a useful infographic from UNESCO showing the “Slave Route” here.

For more information about Indentureship, please visit the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies.

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