In 1324, when Musa Keita I, Emperor of the Mali Empire, made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca, news of his fabulous wealth in gold and slaves arrived in Europe – an altogether poorer part of the world. The Catalan Atlas, drawn and written in Majorca in around 1375, was, for some time, the best map of the known world available in Europe. In this map, painted onto vellum leaves with lapis lazuli, silver and gold, Keita I appears, in regal dress, with an inscription that notes the source of his wealth: “This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands.”
In the European myth of Prester John, which reaches back to at least the 12th century, the fabulously wealthy Christian King was first believed to be in Persia, and then India. After Keita I made his pilgrimage to Mecca, Prester John’s imagined location shifted to Ethiopia. Portuguese traders began looking to Africa as a source of wealth. In 1419, the Portuguese crown claimed Madeira, an uninhabited archipelago in the North Atlantic. In 1444, Portuguese traders arrived at the coast of Senegal, began to purchase slaves and built a settlement on Gorée Island. They went on to build stone fortresses, feitorias – from which the English word factory is derived – along the Northern part of the Western coast of Africa. The feitorias were used as nodes in a set of trade networks that included gold, ivory and enslaved people.
Sidney Mintz tells us that sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea around 8,000 BC. Two thousand years later it was carried to India where the army led by Alexander the Great encountered it. By 500 AD, sugar was being produced near Baghdad, where it was known as ‘the Indian luxury’. It arrived – along with rice, wheat, cotton and citrus fruits – in Southern Europe with the Arab invasion of Spain in 711. In the Crusader states set up in the Levant after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, sugar cane was grown with a mixture of free and forced labour. “Europeans”, Mintz concludes, “became producers of sugar as a result of the Crusades.”
In 1452, sugarcane plantations, based on the model of the Crusader plantations but worked by African slaves, were set up in Madeira. In the same year Pope Nicholas V issued a bull, Dum Diversas (Until Different) authorising the Portuguese King to “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans . . . as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property . . . and to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude”.
Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies, led by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453. Athens fell in 1458. The Ottoman Empire was building an army, and a navy, that would become the most powerful in Europe. At the same time the European elites depended on Muslim traders to access spices from Asia. The desire to capture this lucrative trade, and to undermine part of the basis for Muslim prosperity, lead to increased interest in the possibility of a sea route to Asia.
Christopher Columbus, an ambitious trader born in Genoa, sought to stake a personal claim on this possibility. He had read Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the East and concluded that he could sail west and reach Japan. Columbus was married to the daughter of a sugar plantation owner on Porto Santo, an island close to Madeira. In 1482, he had sailed with the fleet that built São Jorge da Mina, a Portuguese feitoria on the coast of what is now Ghana.
On 3 August 1492, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, in Andalusia in Spain. The opening line of his diary records that: “In the same month in which their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.” His diary reveals an obsessive interest in gold.
Columbus, expecting to arrive in Japan, arrived at the Bahamas on 12 October. His diary entry for that day observed that the inhabitants of the islands “should be good servants”. He left a group of men on an island he named Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), with the instruction to search for gold. In May the following year, Pope Alexander VI issued a bull granting Ferdinand and Isabella the right to conquest, to “full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind”, in the New World. This affirmation of a right to conquest and expropriation drew on a set of ideas – like Terra Nullius – first developed during the Crusades.
For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.” For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”. For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a single history that we all now live, and while it led to incredible techno-scientific and other such dazzling achievements, as well as to the material well-being of one restricted portion of humanity, it also led to the systemic large-scale degradation and devalorization, even the extinction, of a large majority of the peoples of the earth.”
When Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1495, his journey funded, in part, by wealth expropriated from Jews and Muslims in Spain, he took sugarcane with him. But his first priority was still the pursuit of gold. The men that he had left on Hispaniola on his first voyage had been killed after abusing the people on the island. Columbus undertook the search for gold with the kind of monomania that Herman Melville would later write into the character of Captain Ahab. It took the form of a genocidal holocaust. He also enslaved hundreds of people – some of whom were sold in the slave markets of the Mediterranean. The pursuit of gold and silver, via appropriation and – as Andrés Reséndez’s new book shows – enslavement, would soon wreak genocidal devastation across the Caribbean, and then in large parts of what is now Latin America.
In the Caribbean it would be the plantation, and in particular the production of sugar, that would continue to result, on a staggering international scale, in the ruination of some and the wealth of others. Various dates, ranging from 1501 to 1505 are given for the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Hispaniola – usually thought to have come from Spain. Bartolome de Las Casas, whose father had sailed with Columbus in 1492, became a key figure in the shift to an economy based on African slavery. Las Casas sailed to Hispaniola in 1502 and, in 1510, was the first priest to be ordained in the New World. He was appalled at the genocidal treatment of the Taíno people and believed that, because there had been no previous Christian presence in the Americas, they could not be legitimately considered as ‘enemies of Christ’. In 1514, he began to oppose the enslavement and murder of the Taíno people, initially recommending that Africans replace them as slaves. In 1517, the first major shipment of enslaved Africans arrived. At this time enslaved people in the Caribbean included Muslims, Jews, indigenous people and Africans and slavery was not assumed to be marked on the visible appearance of the body.
In 1522, the first recorded slave revolt was organised in Hispaniola. Enslaved Africans, in some accounts reported to have been Wolof Muslims, rebelled on a sugar plantation belonging to Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son. Some of them were able to escape into the mountains and form Maroon communities with Taíno people. At the same time there was acute political conflict in Europe. A massive peasant rebellion raged across German-speaking Europe in 1524 and 1525. The Twelve Articles adopted by the insurgent peasants in Memmingen on 20 March 1525 demanded freedom, democracy and access to the commons. The rebellion was put down with mass slaughter – estimates of the dead range from one to three hundred thousand.
Conflict in Europe would continue for more than three centuries as the enclosure and expropriation of land, and then proletarianisation, gathered pace giving rise to various kinds of heretical ideas and then, beginning in the eighteenth century – with the French Revolution of 1789, the uprisings across Europe in 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 being the key events – modern forms of secular radicalism. Popular rebellion would consistently push the ruling class in Europe to seek to contain the social and political crisis at home with wealth wrung from expropriation and slave labour in the colonies, new markets attained abroad and land expropriated for European settlement.
The Portuguese established their first settlement in Brazil – which they initially called ‘The Land of the True Cross’ – in 1532. In 1537, Pope Paul III declared the doctrine of Anima Nullius, empty souls, with regard to the people of the Americas. It was closely articulated to the doctrine of Terra Nullius. The justification for domination, exploitation and extermination remained theological. As in the Caribbean, the first people to be enslaved were mostly indigenous.
In 1545, the Spanish started mining silver, with slave labour, at Zacatecas, in what is now Mexico, and Potosí, in what is now Bolivia. The mines produced fabulous wealth for the Spanish crown – in a single year more than two hundred tons of silver were shipped to Spain from Potosí. It rapidly became one of the most populous cities in the world and is frequently mentioned in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The wealth went to Spain from where it was disbursed, often via debt repayments, throughout Europe, and on to the Ottoman Empire and China. The influx of silver resulted in a massive increase in currency, began to displace the once more or less absolute feudal link between land and wealth and played a central role in enabling the development of international trade – particularly between Europe and China, and, to lesser extent, India. It has been argued that silver from the Americas was a central factor in the steady strengthening of Christian Europe against the Islamic world. It also seriously weakened the gold markets in West Africa. Eduardo Galeano famously wrote: “You could build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid from what was mined here – and one back with the bones of those that died taking it out”.
The first ships bringing slaves from Africa to Brazil, most of whom would be set to labour on sugar plantations, arrived in 1570. Four or five million people would follow in the next three hundred years. In 1609, the Moriscos, the descendants of Muslims converts to Christianity, were expelled from Spain.
