In Virginia, elite anxieties around popular solidarities were escalating. Linebaugh and Rediker give a good account of this. In 1662, servants and slaves, European and African, gathered, on a number of occasions, to hear heretical preaching. Two years later, an act was passed in Maryland to prevent English women marrying African men. In 1667, the colonial elites in Jamestown expressed their concern that European servants would ‘‘fly forth and joyne’’ with African slaves in Maroon communities.
In Allen’s estimation the ascription of race as we still know it today – “a monstrous social mutation” – emerged as an attempt to contain popular solidarities that became a real threat to colonial authority during the uprising, known as Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1667. It began as a demand for more aggression against indigenous people by freed men and small farmers seeking land, but turned into a struggle against forced labour by slaves and indentured workers. On 19 September 1676, the rebels, white and black, burnt Jamestown to the ground.
When the King’s representative had to negotiate against armed servants and slaves, European and African, he sought to divide them by offering the Europeans relative privilege. William Petty’s early attempt to offer scientific legitimation to the ascription of race – which would increasingly be imagined as a matter of the body – appeared in the same year. Philosophical legitimation, with thinkers like John Locke and David Hume doing the initial work, would follow.
Linebaugh and Rediker explain that: “The self-conscious segmentation of the plantation proletariat became even more evident in legislation of 1682 providing that ‘all servants not being Christians, being imported into this country by shipping’ (i.e., Africans) should be slaves for life, while those who came by land (Native Americans) [who at the time constituted the majority of the people who had been enslaved] should be servants for twelve years. European servants continued to serve only four to five years. Virginia’s big planters began to substitute African slaves for European indentured servants.” Europeans were given “supervisory and policing positions”. Allen argues “in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry after Bacon’s Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of laboring-class ‘whites’. In the Anglo-Caribbean, by contrast, under a similar English ruling elite, ‘mulattos’ were included in the social control stratum and were promoted into middle-class status.” The die was cast. More than twelve million Africans would be enslaved and shipped to the New World. Modernity would not just be profoundly raced – it would be fundamentally raced.
Allen’s conclusion repeats that of the historian (and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago) Eric Williams who, in his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, concluded that “Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of [New World] slavery.” Whiteness and blackness were developed in the Caribbean and the Americas. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1920: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing . . .The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction”.
On 11 September 1683, the armies of the Ottoman Empire were defeated at the gates of Vienna. Although Greece was still under Ottoman rule the idea of Europe as a Christian project, long secured on the Iberian Peninsular to the South, was now also secured from the East. The enclosure of common lands, in the Old World and the New, along with the mines and then the plantations in the New World became the economic foundation of the modern world. The new systems of domination – rooted in racism – were increasingly legitimated via secular philosophy and science.
John Locke is often described as the ‘father of liberalism’ and the ‘philosophical founder of America’. His Two Treatise of Government, written in 1689, is a foundational liberal text. Locke was directly involved in slavery and colonialism. He took the view that lands governed in common – be they in Europe or the Americas – rather than as private property mediated by money, were ‘waste’ – ‘waste’ that could and should be redeemed by expropriation. He offered explicit legitimation for the repression of the Irish and the dispossession of Native Americans – who he described as “not . . . joined with the rest of mankind”. For Locke, liberal equality could apply only to “creatures of the same species and rank”.
Domenico Losurdo, the Italian philosopher and historian, has shown that liberalism was initially grounded in the idea of sacred and profane space – with rights only applying in the former. But as English power expanded into the New World the idea of a sacred realm of rights increasingly came to be marked out by race rather than solely by geography. Whereas England was once the sacred space of freedom and, say, the Caribbean, a profane space where a different set of social arrangements applied, white bodies came to be sacred and therefore sacrosanct, and black bodies profane, and therefore disposable, wherever they were.
In 1684, Francois Bernier, the French physician who had been the personal doctor for the son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, published A New Division of the Earth – often said to be the first attempt to classify humans into races based on physical appearance. Science, like religion before, had become an ideological tool legitimating an often-murderous drive for wealth and power.
In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, published in 1764, Immanuel Kant, making reference to Hume, declared that: “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling”. His Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (On the Different Races of Man), published in 1795, is often taken as a key text in the development of modern theories of race. After Kant figures like G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Darwin would continue this ideological work.
