The sheer area of land available to the kingdom of Spain after their conquest of parts of the American continent and some Caribbean islands including Cuba and Jamaica was truly mind boggling. So much so that it must have paralysed their mind but not so much that they forgot to make Christians of the remnants of the indigenous people within their vast territories. The people were thus doubly deprived of both their land and their spirituality. In any case, land and the spirituality of a people are intertwined so intricately that you cannot separate one from the other. The Spaniards conquered America in very sense of the word but did not seem to have any plans for the systematic exploitation of their new territories beyond tearing up the soil in their ceaseless search for previous metals, especially gold and silver.
Today, South America is so overwhelmingly Spanish that one may be forgiven for thinking that their pernicious influence was limited to that area but nothing could be further from the truth. Look up north and you will find Spanish place names to confirm that the Spaniards were there and had been there for a very long time. But for the gold rush which in 1849 brought California to the attention of American gold diggers, that portion of the USA may still have remained Spanish. Before then, large portions of Southern USA including Texas, which was to become by far, the largest state of the union was a Spanish colony and even today, Florida on the east coast is more Spanish than American.
It has to be said that although the Spanish were the first to try to exploit the rich as well as the imagined bounties of the New World, several European countries were not far behind even though the activities of these interlopers were restricted to North America. At first their activities were restricted to the crude exploitation of the abundant natural resources which were available in obvious profusion such as the furs of wild animals, timber and of course, mineral resources which were not so easily accessible.
Land itself was widely and wildly accessible but land by itself is merely a potential source of wealth. It must be cultivated, which means that a lot of skilful work has to be done if a useful harvest is to be achieved.
Central America is one of the three places where agricultural science first developed and many crops were first domesticated in that region. Many of these crops; cocoa, maize, tomatoes, potatoes, tobbaco, cassava and various peppers have become staples even in this part of the world leaving us to wonder what our agricultural resources would have been like without the importation of those crops from the New World.
Crop movement was however not in one direction as some crops crossed the ocean in the opposite direction and with their arrival in the western hemisphere caused such an upheaval that the history of the world was placed on a tragic trajectory, the results of which are still playing out all over the world, especially in Africa. Chief among these crops was sugar cane, an Old World crop from which sugar is produced. The Portuguese had been growing modest quantities of sugar in the Atlantic islands of Principe and Sao Tome using African slave labour before the Americas were discovered but sugar cane planting really came into its own when this enterprise was transferred across the Atlantic into the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Sugar cane is a labour intensive crop and to sustain it as well as the even more labour intensive production of sugar, millions of Africans were enslaved and transported to Brazil and other places in the New World under the most appalling conditions giving rise to the largest enforced migration of people that the world has ever seen; the legacy of which there is likely to be no end. The Portuguese have the distinction of taking out of Africa more than six million slaves over a period of close to four hundred years, a time during which Africa was in continuous turmoil as slave raiders disrupted peaceful intercourse all over the continent. Close to two centuries after the end of this destructive phenomenon, Africa is still to come to terms with its after-shocks and there are indications that it has not yet ended but only gone underground or has re-emerged in new forms. That in itself is worthy of separate interrogation. But certainly, the continuing fratricide in many parts of Africa suggests that those pernicious seeds planted in African soil since around 1480 are still alive even if they have lost some of their vigour.
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Over the years since the eighteenth century, Europeans developed a bad and increasing taste for the sweetness of sugar and this meant bad news for Africa and Africans as more and more of them were shipped mainly to Brazil and the Caribbean islands to provide the unpaid labour through which sugar was produced to assuage the raging appetite for sugar in Europe. Again this subject needs a separate discussion and fortunately, the work of Eric Williams, the world renowned historian who led Trinidad and Tobago to independence is available for consultation. His book, Capitalism and slavery which could not find any British publisher for more than sixty years after it was first published in the USA contends or rather, exposes the nexus between capitalism and slavery. Williams insisted that for capitalism to advance to the next level slavery had to go and the emancipation of slaves in the British possessions in the Caribbean islands in 1833 was not as a result of any form of benevolence but was the result of cynical calculations which enhanced the growth of capitalism. The British stubbornly refused to accept this rebuke but the stand adopted by Williams has been vindicated many times over by contemporary evidence.
Cotton is another crop which came to define the relationship between Africa and Europe during those dark centuries of slavery. Now cotton, unlike sugar cane was also a New World crop and did not have to cross the sea to find fresh lands to conquer. Quite interestingly however, it has become evident that cotton was first domesticated in an area along the Nile in what is present day Sudan so that going back far enough we find that this crop which came to blight the existence of millions of Africans a few millennia down the line was first introduced to the world by Africans! Much later, the centre of cotton cultivation moved through the Middle East (the word cotton has an Arabic root) to India where it became the most important commodity for many centuries and made India the centre of textile production for several centuries during which time the Indians produced and sold all kinds of textiles to the world. This was at a time when Indians took textile production to the level of high art and through it made it possible for India to be responsible for roughly 25% of world trade by value. At that time India did not need any items of European manufacture and the Indians were paid for their textile exports with gold and silver extracted from lands in the Americas, proof again that globalisation has a long history which is now only enhanced by modern technology.
The Indians owed their pre-eminence in the textile trade to their ability to produce different coloured cotton fabrics, a technology they had mastered long before the Europeans had any inkling how to do this. When the Portuguese arrived in India in 1500, they straight away began the business of converting the Indians to Christianity and it was one of such converts who taught their newly acquired Christian brothers the secret of dyeing cotton to produce all the exquisite colours exhibited by Indian textiles. Another example of the use of the name of Jesus as a shortcut to gather political and economic benefits. Clearly, Christianity has a lot to answer for before the Ecclesiastical courts up in heaven above on that day of judgement with which the Christians have been threatening the world for more than two millennia.
Armed with this knowledge, the Europeans started looking around for the means of producing raw cotton in the vast New World they had conquered which is how large scale cotton production was established in the Western hemisphere. No sooner was this achieved than the British who had by this time colonised the vast Indian sub-continent began to forcibly dismantle the Indian textiles industry. In doing this, the centre of the global textile industry was transferred to Britain, to the dark satanic mills of Lancashire from where millions of yards of cheap textiles were sent round the world every year, to undermine the textile industries located anywhere on earth including parts of Africa from where textiles were once exported to other parts of the world.
As pointed out by Eric Williams, slavery and capitalism found themselves on a collision course almost as soon as the Industrial Revolution was launched around 1750. What the Industrial Revolution brought to the party was the use of machines each of which could do the work of a thousand slaves in less than half the time taken by the slaves to complete the same amount of work. Machines had arrived primarily to take jobs away from unpaid slaves. In other words, slaves were no longer needed and had to be got rid of. There were too many of them to be killed off in any systematic manner and there simply was no way that slaves could be trusted to operate expensive equipment designed to produce vast quantities of trade goods they had no chance in hell of ever acquiring. In essence, they had to go. They had to be set free to fend for themselves as best they could hence the movement towards the emancipation of slaves.
Many of my contemporaries would at this point remember the pap we were fed in school concerning William Wilberforce, Grenville Sharp and other abolitionists who fought to bring the slave trade to an end in 1807. The stark reality is that those gentlemen may have been pushed by altruism to bring an evil enterprise to an end but they were only successful because the slave trade had become unprofitable and had to be stopped by all means necessary. They were simply pushing against an open door. By this time, Britain had become the largest slave trading nation in the world and had by far, the most powerful navy with which to enforce her decision that Africans must be forced to stay in Africa to produce the raw materials which the British needed in their dismal factories to produce all those manufactured products which they were hawking all round the world including Africa. Slaves were of course in no position to buy a thing however cheap they were and so, the slave trade had to be abrogated so that Africans could be dragged into the markets created by industrialists in Europe, mainly Britain in the early stages. But, nothing about human affairs is ever straightforward and the affair with cotton has to be discussed to prove this point.
In 1803, French territories in North America which when taken together formed more than 20% of present-day USA was sold by Napoleon Bonaparte, the self crowned Emperor of France to the government of the USA under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson for the grand price of $15 million or three cents to the acre. This has to be the cheapest price for prime estate anywhere in the world as it doubled the size of the USA at that time. The most important thing at least as far as cotton was concerned is that it gave the Americans access to 25 million acres of prime cotton growing land. In other words, fresh land had been created and made available.The only impediment was that these lands were occupied by Indian tribes, the members of which were uprooted from their ancestral lands and forced to march thousands of miles away to strange lands under atrocious conditions on the western shore of the Mississippi river. As many as four thousand souls are estimated to have perished along what has come to be known to history as the Trail of tears.
- To be continued.
