Tag: rise of capitalism

I learnt from my exposure to history in the primary school that the abolitionists led by the Right Honourable William Wilberforce, after many years, managed to convince the British parliament to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It must be said that the bill to abolish slavery was presented to the British parliament no less than eleven times showing the determination of the abolitionists to get the bill over the line and how difficult their job was. As a result of the passage of this bill, not only was the slave trade to be brought to an end in 1807 but that a squadron of ships of the Royal Navy was to be set to patrol along the West African coast to enforce the ban and make sure that the ships of other slaving countries did not continue to carry on making money from the buying and selling of captive Africans. To prove that the ban was effective, we were told the story of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the slave boy who was rescued by a ship of this squadron and taken to Freetown in Sierra Leone. To complete his story as history, we were also told that he translated the Bible from English into Yoruba and was also consecrated the first African Bishop by the Anglican Church and was received by Queen Victoria in her palace. That is history. It was however vividly brought to life for me when I went to school with two of his great grandchildren. Besides, my school and even class was full of Smiths, Georges, Coles and Williamses whose recent ancestors could have told them their own stories of rescue by ships of that squadron. What our teachers did not tell us was that in spite of that scouring squadron, no less than a million slaves were still taken across the Atlantic to Brazil and Cuba right up until the closing years of the nineteenth century. This period coincided with the years of the Yoruba civil wars and my people, the Ijesas, suffered disproportionately more than others in the period following 1860 when until the end of hostilities at Kiriji they were continuously at war with those ruffians from Ibadan. This is a story for another day but suffice to say that this explains why many of those who returned from slavery in Brazil were ethnic Ijesas. Many thousands of them are still in exile in Brazil and Cuba. They remain out there in the diaspora and will never return home.

The story of the stoppage of British participation in the slave trade as well as the deployment of the squadron to stop the ships of other European nations from continuing their predatory practice of stealing Africans across the Atlantic was supposed to show the altruistic instincts of the British. Incidentally, the British were our colonial masters at the time this propaganda was being given voice to. We, as a people, were therefore supposed to be grateful to our supposed benefactors who had saved our ancestors from a fate worse than death on the cotton fields of Alabama or the sugar cane plantations of Cuba. As children, some of us would have been beguiled by those fairy tales and made into lovers of Great Britain for life. It is clear to me however that if I had been fooled by those fairy tales I would not be sitting up this early morning when I could be enjoying an early morning snooze to write these lines.

The truth is that the story we were told as history retained an overpowering smell of good old fashioned bullshit and it did not quite go down my throat as I grew out of childhood. I have since found out that if it smells like bullshit it likely to be bullshit. In fact, it is bullshit.

Whilst if is true that the abolitionists, together with a fair number of freed slaves fought to bring about the abolition of slavery, slavery was abolished because it was no longer needed to power the British economy as it had done for two  centuries. In other words, slavery had, to use a modern term, come to its sell by date. It had expired and had to go and that for several reasons. But before looking at any of those reasons, it is instructive to look at British involvement in the slave trade.

The first Briton to participate actively in the slave trade was Sir John Hawkins. In 1662, he sailed down the West African coast starting from Senegal, kidnapping Africans all along the  coast. Using this method, he was able to capture three hundred people. These he took across the Atlantic and sold to the Spanish. His profit was so large that two years later, he was back for a repeat performance and in doing so launched the British involvement in the slave trade. By the time the slave trade was abolished in 1807, 3.1 million Africans had been taken from Africa in  British slave ships. Only the Portuguese had taken more. Throughout that period, the British economy was geared towards the institution of trans-Atlantic slavery. Ship building was skewed towards the building of slave ships and new port cities, notably Liverpool, Bristol and the London docks became famous as centres of the slave trade. For all that however, the slave trade had to be brought to an end because it was standing in the way of the development of something even more profitable, if not any less abhorrent than the slave trade, to wit, the rise of capitalism.

Making money is all about following a fashion trend but it is even better if you could set the trend. The slave trade was definitely in fashion for three centuries but nothing can be fashionable forever and the British were the first to recognise the need to pivot away from buying and selling human beings as a means of building wealth. They were the first to come to the realisation that investment into using machines as a means of production was infinitely more profitable than using human beings for the same purpose. And so, the slave trade had to be brought to an end. It is instructive that although the slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery was continued throughout the massive British empire until 1834. After that, the slaves remained bound to their masters until 1840 before they were let go to somehow fend for themselves without any help from anybody. In the meantime, the slave owners were paid reparations for the loss of the services hitherto provided by their slaves.

 The early capitalists used this period to introduce workers to the new machines which were becoming available and set up an industrial machinery which replaced slavery as the predominant means of production.

The other reason why slavery was more trouble than it was worth was that slaves were getting out of control and the cruelty needed to check them was increasing daily. As the cruelties increased, the incentives for slaves to resist in one way or the other also increased. As the number of slaves increased through the slave trade and natural increase through breeding, the danger of slave insurrections also went up and this was no flight of fancy. What happened in Haiti was a warning to slavers. There, slaves not only rose up against their masters but set up a republic which repulsed all attempts by the French to retake the new republic. It was clear that a great deal of naked force and undisguised terror would be needed to maintain a large number of human beings in the state of slavery.

Another factor militating against slavery was the availability of machines some of which were quite capable of doing the work of a hundred men and do it even better. Furthermore, there were machines which could be manipulated by  children whose wages were far less than what was paid to grown men which meant that greater profits could accrue to the capitalists. Everything considered therefore, it only made common sense for slavery to be abolished. Even after the American civil war had been fought and won there were a host of dinosaurs in the southern states and indeed in other places who still insisted on the continuation of slavery. So ingrained had this practice become  that Abraham Lincoln, the acclaimed Emancipator had to admit that if he could save the union without freeing a single slave, he would have done so but if he had to free all the slaves in order to save the union, that was what he was going to do. In other words, he freed the slaves because he had to.

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By 1760, the recognised beginning of the Industrial revolution, all the stars were aligned to favour of this process. All the monies which had poured into several European countries especially Britain from the slave trade and related practices had made a cohort of people fabulously wealthy. This made it possible for them to invest in the new fangled machines which the engineers of the day were going and producing. Those machines were doing things which the ordinary man could not imagine in their wildest dreams and it was clear that they could make their owners rich beyond their wildest dreams. In today’s parlance, the industrialists controlled all the means of production.

In pre-industrial times, artisans did all their work in their own homes or for those who were agricultural workers in the fields. What the industrialists did was to herd them into their factories where they were tied to pieces of machinery for up to sixteen hours, six days a week. The factories were poorly lit, the machines were noisy and gave off so much heat that the factories were hot as hell. Some of the moving parts on the machines were exposed and limbs were frequently caught in the machines sometimes with tragic consequences. The men and women who worked in those factories were so badly paid that they found work for their children as young as five years old to augment family income. The men were paid up to double what the women were paid, a practice that has endured right up to the present in Britain. As for the children, they were paid a pittance but whatever they were paid it was better than nothing and so, they were made to join the work force almost as soon as they could walk.

Steam was used to power the machines in those early factories and this meant that coal had to be mined to be burnt in furnaces. Conditions inside the mines were even worse than what obtained in the factories. The mines were damp and ran with water in which the miners worked for twelve hours, six days a week for such low pay that it was a wonder that they did not starve. In mining areas, father, mother and five year old children were taken down to the coal face to dig for coal and bring it up to the surface. The people in those areas had no choice. They had to dig for coal or starve to death. The workers had nothing to add to production but their labour and whatever they produced was expropriated lock, stock and barrel by the capitalists for their own private use.

An objective look at the conditions under which those early industrial labourers worked suggests quite strongly that they were hardly better off than the slaves toiling on the sugar cane fields of Jamaica or the cotton plantations in the deep south of the USA. True, the factory workers, unlike the slaves were free men and women, they were only nominally so. In truth they were slaves to the industrialists. A situation in which a woman is delivered of a baby on the coal face on one day and has to return to work the next day can only be described as a form of slavery. There can be no single altruistic bone in men who operate such a system. If they were as inhuman to their own people as they were, there is no earthly reason why they could have been moved by any human feelings towards black people to want to free them from slavery for any altruistic reason.

Anyone who has been following this series faithfully would no doubt be impressed by the vast quantities of money or if you prefer, the loot which was flooding the coffers of a few countries in Western Europe in what appeared to be an unending stream. As soon as the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived in the Americas and parts of Africa respectively, they began to exploit those territories in a way which had not been seen in the history of the world.  European Empires of the day rose up quickly and fell just as quickly without leaving behind such structures as the pyramids of Egypt, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Pantheon of Greece or even the impressive road networks of the Roman empire. The lasting legacy of this period can however be identified as the rise of capitalism in Britain, from where it spread to the rest of the world. This has changed the world in a profound manner even whilst sowing the seeds of dangerous human division. This is because capitalism has its roots in the brutal exploitation of the vast majority by a miniscule minority and is based on the unhealthy platform of unhealthy rivalry between and within states. But underneath it all is the division of humanity into the league table of race and racism, the eggs from which it was hatched. Before the arrival of capitalism, culture, traditions and religion were the bases of human division into groups. But, for capitalism to develop humanity had to be divided strictly according to exploitable human races identifiable by skin colour. I am afraid that when the history of this era is written in the future it’s lasting legacy will be the anti-human division of the human race into manufactured human sub-races resembling different species.

The artificiality of the division of humanity into so called races is based on one simple and undeniable observation; there is only one human race known to science as Homo sapiens or to give it its descriptive English translation, Wise man (woman). It has to be said that this species was not suddenly inflicted upon the earth. It took a long time in arriving, having evolved through numerous clearly inferior races into the current version of the human race. This evolution is calculated to have taken place over a period of fifty million years, a very long time in human terms but very brief in geological time scale given that the formation of the world around us has been going on for more than four billion years. The brevity of the presence of Homo sapiens is established by the length of the earthly tenancy of our race which is no more than three hundred thousand years, only the last five thousand years or so being captured in authenticated human history. It is only since 1492 that the modern era of racial identification by skin colour began.

I remember listening to JJ. Okocha, the extravagantly talented Nigerian footballer claim that he did not know that he was black until he arrived in Europe to ply his trade on the football fields of that continent. That is a common experience of practically all adult black people who have made that transition at some point in their lives. And really, what is the point of the skin colour graduation that now rules the world? As the great Nelson Mandela is famously reported to have retorted to a white interlocutor who pointed out that he was not black but rather a shade of brown, ‘neither are you white but rather a shade of pink’ he shot back. The colour scheme that humanity has chosen to impose on itself is wildly imprecise most probably because of its artificiality. Human skin colour tones vary over a broad spectrum. From the jet black of some people living around the equator to the nearly paper white of those who were born in arctic regions. In other words, geography more than any other factor is responsible for the spectrum of colour seen around the world and all the differences are no more than skin deep. In biological jargon, it is no more than an adaptation to the environment. People who call the equatorial regions home need protection from the harmful rays of the sun and so have dark skins which filter out the worst effects of the sun. Those who live in places where the sun does not shine for long periods on the other hand are denied the opportunity of using sunlight for the production of vitamin D which is associated with bone strength. White people who live in tropic regions are susceptible to skin cancer whilst people with dark skins are likely to develop brittle bones in the absence of adequate sunshine. It is worth pointing out that there are other adaptations brought about by geographical dictates.

Some examples of this phenomenon are quite interesting but none of them is as well defined as skin colour.

It has now been demonstrated that people who live at high altitude have a greater lung capacity than those who live at sea level. This is because the concentration of oxygen is reduced at higher altitudes. Football followers must be aware of the difficulty of beating Bolivian football when they play at high altitude in La Paz because visiting teams have to play against the team in front of them as well as the difficulty of getting oxygen into their blood. Another interesting adaptation associated with high altitude is a congenital lack of the fear of height among people who live at high altitude. Some indigenous people living in the Andes mountains have absolutely no fear of heights and are superbly adapted to building sky scrapers or washing windows on the upper stories of finished sky scrapers. Such people look no different from the rest of us and are therefore not easily identified as being people who are set apart by their respective talents.

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The point to be made here is that our having been separated into different racial groups is strictly for economic reasons and that separation occurred long after the enslavement of the indigenous peoples in the Americas as well as the peoples of Africa. I feel bold to say it because Shakespeare wrote his iconic tragedy in the seventeenth century and it could only have resonated with his audience because it was still possible at that time for black men to hold important posts in Europe. In that play, Othello, the hero was not only black but was the commander of the Venetian army, leading his predominantly white forces and winning against the Turks who were in perennial conflict with the Venetians. He was commissioned to do a difficult job purely on merit and was not judged on the colour of his skin but on the contents of his character and manifest competence.

The first Africans to land on North American soil were bought from a passing English ship in 1619 but were not treated as slaves. Like many whites working on farms at the time, they were treated as indentured servants who were free to live as full citizens after a prescribed period. After their period of servitude they were able to acquire lands like their white neighbours and could employ servants of their own. As time went on however, demand for cheap labour went up and state after state promulgated slave codes which abolished the tenured servant status for black people and created a heritable slave status on every black person. This Africans were, on the strength of the slave codes converted into chattel to be sold, bought and otherwise exchanged at the whim of their white owners. From that point onward, they had become items of trade and remained so by law until their fraudulent emancipation in 1865. Human generation time has been fixed at thirty years which means that roughly ten generations of black people were born into slavery in the United States. The last person who was born a slave died in 1972 and it has been claimed that the last children of those born into slavery are quite possibly still alive. Another five generations of direct descendants of slaves have been produced since emancipation and American slavery has not yet been completely buried under the weight of history. A little dig today will expose the bones of slavery in America. The millions of Africans who have done nothing but suffer and died whilst creating wealth and criminal gentility for people who at least constitutionally think that they are only three fifths of a human. At least, they were thought to be marginally better than mules with which they worked side by sides out in the fields.

Once Africans became items of commerce, it became imperative that their status be recalibrated and their human status permanently revoked thereby opening the door to racism which has since become the single most important determinant of status in the world today.

Slavery has been a factor in practically all societies all over the world for several millennia but the virulent form which was inflicted on the world in the Americas was something completely unknown. For the first time in human history, slavery became an inheritable characteristic, to be passed down to coming generations ad infinitum and it was based on the colour of one’s skin. But when the colour of one’s skin became ambiguous or indeterminate as a result of racial mixing, a great deal of which was non-consensual, there was a recourse to blood. The iron rule in the USA is that if you could be connected to one drop of African blood reaching down to any number of generations, then you were classified as black with all the attendant consequences that your classification entails. In some other parts of the Americas, there is a hierarchy bypassed on skin tone with the lightest at the top and the darkest far down at the lowest level. In short, skin colour has been weaponised with those with dark skins relegated to the bottom. This only serves the purpose of ordering a world in which capitalism reigns supreme and as long as this is the case, true emancipation from slavery can only remain a pipe dream.