The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (20 page)

This gave a push to inventors who began a technological saga that has only accelerated with time. Drawing on seventeenth-century scientific experiments in hydraulics and hydrostatics, these pioneer engineers designed mechanical slaves, machines that could harness energy. Isaac Newton’s brilliant calculations of how gravity kept the planets in place prompted a new respect for human reason. As Alexander Pope wrote:

Nature and nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;

GOD said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.”

Thomas Newcomen, Richard Arkwright, and James Watt demonstrated that lesser mortals could take the Promethean fire from Newton and build engines that could work a lot harder than human beings and their animals.

These two phenomena—American slave-worked plantations and mechanical wizardry for pumping water, smelting metals, and powering textile factories—may seem unconnected. Certainly we have been loath to link slavery to the contributions of a free enterprise system, but they must be recognized as twin responses to the capitalist genie that had escaped the lamp of tradition during the seventeenth century. Both represented radical departures from previous practices. Take farming. Growing food had long been the province of each country’s peasantry. Peasants’ work was hard and demeaning, but families embedded in village customs did varied tasks of raising and preparing food. Sugar plantations began de novo, without rural traditions, using laborers wrenched from their homes to work like robots in military-style routines growing a single exotic crop.

Tapping into the energy of fossil fuel changed forever the relation of human beings to their natural environment. Inventiveness wasn’t new, but the scope of the steam power was. People had created elaborate waterwheels, windmills, fountains, bellows, guns, and dams, but they had never before penetrated the secrets of physics or devised ways to use those secrets to manipulate natural forces. The amount of power that could now be generated and the diversity of uses to which it could be put transformed production processes everywhere. Like that of the sugar plantation, their potential for generating profits accounts for the investment of time and money that people were willing to put into developing steam power. Both took concentration of capital, breaking ground for a new sugar plantation costing considerably more than setting up a cotton factory. This capital investment became the major feature of the new economic order. Perhaps even more significant to the workingmen and women at the time, both factories in the fields and factories under a roof introduced work routines that required long hours of disciplined labor. Employers had always preferred hard work to easygoing habits, but their considerable investment in slaves and equipment turned that preference into an imperative.

Politics in the late seventeenth century altered the history of capitalism by changing the European trading patterns. Fierce dynastic rivalries strained relations between Great Britain and France, France and Austria and the Netherlands, Spain and Great Britain, France and Russia and Spain, as well as some Italian states. Various combinations of these countries went to war against each other eight times between 1689 and 1815 for a total of sixty-three years.
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One major consequence of these hostilities was a sharp reduction in the intra-European trade that had grown substantially in the previous two centuries. Neighboring Great Britain and France, in particular, turned from each other as trading partners toward their overseas holdings. The wars themselves made raising revenue urgent, so heavy import tariffs became the order of the day. The various European colonies in the New World were expected to complement the economic needs of the mother country.

The persistent warfare among European powers created a kind of catch-22. The warring countries needed the riches they extracted from Asia and the New World to support their wars, but the intense competition for control of these lucrative trades triggered more bellicosity. France and England confronted each other in five different spots around the globe: over cotton and silk in India, slaves on the west coast of Africa, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Indian alliances in the Ohio River valley of the North American continent, and furs in the Hudson Bay area. James Fenimore Cooper commented wittily on this rivalry in
The Last of the Mohicans
when he observed that the French and English armies in North America were forced to travel long distances in order to fight each other.

Because of its centrality to the sugar trade, the slave trade was the most hotly contested European venture on the face of the globe. The numbers themselves shock one into an awareness of its significance. Between 1501 and 1820 slavers took 8.7 million Africans in chains to the Western Hemisphere; between 1820 and the final abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, 2.3 million more were sent. A total of 11 million men and women came from Africa to the New World colonies in comparison with the 2.6 million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the same period. Over one hundred thousand separate voyages brought this human cargo, 70 percent of them owned by either British or Portuguese traders.
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Sugar was one of capitalism’s first great bonanzas; its successes also revealed the power of the profit motive to override any cultural inhibitions to gross exploitation. Slavery was old. Egyptian slaves had built pyramids; Roman ones, bridges and aqueducts. What capitalism introduced was sustained and systematic brutality in the making of goods on a scale never seen before. It’s not size alone that distinguishes modern slavery from its ancient lineage in Greece and biblical times; it’s also race. Slavery then often had an ethnic component because slaves were taken as the captives of war, but never a consistently racial one. When the Portuguese brought back captured Africans to work in depopulated Lisbon starting in the fifteenth century, the trade didn’t differ much from the commerce in slaves that the Arabs had been conducting for several centuries throughout central and eastern Africa. A hundred years later, something new had been added to this commerce in human beings: They were integrated into an expanding production system. Those sent to the Caribbean were put to work in gangs planting sugarcanes, chopping weeds, cutting the harvest, and crushing the canes in the mills that turned out molasses and sugar. The very size of the trade promoted warfare in Africa in order to meet the new demand for slaves.

The Spanish, who were the first Europeans to arrive in the New World in search of gold and glory, would have been happy to use indigenous people to labor for them. Europeans did that wherever they could. But that was not to be, for the native people of the New World were peculiarly vulnerable to European diseases. So isolated had they been from the rest of the world’s people that they didn’t even have the same range of blood types as Asians, Africans, and Europeans, who had been mingling for many centuries. The joining of the Old and New Worlds caused an unintentional genocide as tribe after tribe in the Western Hemisphere died from the diseases that Europeans brought with them, leaving but a “saving remnant” of the indigenous population of North and South America.

Historical demographers put the pre-Columbian population at 90 to 110 million, with 10 to 12 million living north of Mexico. Measles, smallpox, pleurisy, typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, and diphtheria actually wiped out whole tribes. Repeated exposure to new diseases culled the indigenous population down to a tenth of its original size. People sickened and died with astounding rapidity. Without knowing what caused disease—germs weren’t isolated until the nineteenth century—no one understood the phenomenon. Indians sustained a profound psychological blow as they watched their own die while their conquerors survived. No less ignorant of the cause, Europeans tended to see God’s hand in saving them while destroying their pagan enemies.

A New Source of Labor

The Spanish, and later the Portuguese, tried to enslave the survivors, with limited success. Columbus had even sent 500 captured Indians back to Seville in 1495. In the early decades of the sixteenth century a succession of Spanish conquistadors moved onto the islands of the Greater Antilles, forcing the native people to pan gold and raise food for them. One of the witnesses of the bloody conquest of Cuba in 1511 was Bartolomé de Las Casas. In a long career as priest, historian, polemicist, Dominican friar, and bishop of Chiapas, he became the Indians’ greatest defender. It was Las Casas who suggested that the Spanish import African slaves as a way to protect the indigenous people. He argued that Africans were better prepared to work than the Indians who, he said, had not yet reached the same stage of civilization.
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From his suggestion came one of the most lucrative plums of Caribbean commerce, the asiento, a contract that Spanish officials awarded for an annual supply of slaves and European goods. The first one, signed in 1595, gave the Portuguese the exclusive rights to land 4,250 slaves annually at Cartagena. In 1713 the British secured the asiento in the peace treaty ending the War of the Spanish Succession.

While the Spanish used Indian and African slaves in mines, cattle ranches, and food-raising farms, the profits that sugar garnered paid for importing slaves. Pioneer agronomists in India had domesticated the sugar plant more than two thousand years earlier. It took more than a millennium for the sweet foodstuff to reach the Mediterranean. There Venetian merchants took control of the European market for it.
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Italians learned how to grow sugar successfully in Sicily, as did the Arabs in Ethiopia and on Zanzibar. The technique for processing sugar through cane-crushing mills came from the Arab world as well. The Portuguese no doubt picked up this know-how after invading Ceuta in Morocco just a few years before colonizing Madeira, its island possession off the Moroccan coast. In short order they experimented with growing sugar there and in the Azores, Cape Verde Islands, and Säo Tomé, all this in the fifteenth century. The Spanish followed suit in their Atlantic islands, the Canaries.

What was startlingly new in Madeira and São Tomé was the Portuguese organization of slaves into strict divisions of labor.
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Large numbers of workers had been collected under one roof before, but Portuguese sugar producers figured out how to coordinate the complicated tasks of crystallizing sugar from vats of boiling cane cuttings. Italian merchants had seized slavs (hence the name “slave”) from Eastern Europe for work in the Mediterranean from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries while Arab merchants had enslaved more than a million Western Europeans from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. At first the slaves the Portuguese used were white, but once Portuguese merchants had begun regularly bringing home Africans, sugar growers switched to black enslaved laborers. The thousand Africans that the Portuguese brought back annually to Lisbon in the mid-fifteenth century grew to thirty-five hundred a century later.
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Good luck and good winds had given the Portuguese a large foothold in South America, Brazil. At first, they concentrated on exporting the famous brazilwood that produced red dye and gave Brazil its name. (Actually Portuguese priests had first called this vast region Holy Cross.) Forests stretched along the southeast coast and inland for several miles. The Portuguese relied upon the Tupi hunters and gatherers to extract the resources from the trees. This turned out to be a temporary labor force, for the Tupi refused to farm. They fled into the recesses of the forests or killed themselves when the Portuguese attempted to coerce them to work. It was more plunder than production, as one scholar commented, and when it was over, the Portuguese in Brazil turned to the sugar production that they had mastered closer to home.
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Breaches on the Spanish Lake

Nowhere is the profit-maximizing imperative of capitalism more in evidence than in the sugar sweep in Europe’s New World colonies. Columbus carried sugarcane slips to the Caribbean on his second trip. Spanish authorities back home encouraged their cultivation, but the colonists themselves were more interested in precious metals. It was left to the Portuguese in Brazil to demonstrate the profits to be boiled out of sugarcane once you secured workers to do the drudgery. Sugar growing in Madeira and São Tomé gave the Portuguese a template for establishing plantations in the New World. Over the course of more than three centuries, Brazil imported almost four million slaves, the largest of any European outpost and more than a third of the total sent to the New World. Small wonder that Brazilians, looking out at the mountain in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, could only see a sugar loaf.

While the pope made Spain accept the Portuguese presence in Brazil, the Council of the Indies in Seville had every intention of keeping the Caribbean a Spanish lake. Alas, Spain’s wars in the sixteenth century had exhausted both the country and the royal treasury, just at the moment when the French, Dutch, English, even the Danish were eager to enter the scramble for New World wealth. Nor could Spanish manufacturers supply the goods that their colonists wanted—surely not as cheaply as the Dutch and English, who were only too willing to smuggle tools, weapons, cloth, and food into the many port cities of the Spanish New World. Spain’s effort to maintain monopoly control only attracted outlaws to the Caribbean. Soon the area was considered “beyond the line”—outside the norms of European civilization and its international treaties. Here Europeans accepted rapes, abductions, plunder, torture, attacks, piracy, and chicanery of every kind, all made the more debased by the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans and Indians.
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True to their concentration on commerce, the Dutch wanted a toehold on the Spanish Main. Dutch West India Company traders moved from piracy to smuggling and finally to the occupation of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, in 1634. Near Curaçao also was a source of salt, a precious food additive critical to the Dutch herring trade. The company had already established New Netherlands on the North American continent when it purchased Manhattan for goods worth roughly twenty-four dollars. With its natural harbor Curaçao became the center of the Dutch slave trade. With this gateway to Spain’s mainland colonies, the Dutch entered the competition for the Spanish asiento.