A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 18). This blog is a continuation of review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Chapter 6: Plunder and Loot
Much of what goes under the heading of ‘trade’, especially in the early days of European expansion, amounted to little more than plunder. Europeans coveted the wealth of the East. They obtained the means to pay for it – at first gold and silver and later, more indirectly, slaves – largely by force. Adam Smith says: ‘The pious purpose of converting the inhabitants to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project. But the hope of finding treasures of gold there was the sole motive which prompted them to undertake it. The first English settlers in North America offered a fifth of all the gold and silver which should be found there to the king, as a motive for granting them their patents.’
The Spaniards were in ‘seventh heaven’
According to a Mexican text preserved in the Florentine Codex, the Spaniards were in ‘seventh heaven’: ‘They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit up their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with a great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.’ Later when they reached Tenochtitlan: ‘And then they made a great ball of the gold and set a fire, putting to the flames all that remained no matter how valuable, so that everything burned. As for the gold, the Spaniards reduced it and made bars.’ In Peru, Pizarro extracted a ransom of a roomful of gold and two of silver from the Inca Atahualpa; and then he strangled him. The European thirst for gold and silver culminated triumphantly in the discovery of Potosi, the ‘mountain that gushed silver’. They put the natives, those that were left after the ravages of conquest, to work extracting it, and most of them died. The Europeans used the gold and silver which they plundered in America to buy what they could not plunder in Asia.
Chapter 7: Plantations, Workers and Slaves
These ravages were further extended with the introduction of sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations. The Europeans eventually introduced the plantation system into nearly all the areas they dominated to grow products they wanted. But it was first introduced in America. The first chapter of Eduardo’s book The Open Veins of Latin America is entitled ‘Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver’. The second is dedicated to ‘King Sugar and Other Agricultural Monarchs’. Sugar was then scarce and highly prized in Europe. On his second voyage to America, Columbus planted sugarcane roots in the Dominican Republic. The plantation system spread throughout the Caribbean and, notably, to the Brazilian northeast. Land was granted by the monarchs to individual conquerors and soldiers and the present-day latifundio system evolved from these original grants of land. Galeano says: ‘The land was devastated by this selfish plant which invaded the New World, felling forests, squandering fertility, and destroying accumulated soil humus. The long sugar cycle generated a prosperity as mortal as the prosperity generated by the silver and gold of Potosi.’ The absorption of land by plantations and latifundios progressed fast and the local people were left with less and less land to provide for their own needs. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, European colonization left sterile rock, washed-out soil, eroded lands.
Densely populated regions were completely depopulated
Estimates of the numbers killed by the Spaniards range from 12 million to 15 million; densely populated regions like Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and the coast of Venezuela were completely depopulated. The Portuguese in India behaved in similar fashion; prisoners were slaughtered and their hands, noses and ears sent in mockery to the ‘barbarian’ kings. The availability of labor was a problem for the colonialists everywhere, and they resorted to the use of slaves. The shortage of labor was most severe in the Americas and new supplies were sought in Africa.
The biggest of all the slave trades
Thus began the biggest of all the slave trades, and the one in which the British were the major operators. Estimates of the number of African slaves who reached America alive range from 10 million to over 100 million. To this figure must be added the 15% to 20% killed on the journey, the many more killed while resisting capture and the many killed in the wars waged between Africans to obtain captives for sale to Europeans. Africa was transformed into a hunting ground for slaves. Local rulers and elites were transformed into accomplices of the ‘trade’; and in return for slaves, the products that were offered were rum, guns and textiles. The institution of slavery in the Americas continued up to the 19th century, in particular because of the need of British industry for cotton grown in North American plantations. As Marx commented, the institution of free wage-labor in Europe was built upon the pedestal of slavery in the Americas.