Walking Through Bridge For Summer

It is somewhat well known at this point, that the so-called ‘discoverer’ of the Americas, had in fact just stumbled upon those lands when he set off on a voyage to Asia. Columbus had planned to, though not the first, to reach Asia (which was known to have great wealth and resources) by sailing west from Europe. This proposal however, would be rejected by the Portuguese and the English authorities. In the end, in 1492, Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella (who were strong advocates of Catholic expansionism) agreed to finance the voyage under the condition that Columbus could retain 10 percent of the wealth he would find but the rest would have to return to the Spanish empire.

After months of sailing, in October the crew made landfall. He would record his impressions of the natives as such -

“They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

He had remarked later that “..this land isn’t meant for business, but to be conquered..”. Because, to Columbus’s annoyance, his voyage yielded no discovery of the riches he had promised to the Spanish monarchs. He thus explained to the king, that his plans of colonisation would be funded by slavery instead. So he sent hundreds of the natives of those lands to Spain, in the first slave ship of what would eventually become the massive trans-atlantic slave trade.

This would supplement the already existing trading of human beings in the Middle-East and within Europe, where Europeans had been enslaving each other. The colonial expansion gave it the form of an international trade of economic interest to the various empires. The Portuguese were in fact the first to expand overseas into Africa, even before Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. They would kidnap Africans from the west coast back into Europe. It is estimated that by the early 16th century as much as 10% of Lisbon's population was of African descent.

Interestingly, Columbus had never set foot on North American soil. Instead, he had found several of the Caribbean islands (the first of them being modern day Bahamas). The initial search, as aforementioned, was for gold and silver, but there was little to be found. Instead, the Europeans tried growing different crops, such as tobacco, to be sold back home. These didn’t seem to yield favourable results so the English colonists tried growing sugarcane in the Caribbean which was not a local plant, but it grew well. Sugarcane could be used to make various products. There was sugar, of course, which went well with tea, coffee and chocolate. It could also be used to make rum. These products were in good demand back in England. Eventually, those who grew it – known as ‘planters’ – became very wealthy. This also made the Caribbean colonies valuable – and tempting targets for rival empires.

Labour power was obviously a major requisite of the growing sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The initial sources of labour - from Europe and the American natives - were soon turning out to be insufficient. The slave ships which would earlier go from Africa to Europe, now began to head directly to the Caribbean where the planters were increasingly dependent on enslaved labour and bought slaves to form the bulk of their labour force.

Prior to this, the ideas governing racism and slavery were in certain ways limited and shaped by religious doctrines. In the middle ages, Islamic Law and Christian decree said that only those can be enslaved who are social outsiders, refusing to convert after being captured in war. But as the plantations grew further - propelled by the ever-incoming African slaves and the Native-American slaves - the composition of the population began to change. The Africans in fact, formed the majority. The cruel irony was that while the slaves toiled, planting sugar canes in the field and living in gruesome conditions, the plantation owners were at the same time sowing the seeds of racial hierarchy in society to justify the same - blacks and whites, with the ‘mixed’ somewhere between them.

The story of North America followed in similar footsteps. The British began their invasion of North America in 1587 when the Plymouth Company established a settlement in present-day Virginia. This first settlement failed mysteriously and in 1606, the Virginia Company of London sent a ship full of people to establish a settlement. They named the area Jamestown. Interestingly, the term “plantation” arose as the southern settlements, originally linked with colonial expansion, came to revolve around the production of agriculture. The climate of the South was ideally suited to the cultivation of cash crops, and King James had every intention of profiting from these plantations. Tobacco and cotton proved to be exceptionally profitable and gave the scope of mass production for exports. The interests of the big capitalists, however, were in direct contradiction to the individualistic mindset of most farmers back in the day who chose to practice farming on a small scale or so to say, intensively. For his hopes of mass production to be realised, the small farmers had to be made to concede and be a part of their extensive capitalist ecosystem. The answer to this was slavery.

But how? After all the slave labour employed by the planters was unskilled labour. In that light, hired free (i.e. Not enslaved) labour would obviously promise better returns owing to their efficiency. But then why didn’t the planters choose hired labour over slaves? This is because the stage of colonial encroachment in question didn’t facilitate that. Instead, the plans of the big capitalists found obvious benefits in the institution of slavery. Because when it came to the production of cash crops, the cost of production could be reduced significantly if the scale of production was large enough. This was perfectly facilitated by the vast slave labour force of the big planters. The lack of efficiency of the slave labour was made up for, by the profits generated. Soon the plantation system was being put into place to drive the economy of the North American south. The plantation owners pounced upon this opportunity to establish slavery as a socio-economic institution which basically translated into a prolonged period of extracting (unpaid) labour. This would turn out to be the dominant norm in the South and eventually exposed severe stratifications in society along class lines.

“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”

“Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World”

Karl Marx

In the 17th century, the social system was slowly making a transition from the then long-standing feudal order to capitalism. This transition was made quicker by the sheer plunder of slave labour by the early big-capitalists. The plantation owners and other merchants, especially in the south, amassed immense wealth during this period by virtue of the brute force of their colonial powers. This process, known as the ‘Primitive accumulation of capital’ laid the foundations for the capitalist mode of production and the stark class distinctions which were soon to be. Which is to say that as the feudal order began to wane, the new dominant class, the bourgeoisie, used this accumulation to establish itself as the controller of the means of production. This formed the basis of exploitation of the class which lacked the same, the proletariat. In the context of the American plantation system, they were the poor farmers, indentured servants and slaves.

Thus, slavery was never a moral adoption, (as explained in previous paras) it was the most necessary economic instrument required to construct the initial trampoline off which the capitalist mode of production would catapult into its future.
(Such primitive accumulation hasn’t ceased to be. It exists till date, not only due to yet-existing feudal relations in society but also as a general instrument of capitalist expansion and monopolising markets)

Hence, the discovery of America in a way opened up the floodgates of world trade. It created a market which, if looked at from the outside, fed and consumed itself in all self-sufficiency. For England, the primary engine driving it was the Triangular Trade. In it, England, France and Colonial America were the suppliers of the exports and the ships, Africa supplied the slave labour, while the various plantations supplied the raw materials. The sequence of events was as such: (1) the ships would carry manufactured goods from the home countries to Africa where they would be traded at a profit for Negro slaves, (2) the slaves in turn would be taken to the various plantations where they were again traded, at another profit, for raw materials produced in the plantations, (3) this cargo was taken back to the home countries as raw materials for their factories. At every level it was the home country which was being benefitted. The slaves were traded for the home country’s manufacture. The slaves worked in the plantations, producing raw materials for the industries of the home country. Even the aspect of maintenance of the slave, served as a market for those industries. All in all, a multiplicative loop ran on and on at the cost of plunder of slave labour.

The flow of capital and its influence on the Industrial Revolution in Britain can be traced quite simplistically in relation to the colonial developments. The sea-front city of Liverpool and its development was directly fuelled by the slave ships coming from the far west. The slave trade in Liverpool generated the capital necessary for the industrial uproar in its hinterland - Manchester. Even the choice of industry, cotton, was based on its continuous supply from the Indies, and the American south. The produce from Manchester would be taken back to Liverpool from where it would set sail for the African coast. This in fact would form the backbone of the rising British Capitalism.

In the later half of the 17th century, the ‘Age of enlightenment’ swept over Europe and its colonies. The French, the German, the English - all poured in their Enlightenment thinkers and their ideas (which were often very different from one another) into the world theatre. The Colonial Americans, influenced by this European intellectual movement and its cry for the ‘natural rights of humans’ began to demand the same from the British royals and its Parliament. This increasing friction gradually shaped the vision of an American government that would ensure and protect the rights of its citizens. The socio-economic balance between the British colonies in North America (‘Thirteen Colonies’) and England began to deteriorate. Gradually there was a conflict of interest between the British Raj and the emerging colonial capitalists. England won the seven year war with France in 1763 and subsequently the French colonies of North America came under British rule. But England banned the capitalists of the American colonies from trading with those colonies without the permission of the British authorities. In addition, a number of new taxes were introduced to cover a portion of the cost of the growing empire on the British colonies in the United States. Naturally, these stood in the way of the socio-political development of the colonial capitalists. Over the next decade, the British East India Company was given the right to export tea directly to the United States to save it from a business crisis, which greatly disrupted the economic interests of American tea-importing companies. These obvious economic factors are said to have laid the socio-economic basis for the American War of Independence. Although the initial opposition to British policy was put forth with an air of negotiation, its limitations soon became clear. Representatives of the thirteen American colonies decided to sever all economic and political ties with Britain. The Declaration of Independence was passed on the 4th of July 1776 with the consent of the Colonial Congress.