![]() There are many reasons why this seems silly on the face of it. From this camp, the message is that the commerce in slaves itself was never a very profitable business and that plantation agriculture was of very limited importance to Europe’s success. There has long existed a cottage industry of historical denial in Europe-and nowhere more so than in Britain-about the importance of slavery to that continent’s emergence in the modern era as the richest and most powerful region in the world. ![]() These culminated in the French charnel house plantations of Saint-Domingue, where an uprising of Africans that began in 1791 would ultimately see the liberation of enslaved people and the birth of the second oldest republic in the Americas, which they named Haiti. But starting long before the Raj, it was this region, the so-called West Indies, that would see a succession of the richest colonies in economic history. Given the immensity of the horrors inflicted through slavery on Black people in the Caribbean, the British have traditionally preferred to think of their empire as having been seated in India. As the English proved in Barbados though, even bigger money was to be made from plantation agriculture built on the backs of enslaved Africans, starting in the Caribbean. The near-total replacement by mid-century of white indentured servants with enslaved men and women who were brought in chains from Africa and deliberately worked to death-almost as many as the number of enslaved people brought to the incomparably larger mainland North America-turned sugar cultivation in Barbados into a virtual license to print money.Įarly stories of the European New World empire commonly taught in Western schools are dominated by famous acts of plunder by Spanish conquistadors against great Native American civilizations like the Inca and Aztec, filling galleons with astounding quantities of silver and gold. In Barbados, the English quickly implemented the morally indefensible but economically unbeatable economic model that the Portuguese had recently devised in São Tomé. In that same decade, as I have argued in my book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, the most important foundational act of English empire-building took shape on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where the English colonized Barbados, a small island in the eastern Caribbean that is approximately one-third the surface area of present-day Los Angeles. It was called the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa and was ambitiously granted a monopoly on the lucrative trade of that continent for a period of 1,000 years. Before long, the company was rebranded in a way that took all the mystery out of the principal geographical target. Here, adventure meant the violent quest for gold and slaves in the tropics. Her successors took her efforts further with the 1631 formation of the colorfully named Company of Merchant Adventurers of London. In doing so, that first Elizabeth laid the early groundwork for what would eventually become the British empire. But the sovereign whose era we mostly associate with author William Shakespeare yearned for a far-bigger stage and encouraged the gentry as well as pirates like John Hawkins to venture out beyond the English Channel to raid Portuguese and Spanish ships and get in on their booty of gold and human beings extracted from coastal West Africa. Their model, based on sugar cultivation and commerce of the enslaved Africans who fueled it, would quickly come to dominate economic life in the Atlantic for centuries, supercharging European economies and propelling the rise of the West over the so-called rest.Įngland’s imperial history up to Queen Elizabeth I’s time had been mostly limited to dominating its neighbor Ireland. The former had shown the way, earning fortunes trading with West Africans for gold beginning late in the 15th century before perfecting a revolutionary formula that conjoined plantation agriculture with race-based chattel slavery to produce tropical commodities on tiny São Tomé. The Portuguese and Spanish had established an early dominance in this endeavor. ![]() In the late 1550s, taking stock of affairs in Europe, an English queen named Elizabeth grew worried about being left behind in a new race underway among her country’s neighbors on the continent: the construction of a far-flung empire.
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