THE impact of the West’s encounter with the Americas was devastating for its people. The population of the Americas before Europe’s “discovery” has been estimated to be anything between 2 to 100 million people. The figures of genocide also depend not only on different estimates of the Indigenous population of the Americas but also on what numbers should be excluded in the counting of victims of genocide. Do we include those who died of diseases as their societies and the productive basis of their societies were destroyed? How do we account for an estimated 2-8 million who died in the silver mines of Potosi, a significant number of whom were the indigenous people?
Leaving out these issues to others, let us get back to how silver, the first global commodity, was mined from the mines starting from Potosi in Bolivia. The Potosi mine was known as the Mountain that Eats Men. The brutal conditions of mining, the long hours spent underground, and the difficulty of beating at a height of 14,000 feet took their toll on the miners, the indigenous people who were enslaved. The solution for the Spanish was to import slaves from Africa. As the Treaty of Tordeseillas had “allotted” Africa to the Portuguese, Spain gave the contract for supplying slaves from Africa to the Portuguese. This became known as Asiento de Negros (agreement of blacks), which was held later by the Genoese merchants, the Dutch, the French and the British.
The Portuguese built the El Mina Castle in Ghana, which used to hold Africans in between slave ship voyages, transporting them to the Americas for silver and gold mines. With the Dutch capturing El Mina castle later, the Portuguese shifted to Angola for their procurement of slaves. The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the introduction of plantation crops—sugar, coffee, tobacco, and coca—in the Caribbean and Brazil. From the smaller numbers required for the mines, the plantations run by slave labour became the major “market” for slaves. From silver as the first global commodity, slaves and sugar became the second part of the story of the rise of the West. And again, it predates the Industrial Revolution by two and a half centuries.
The numbers enslaved in Africa and transported to the plantations are estimated to be 3 million in the 16th, 6 million in the 17th, and another 3 million in the 18th century, a total of 12 million people. This does not take into account the indentured labour from India and China, who became the source of labour in West and East Indies plantations after the abolition of Slavery. Nor does it address the demographic collapse in Africa as a consequence of the large-scale “removal” of young men and women on the sustainability of societies from which they were being taken. The African demographic collapse is not as severe as the Americas, but nevertheless led to Africa’s population not growing at a time when Asia and Europe showed rapid growth of their populations.
The slave labour was the backbone of the plantation economy in the Americas. The first major plantation crop was sugar. It was Caribbean plantations that produced the second global commodity after silver: sugar. The West, having learned the production of sugar from the Arabs during the crusades, first experimented on plantation-based sugar production in Mediterranean islands, then Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and then in Sao Tome off the coast of Africa. The Portuguese took it from Sao Tome, which was under Portuguese control, to Brazil. The Dutch, who controlled the sugar-growing areas of Brazil for a brief period, took it to Dutch Guyana, from where it spread to the British Caribbean islands of Barbados, Jamaica and the French Caribbean island of San Domingue (now Haiti).
The conventional narrative of the birth of capitalism flowing from the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution leading to the Industrial Revolution also airbrushes out of history that the plantation economy in the Caribbeans established sugar as a global commodity. It was followed by cotton production, again produced by slaves in the American South, which underwrote England’s textile revolution. In this story, the other global commodity, slaves from Africa, is left out, as, after all, human beings cannot be considered commodities. Except for those involved in the slave trade, the merchants from London, Bristol, and Liverpool—responsible for 90% of the slave ships from England—thought otherwise. Human trafficking for them was just another trade; human beings were just entries into the profit and loss columns of the ledger.
How did the European nations procure slaves from Africa? Briefly, it was the newfound silver from the Spanish American mines that funded the procurement of slaves with guns and gunpowder as the major coercive element of the “trade”. Silver, guns, gunpowder, textiles, spices, all these went into not simply funding the slave trade but the “production” of slaves from Africa. This is what reduced free men and women into slaves, what the French anthropologist Meillassoux calls the production of slaves from the “womb” of gold (money) and iron (guns and bullets).
Sugar not only created the capitalist market but also laid the foundations—along with Spanish silver—of the global financial system. It was accompanied by the other ‘commodity’—slaves captured in Africa and sold in the Caribbeans and Americas. The development of British, Dutch and French capital is the story of this vicious practice of treating human beings as commodities for the market, no less than it is about the commodity produced through such labour. The cotton that was the backbone of the English cotton mills came again from the slave plantations of the southern U.S., what the Americans still refer to nostalgically as the Antebellum South.
The brutality of the plantation economy is known to us from American literature and the more “modern” cotton plantations. The condition of slave labour in the sugar plantations of the Caribbeans and Louisiana in the U.S. was far worse. The average number of years for a slave before the banning of the slave trade was counted to be 7 years before he or she had to be replaced. Children worked from the age of 4-5, helping their parents in the fields. The calculation for slave labour in the journals of the plantation owners was a matter of fact and completely “scientific”: how much does it cost to keep a slave, and when was the return on capital enough to “replace” him or her? Very much how a capitalist calculates depreciation on his capital equipment.
The globalisation of trade in the 16th-18th century had silver flowing out to China and India from the West, while silk, porcelain, spices, and cotton textiles came back to Europe. While Spanish silver was the basis of trade to the East, what did the Dutch, French and British supply to the global markets? How did the Dutch, French and British participate in this global trade? It is here that the role of these three, major suppliers of slaves to the Caribbeans—they held the subsequent slave contracts with Spain after Portugal—but also sugar producers for the global market. It was the sugar plantations of the Caribbeans. The Dutch later also had sugar plantations in the Dutch East Indies but more with indentured Indian and Chinese labour, just as the British did in West Indies and Mauritius with indentured Indian labour.
Eric Williams did the pioneering study of the “contribution” of Slavery to the British economy in his Capitalism and Slavery. Subsequently, Joseph Inikori developed his arguments further in Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. Some of us have summarised our findings and are working on the issue of sugar and Slavery, to which we need to add the supply of textiles and gunpowder in the British trade with Africa. The so-called triangular trade assumes that the British produced and manufactured whatever it supplied to Africa on the Europe-Africa side of the triangle. It did not. Cotton textiles from India consisted of anything from 30-50% of the value of goods traded for slaves in Africa. The English had not yet made their industrial revolution during this period when sugar was the major global commodity. Gunpowder may have appeared to be an English product, but it was not. The major constituent and the cost of gunpowder was saltpetre, which again came from Bengal-Bihar.
The history of capitalism is not from Enlightenment, Science and the Industrial Revolution as the West would have us believe. As Marx noted, it comes from the blood and sweat dripping from its every pore. This is the history they would have us forget.