The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. Gerald Horne
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then antagonist, the Dutch, engendering a process that led to a new identity: “whiteness” or the leapfrogging of ethnic boundaries and constraints. The influence of the Dutch on events in English colonies, not least in illustrating the value of republicanism, should be underscored here too.32
THE ISLES OFF THE WESTERN COAST of Europe had plenty of experience with martial conflict, beginning in the early 1640s. However, it was not just England that was beset by turmoil. Yes, what has been called the “Puritan Revolution” stretched from the 1640s to the 1660s. There were also a series of revolts in France known as the Fronde, which may have surpassed in havoc and intensity the events there of the late eighteenth century. By 1649 there was a kind of coup that hit the Netherlands. In 1640 there was a revolt in Catalonia that failed, accompanied by another in Portugal against Madrid that succeeded. The next year there was nearly a revolt in Andalusia as well. In 1647 there was a major revolt in Naples. In short, there was a general crisis in Western Europe, inducing strains that were then transferred to the Americas and Africa. The crisis in Europe was resolved in part by transferring the raging militarism westward for conquest. However, dialectically, the riches driven by dispossession and mass enslavement helped to propel colonial merchants, many with close ties to New England, to the forefront in London in the 1640s when civil war rocked England. Finally, these merchants directed a revolt against the monarchy in 1776 that allowed them to further enrich themselves at the expense of enslaved Africans and looted indigenes.
In other words, what was unfolding in Western Europe was in some ways a regional crisis of production as the emerging bourgeoisie strained against the feudal leash, then broke free while retaining the bloodily bellicose backwardness of the previous regime, which facilitated enslavement and dispossession.33 There was the Swiss peasant war of 1653 and a major Ukrainian revolt during the same period. Bookending these mass uprisings were the rebellions in Ireland in 1641 and 1689. According to the late E. J. Hobsbawm, this represented the “last phase of the general transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy,”34 a transition fueled by enslavement and colonial dispossession.
Providing a frenzied context was the reality that the year 1641 witnessed the third coldest summer recorded over the past six centuries in the Northern Hemisphere. In 1641 there were more deaths from snow and frost and extreme cold than from violence, which admittedly was extreme, too. There was an accompanying severe drought in Senegambia and Upper Niger from 1640 to 1644. Angola records a unique concentration of droughts, local infestations, and epidemics throughout the second quarter of the seventeenth century with a major drought and famine in the late 1640s, as slave ships began to descend in southwest Africa in droves. It was not just the 1640s that were subject to climate crisis; 1621 saw an “El Niño Autumn” that ruined the harvest in England, and, arguably, helped to instigate migration across the Atlantic.35
A quarter or perhaps even a third of the adult male population may have been in arms in the British Isles during this period. Casualties were astronomical, higher as a proportion of population than the catastrophic figures of the First World War. The figures for Scotland in the 1640s were even higher and those of Ireland higher still. This not only created battle-hardened troops well-disposed to subdue Africa and the Americas, but the losers in these conflicts were often dispatched to the budding Caribbean plantations as bonded laborers, and their resultant bumptious rebelling then set the stage for creating enslaved Africans and indigenes to supplant them.36
These 1640s’ conflicts were another turning point in terms of the apocalypse that ensnared Africans and indigenous Americans. Yet, like a seesaw, as some lost their lives, their freedom, others benefited. Foremost among this latter group was Maurice Thomson, who helped to finance Oliver Cromwell, the “Lord Protector” who deposed the king in London, then went on to rampage through Ireland. Thomson was promised 16,218 acres in the Ulster counties of Antrim and Armagh for his troubles, which included this merchant lending considerable sums of money to support Cromwell’s forces in Ireland. This occurred after he had succeeded against the odds as a Virginia planter, taking up a grant at Blunt Point near what is now Newport News as early as 1621. Thomson was also a tireless trafficker in human lives, taking up a grant in St. Kitts to facilitate his growing involvement in the African Slave Trade. The busy Thomson also had a hand in the Canadian fur trade.37
As the civil wars in England were unfolding, the Thirty Years’ War on the continent was lurching to a close, marked by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648.38 This epochal agreement established rules for state sovereignty that have yet to disappear, but the concord also set the stage for European expansion. These sovereigns, including the now battle-hardened England, were able to turn their military prowess outward toward Africa and the Americas. In the process, toughened, albeit defeated, troops were exported abroad to the Caribbean, suitable for wreaking havoc on the indigenous and Africans alike.39 At the same time, merchants groaning under the wealth produced by plunder and enslavement in the Caribbean were a major force driving the anti-monarchism that led to a beheading of a king in the 1640s. These very same merchants were to triumph in 1688 in the so-called Glorious Revolution, which empowered them further as they weakened the Crown’s control of the wildly lucrative African Slave Trade, which ultimately provided the wherewithal for the overthrow of the reign of the monarch again in 1776.
Assuredly, the seventeenth century proved to be decisive, not only to the rise of what came to be the British Empire but also in the secession in 1776 that created a competing power, which has carried the torch of global supremacy into the twenty-first century, with it too being propelled by enslavement of Africans most notably.40
Nevertheless, this is not a story of unblemished triumph. This seventeenth-century rise was an unmitigated disaster for those who were its primary victims. Though understandably and justifiably West Africa is viewed routinely as the prime vector of European depredations on the beleaguered continent, hundreds of thousands of souls were snatched from East Africa, with this number accelerating in the seventeenth century, then expanding exponentially thereafter.41 The early seventeenth century marked the advent of English slaving in the Indian Ocean basin, with some of those manacled shipped to the Malay Peninsula.42
The seventeenth century also marked an acceleration of what came to be a genocide against the indigenous population of North America.43 Though even those on the left, often in a one-sided fashion, hail the point that London’s bastard child in North America merits a salute because of its bringing of bourgeois democracy, this was more akin to burning down the house in order to roast the pig. As I have pointed out elsewhere, hailing the arrival of bourgeois democracy should be seen in the same way that it arrived in South Africa—as a means by which to consolidate colonial rule by dint of “race,” providing a kind of “combat pay” to settlers. Moreover, 1776 was an attempt to continue the process of moving west through North America, seizing the land of indigenes and stocking same with enslaved Africans, when it seemed an exhausted London was more keen to turn its attention to the jewel that was British India or newer horizons in Africa. Thus, 1776 completed the apocalypse begun in the seventeenth century.44
The British scholar Richard Gott has a point when he concludes that “the rulers of the British Empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.”45 Of course, a friendly amendment would also include their brethren in North America in this hall of infamous shame. Indeed, the forces unleashed by the rise of London, then New York, proved little less than apocalyptic for Africans and the indigenous of North America.46
In North America the colonialism implanted bloodily involved racialization, which meant the denial of the right to have rights, making millions—Africans particularly—denizens of a society but not of it, that is, permanent aliens, a status that has not entirely dissipated to this very day, indicating its profundity. Ultimately, this is a description of what “race” means,47 a pernicious concept that emerged forcefully, coincidentally enough, in the seventeenth century as colonialism was gaining traction.48
This serves to explicate why the eminent Ghanaian scholar A. Adu Boahen has termed the slave trade “an unpardonable crime, a crime unmitigated by any extenuating circumstance.”49 And certainly not extenuating is the racially