I feel the need to reflect and digest some of the things I’ve learned over the past several years of armchair history reading, listening and viewing. I have no idea when Part Two of this lesson may come, but this is something of a mid-term to assess where I am.
I am particularly glad I started to keep track of the Books I’ve Read Lately. To steal a metaphor from Alexander von Humboldt, I feel I’ve been on a mountain climb these past several years to gain a better understanding of where we (America, humanity, myself) came from and how we got here. I noted in my review of Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt that the book helped tie together a number of threads for me:
Very unexpectedly, the Humboldt book helped me piece together interconnections of events, ideas and personalities involved in the American, French, Haitian and South Americans revolutions — crucibles which formed today’s world of nation states, representative democracies, multiethnic societies, intellectual focus on reason and science, and nascent recognition of human impact on the earth. I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate this book without having traveled over these several years of readings and now podcasts, sparked by the unlikely source of John Leguizamo’s play, Latin History for Morons. I’m still embarrassed that this goofy show was the genesis of my curiosity, but it led me straight to Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Israel’s The Expanding Blaze, Wilson-Lee’s Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Mann’s 1491 and 1493, Arana’s Silver, Sword and Stone, Roberts’ Napoleon: A Life, Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin, Horwitz’s Spying on the South, and the Revolutions podcasts.
Add Guns, Germs, and Steel to that list now. I feel like I’m at something of a plateau in my climb and it’s an appropriate point to reflect and digest.
Nearly 30 years ago with the end of the Cold War (hard to believe it’s that long ago), came a popular concept or misconception: the end of history, especially associated with Francis Fukayama’s writings. The simplified version that caught popular attention: “The end of history…proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics…Now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy. That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
There was a great deal of academic and practical criticism of this notion, but the core idea of the triumph of “Western liberal democracy” as the best approach to governing human society still seems prevalent. It’s there in Trump supporters’ belligerent calls for “freedom” as well as Biden’s argument about the competition between democracy and autocracy. Implicitly, we are to assume that democracy is the best choice.
I keep circling around questions of whether “Western liberal democracy” is really the best we can do. I have my doubts. Which country is really doing it right? What is the best constitutional/governing model? If you were starting a country today, what political model would you choose to emulate? What constitutes a nation or state worthy of its own constitution and government? Is a nation or state better off being bigger and more polyglot or smaller and more focused? Is there really wisdom in masses and crowd-sourcing? Do technological advances offer better avenues for governance?
I know that I am way out of my depth in trying to answer these questions. Professional academics, politicians and greater fools than I spend lifetimes working on these (likely) unanswerable topics. Nevertheless, I wrestle with these questions for my own sake and to explore what others come up with. A large part of my armchair amateur historical interest is driven by a recognition of how little I know of major flows of history, and how fluid these ideas have become.
The run up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in the last few weeks invoked an avalanche of articles reviewing the event and subsequent two decades of missteps and lessons learned and not learned. One of the best was a comprehensive (and thankless) survey by Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post, of dozens of books about the attack and its aftermath. The headline takeaway: “9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.” Another excellent opinion piece came from Laila Lalami in the NY Times: “What We Remember and Forget on 9/11″. One of the quotes that struck me was this:
“My work as a novelist has taught me that memory is idiosyncratic. One event experienced by five people will lead to five stories, each with its own peculiar details. Even when there is a single vantage point, the passage of time can heighten certain aspects of memory or erase them altogether. Like people, nations form memories in malleable ways, often revising and reinterpreting significant moments in their histories. They adopt rituals, build monuments, share stories about themselves that shift with time.”
I’m repeatedly surprised at how malleable history has become. Has it always been? When I grew up, history was a fixed narrative, a set of facts. One damn thing after another. More than I was ever aware, history turns out to be open to recursive revision and reinterpretation, just like differing perspectives on current events. Everything we know is wrong…according to someone, which is shaky ground on which to operate a life, much less a society or planet. At the moment, there seems to be no truth, only alternative facts.
For example, I grew up with the “lost cause” narrative that Robert E. Lee was one of the great American generals. Today, with his statue coming down in Richmond, reappraisals abound: see opinions by Eugene Robinson and Dana Milbank which both draw from this 2017 Atlantic reassessment of Lee. My kneejerk reaction is to agree that Lee’s statues should come down and we should more clearly assess his merits or lack thereof as a general and rebel leader. But I still struggle a little with denigrating him for being a slaveholder per se — though I didn’t realize he was quite such a devoted white supremacist. He was a man of his times whose wealth was built and depended on slavery. It’s not too surprising that he would fight to defend that economy and the social constructs that underpinned it, but there’s no reason we should celebrate it today.
Having said that, I’m ashamed of the sentiment. I’m only just learning the extent to which this nation and in fact Western Europe were complicit beneficiaries of the slave trade. This has been another thread of learning running through the past several years, but I’ve had some recent eye-openings that shouldn’t have taken this long.
Last Sunday, Barb and I watched a PBS show about King George III and IV by the ever-present and often frivolous Lucy Worsley (a real-life historian and academic who does an awful lot of pretty awful TV). The show was titled “Lucy Worsley’s Royal Myths and Secrets” which was so off-putting I wasn’t going to watch it, but it turned out this episode was related to the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era I’ve been trying to learn about, so I actually watched it…twice. I learned a fair bit about George III and IV that I didn’t know (and finally pieced together what the Regency period was about — didn’t get that or any other actual history from Bridgerton or Barb’s endless collection of romance novels).
That episode in turn led me to another episode about Queen Anne. I learned that Queen Anne formed Great Britain by uniting England and Scotland (largely through bribery) to keep Scotland from going Catholic and more in league with the French. Why didn’t I know that? Pretty much all I knew of Queen Anne before that was from The Favourite and forming the United Kingdom wasn’t in it, I don’t think.
More significantly, I learned for the first time about Great Britain gaining the “Asiento” or the right from Spain to transport slaves to the Americas. Why didn’t I know about that? This period coincided with Great Britain’s rapid rise in wealth and trade — many British fortunes were built directly related to the slave trade. How so, and how much? I then learned that the Asiento changed hands frequently but in a well documented manner over centuries. I want to understand more about who else held the Asiento, how it changed over time, and how the Spanish crown profited from it. What was the Dutch relationship to Spain at the points they had it? Why didn’t the Spanish transport slaves directly? Was the Asiento a loan? A bond? I haven’t gotten to the bottom of these questions.
“Triangular trade” was at least a concept I learned in school but in a very different context. It originally just seemed a clever way to keep the wheel going round, an economic engine that helped build America. “Molasses to Rum to Slaves,” per the song from the musical 1776. There is a lot more to it than that, especially realizing how it enabled and promoted the slave trade well beyond the Carolinas and Virginia. Who else profited off the slave trade over time? How much? To what extent did profits from the slave trade help fund the industrial revolution?
Searching for answers led me to SlaveVoyages.org which is an essential and relatively recent effort to document the actual slave trade, voyage by voyage. This is the source of the remarkable graphic that drew my attention at the African American History Museum in 2018 — the vast majority of slaves went to Brazil and the Caribbean. There’s also a flow of millions to Arabia, Southwest Asia and North Africa that often gets overlooked, but for the time being that’s a different story.
There’s another graphic that needs to be more prominently taught: who ran the Atlantic slave trade.
This highlights that the British and the Portuguese (sourced in Brazil, according to the graphic which is a little deceptive, I feel — it downplays the overall Portuguese role) were the main organizers of voyages, and presumably the main profiteers. I think this graphic also underplays the Spanish role and profit from the trade but it’s especially interesting to me what a large role the British played. I hadn’t realized that before.
There are two timelapse graphics on the site that are marvelously illuminating and merit further study and understanding. One is of the transatlantic voyages, and the other of the intra-American trade.
The essays embedded in the SlaveVoyages.org site are very good expansions and explanations of the numbers, worth reading in their own right. I hope over time they will go into more depth — they seem to have been mostly static since 2007-2008. The site promises more research underway, particularly into the Intra-American trade (“only” 446,000 enslaved people accounted for so far in its database), and who profited (who financed and profited from the trade? How did it affect national balances of trade?).
When I first visited the DC African American History Museum in 2018, I was struck by the vastly greater number of Africans brought to the Caribbean and South America (more than 10 million) compared to the relatively small number (around 400,000) brought to the North American colonies. I knew that I was missing a lot of the story of slavery in the Americas which helped spark my interest in the revolutions in Haiti and throughout South America, but I hadn’t yet seen a comprehensive handling of the whole story.
Searching more recently into the questions of who profited from the slave trade, I found some sources offering a bigger picture. Some of the most accessible come from specialized sites offered by the BBC, National Museums Liverpool, and Colonial Williamsburg. Each confirms the central role of slavery in the Atlantic trade triangle that ultimately powered the Industrial Revolution in Britain and beyond. But their base of evidence is anecdotal, not very detailed.
Finally, I found a very good, though dense, academic journal article by University of Rochester professor Joseph Inikori, “Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy” (published October 2020 in Current Anthropology from a 2018 symposium in Sintra, Portugal). It deals with many of the big-picture flows of goods over the course of the Columbian Exchange. I’m going to copy/quote a lot of it here (apologies to all).
As we know too well, the production and distribution of silver and gold in Spanish America powered the commercializing process in both Spanish America and Western Europe for more than a hundred years from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. With treasure pouring in from their American colonies, Spanish elites and their government were encouraged to rely on other Western European economies to supply their needs and those of their Spanish colonies in manufactures and commercial services. As those needs expanded enormously because of an ambitious imperial enterprise, which American treasure also inspired, the silver and gold from Spanish America moved quickly out of Spain to the developing economies of Western Europe to pay for their supplies:
“Half of Europe, from Genoa to Hamburg, was involved in the “big business” of exploiting America through Spain’s Indies trade. Some 94 percent of the value of all goods shipped to America in Spain’s famous convoys of flotas and galeones in the late seventeenth century consisted of non-Spanish goods; 40 percent of the exports via Cadiz were French in origin. It was a self-intensifying system. As the goods of Europe’s advanced economies flooded Spain’s American markets, capital increasingly drained from lower Andalusia to England, France, Italy, and the Low countries, and the returns in silver from Mexico and Peru flowed back through the foreign branch houses in Seville and Cadiz to irrigate the whole of Europe’s economy.” (Bailyn 2005:87–88)
There can be no doubt that trade in American products and Asian goods purchased with American bullion was central to the growth of intra-European trade and the development of domestic markets and the spread of the market economy in Europe in the formative years 1500–1800. Much of what is treated as intra-European exports during the period ought to be assigned to Atlantic trade.
…
It is now well known to professional economic historians that the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was central to the rise of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. The starting point is the nature of economies and societies in the Americas when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Even though there is some disagreement among specialists, there is general agreement that there were about 57.3 million people in the Americas at the time. These were mostly located in two regions of present-day Latin America and the Caribbean: central Mexico, with 37.3% of the total, and the Andean region, with 20.1%. The most sparsely populated regions of the Americas at the time included present-day United States and Canada, with a total of 7 million (5 million for the United States and 2 million for Canada) spread over their combined geographical area of 7 million square miles, a density of about one person per square mile. Brazil was similarly sparsely populated. Within a few decades of the European arrival, more than three-quarters of the native population died off, further reducing densities radically across the Americas (Denevan 1992:xxix; Escosura 2006:463–504, table 13.3, 476–477; Newson 2006:143–184, table 5.1, 148). Given these demographic conditions, with unlimited supplies of land relative to population, it is understandable the economies and societies were overwhelmingly dominated by subsistence production (i.e., production for the immediate consumption of the households with very little market exchange, if any). The long-run development of these economies and societies from the sixteenth century involved, first and foremost, the development of price-making markets and the market-based economy. This all-important development centered on large-scale commodity production for export in the Americas, giving rise to interregional division of labor, the growth of domestic markets, and the geographical spread of the market economy. The availability of low-cost labor of enslaved Africans was a critical factor in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.
The labor of enslaved Africans was critical for two basic reasons. First, the available markets for bulky export commodities from the Americas were in Europe, initially. Given the high cost of trans-Atlantic transportation in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, production costs for those commodities had to be very low for them to have sufficiently large markets overseas. This meant large-scale production, with extensive economies of scale, as opposed to high-cost, small-scale production. Second, with unlimited supplies of agricultural land in the Americas, large-scale production that required legally free wage laborers was virtually impossible. In Brazil and the United States, the enslavement of the Indigenous people was tried unsuccessfully. In the United States, indentured servants from Europe were tried, also unsuccessfully. In the end, the long-term solution to the difficult problem was found in the importation of captives from Africa for enslavement in Spanish America, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. This experiment was so successful that production costs for sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and several other commodities were drastically reduced, bringing their prices in Europe within the reach of even the common people.
As the European markets for these commodities grew over time, so, too, did their production expand in Spanish America, Brazil, the Caribbean, and, ultimately, the United States (see Table 1). Expanding production was accompanied by increasing specialization that created domestic market opportunities for other producers in the Americas. Cotton plantations in the United States, very much like sugar, gold, and coffee in Brazil and plantation commodities in the Caribbean, depended almost entirely on the labor of enslaved Africans before the Civil War.
Thus, it is clear from the evidence that the rise, by the mid-nineteenth century, of the major capitalist economies of the Atlantic world—Western Europe led by Industrial Revolution Britain and the rising power of the Americas, the United States—and their integration to constitute the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy depended greatly on the growth of the Atlantic economy that was largely the product of the labor of enslaved Africans.
Inikori goes on to show how Europeans and Americans applied the fruits of the industrial, maritime, financial and military revolutions spawned by this trade around the world for the next several centuries, even to the present day. Great Britain extended the model to India and tried with China (the full story of how China was “opened” first by Spanish silver via Manila and later British opium is also under-reported). Other powers raced to grab their own colonies to exploit. America became a continental then international power. Slave labor per se was taboo by the mid-19th century, but extractive economies that mainly benefited the home country became the basis of colonial capitalism and reverberate today.
This article finally answered some of my questions. It pulls together the effects of Spain’s initial centuries of gold and silver extraction, how that impacted Europe’s economies (and politics though that’s not in this article), how the slave trade grew in response to the decimation of indigenous populations, how Europeans and eventually Americans benefited from the slave trade itself, from the goods produced by slaves (cumulatively 73% of all value derived from the colonies), by the mercantile and capitalist institutions they fostered, and ultimately the Industrial Revolution, all of which the Europeans (especially Great Britain) and America extended around the globe. It’s a comprehensive picture that I think should be more widely known, recognized and absorbed. Why is this an obscure academic article, not a global best seller? Where are the BBC and PBS documentary series popularizing this story?
Two adjacent Current Anthropology articles from the same 2018 symposium are interesting and worth deeper reads:
“Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies”, Ibrahima Thiaw and Deborah L. Mack
“The Slavery Business and the Making of “Race” in Britain and the Caribbean”, Catherine Hall
I wondered how those 400,000 Africans shipped to North America became more than 4 million enslaved people by the time of the Civil War. I recently found a partial answer in a 2019 Vox article, “How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business.” Evidently the answer revolves around what Cornell professor Edward Baptist labels “reproductive labor” — North American “enslaved families and communities were raising children faster than adults died. So this means that the US, as it becomes independent, no longer relies on the African slave trade, which by the late 18th century is coming under more and more criticism.” Put more devastatingly, some (much?) of the growth came through increasingly successful “forced breeding” — systematic rape and impregnation to produce higher yields of an investment commodity. By the 1780s, some 250,000 Africans imported to the American colonies over the previous 160 years had grown to a total of 800,000 enslaved people. By 1860, 150,000 more Africans arrived by slave ship but the total enslaved population topped 4 million.
Several documentaries I found on YouTube (I hate saying that) deepened my understanding of the British role in the Atlantic slave trade, its effects in England and the Caribbean, and its eventual abolition. One was this from a Timeline series (I’m not sure who produces these or how credible they are, but it seems legit). Also, this one from Thoughts Camera Action (I don’t know who they are either and I have even more concerns about credibility). There is also this interesting BBC article about the current cultural impact of slave trade revelations (The U.K. government only recently finished paying off the massive indemnity it gave to slave owners in 1833??).
The upshot is that there seems to be at least some movement in the UK to better understand their nation’s complicated history. There are also commendable efforts in the U.S. from the 1619 Project to the works of Henry Louis Gates, Ta-Nehisi Coates and many others but I can’t think of any that widen the perspective to the whole Atlantic trade or attempt to tell a comprehensive story…if that’s even possible.
Having submerged myself in the story of the Atlantic slave trade for just a short time, I am shocked at the scale and depth of the story and its widespread impacts over the past five centuries through to today’s world. But I can also begin to see why it’s been papered over for centuries — it’s profoundly depressing. It makes it hard to get up in the morning or find anything positive to focus on. I mean, I knew things were bad, but I wasn’t prepared to learn that our entire social, political and economic structure was fundamentally built on blood and oppression. Well, yes, I did suspect it but I wasn’t really prepared to confront it.
Another angle: I just watched a relatively recent French travelogue of the Silk Road (on Amazon) which reminded me of a passage from Guns, Germs and Steel that I’d just read and written about. As noted in my review, “Diamond highlights an interesting pivot point in the 15th century when China’s reach and the Ming empire were at their zenith. China’s treasure fleets spanned the Indian Ocean until the dynasty shut them down and turned inward. He doesn’t mention that at nearly the same time, the Ottomans captured Constantinople while the Portuguese began working their way down the African coast, sparking a new European-led maritime race for spices. By the end of the century, Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas unleashing a whole cascade of unintended consequences that we’re still living.” The Western desire for Chinese goods and Asian spices that flowed originally to Rome and later via Venice shifted to maritime routes to Western Europe.
Which brought up another question: The Silk Road went two directions — what went eastbound before there was Spanish silver? It’s not exactly an answer, but that question led me to this Trade and Globalization website with multiple charts of historical trade patterns. It makes clear that global trade as a percent of GDP was a small though growing fraction of total output from 1500-1800 — irrigated for two centuries by Spanish silver and then plantation commodities from the Americas — but still less than 10% in 1800. After that, it took off in two waves of globalization, interrupted by World Wars I and II. The Silk Road was an important conveyor of luxury goods and ideas, but never accounted for a huge volume. It took ships and the dynamics of the Atlantic Trade — and all it spawned — for global trade to really take off.
Meanwhile, I can’t leave the Atlantic slave trade alone. I watched a couple of episodes of BBC’s Black and British series. The second episode discussed the Black Loyalists who fought on the British side of the Revolutionary War. That, in turn, led me to the fascinating story of Harry Washington, one of George Washington’s slaves who was born in Africa, was bought by Washington at age 23, worked first in the Great Dismal Swamp and then at Mount Vernon, escaped (twice), fought for the British, was later freed and resettled by the British to Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone…where he eventually led a failed revolt against the British. His story is pretty well documented (and here (best one), here, here, here, here, here) and would make an interesting book or documentary series, I think. His life certainly touched on a number of fascinating episodes and lesser-known corners of history.
So, to get to my mountain climbing metaphor, I feel like maybe I slid down a slippery slope of shale and am now scrambling to get back to where I was. I keep learning more, but finding more I need to learn. I’ve made some headway in understanding relationships between various nations and revolutions of the 18th-19th centuries. There definitely were links between the American, French, Haitian, and South American revolutions. I have a hard time pinning down why the American Revolution largely succeeded while the others foundered (dumb luck, perhaps?). I’m clearer than I was (though still fuzzy) on the progressions from monarchies toward democratic rule across Bourbon, Hapsburg and Georgian Europe. I have new and troubling insight into relationships between the Atlantic Trade, the Industrial Revolution, colonial empires and globalization.
I’m not really much closer to figuring out what’s been ailing America lately and what we can do about it, but I’m hardly alone. I still have most of the big-picture questions about Western liberal democracy that I started out with. I promise not to give up on these investigations, but I don’t promise clearer answers. I firmly believe, however, that the End of History is not here.
Postscript: Jan. 30, 2022
Add to the list of books that opened my brain to a more complete picture of the development of the Americas American Colonies by Alan Taylor. It does an excellent job of pulling together threads that span North America and the Caribbean, the substantial role of Native Americans throughout the story, and the dynamics of European trade and politics. I’ve just started reading his follow-up, American Revolutions and look forward to tackling his American Empires which came out last year.
Jamelle Bouie wrote an excellent opinion piece in today’s New York Times extolling the work of SlaveVoyages.org, including eye-opening new data on the Intra-American trade. The data show the expansion of traffic in the early 19th century, particularly within the United States via New Orleans. Bouie does a good job reminding us:
It is important to know the size and scale of the slave trade, of the way it was standardized and institutionalized, of the way it shaped the history of the entire Atlantic world. But as every historian I spoke to for this story emphasized, it is also vital that we have an intimate understanding of the people who were part of this story and specifically of the people who were forced into it.
Toward that end, SlaveVoyages.org now includes a section called Oceans of Kinfolk that identifies by name more than 63,000 enslaved people transported via Intra-American trade. It’s a small fraction of the total, but it represents a window into individuals whose offspring today number in the millions. It’s gratifying to see wider recognition of the important work SlaveVoyages.org has done and is still expanding.
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