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The
Wealth of the West
Was
Built on Africa's Exploitation
By
Richard Drayton
Britain
was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The
Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on
Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of
this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for
African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why
was there no substantial public monument of national contrition
equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially,
was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and
Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern
Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to
the descendants of African slaves?
These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush,
their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand
themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness
initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism.
The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to
benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which
included allowing profit-making companies to take over public
services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers
would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here
being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was
that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had
mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan,
and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New
York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich
world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared
to what the west really owes Africa.
Beckford's experts estimated Britain's debt to Africans in the
continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While
this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because
it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For
without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the
modern world as we know it would not exist.
Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and
tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was
how the pull and push from these industries transformed western
Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding,
wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the
cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response
to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.
Joseph
Inikori's masterful book,
Africans and the Industrial
Revolution in England, shows how African consumers, free and
enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant manufacturing industry. As
Malachy Postlethwayt, the political economist, candidly put it
in 1745: "British trade is a magnificent superstructure of
American commerce and naval power on an African
foundation."
In
The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz asked why Europe,
rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern
industrial economy. To his two answers—abundant coal and New
World colonies—he should have added access to West Africa. For
the colonial Americas were more Africa's creation than Europe's:
before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed the
Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough, for
European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious metals
to buy Asian luxuries, returning home with profits in the form
of textiles; only through exchanging these cloths in Africa for
slaves to be sold in the New World could Europe obtain new gold
and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian companies led
ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century
humiliation of China.
Africa not only underpinned Europe's earlier development. Its
palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in
particular gold were and are crucial to the later world economy.
Only South America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks
Africa's contribution to the growth of the global bullion
supply.
The
guinea coin paid homage in its name to the West African origins
of one flood of gold. By this standard, the British pound since
1880 should have been rechristened the rand, for Britain's
prosperity and its currency stability depended on South Africa's
mines. I would wager that a large share of that gold in the
IMF's vaults which was supposed to pay for Africa's debt relief
had originally been stolen from that continent.
There are many who like to blame Africa's weak governments and
economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But
the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of
two centuries of slaving, followed by another of colonial
despotism. Nor was "decolonisation" all it seemed:
both Britain and France attempted to corrupt the whole project
of political sovereignty.
It is remarkable that none of those in Britain who talk about
African dictatorship and kleptocracy seem aware that Idi Amin
came to power in Uganda through British covert action, and that
Nigeria's generals were supported and manipulated from 1960
onwards in support of Britain's oil interests. It is amusing,
too, to find the Telegraph and the Daily Mail—which just a
generation ago supported Ian Smith's Rhodesia and South African
apartheid—now so concerned about human rights in Zimbabwe.
The
tragedy of Mugabe and others is that they learned too well from
the British how to govern without real popular consent, and how
to make the law serve ruthless private interest. The real
appetite of the west for democracy in Africa is less than it
seems. We talk about the Congo tragedy without mentioning that
it was a British statesman, Alec Douglas-Home, who agreed with
the US president in 1960 that Patrice Lumumba, its elected
leader, needed to "fall into a river of crocodiles".
African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or foreign
history; the world they made is around us in Britain. It is not
merely in economic terms that Africa underpins a modern
experience of (white) British privilege. Had Africa's signature
not been visible on the body of the Brazilian Jean Charles de
Menezes, would he have been gunned down on a tube at Stockwell?
The slight kink of the hair, his pale beige skin, broadcast
something misread by police as foreign danger. In that sense,
his shooting was the twin of the axe murder of Anthony Walker in
Liverpool, and of the more than 100 deaths of black people in
mysterious circumstances while in police, prison or hospital
custody since 1969.
This universe of risk, part of the black experience, is the
afterlife of slavery. The reverse of the medal is what W. E. B.
Du Bois called the "wage of whiteness", the world of
safety, trustworthiness, welcome that those with pale skins take
for granted. The psychology of racism operates even among those
who believe in human equality, shaping unequal outcomes in
education, employment, criminal justice. By its light, such
all-white clubs as the G8 continue to meet in comfort.
Early this year, Gordon Brown told journalists in Mozambique
that Britain should stop apologising for colonialism. The truth
is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the dark
side of its imperial history, let alone begun to apologise.
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Dr
Richard Drayton is a senior lecturer in imperial and
extra-European history since 1500 at Cambridge University. His
book
The Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World
will be published in 2006.
RHDrayton@yahoo.co.uk
Source:
The Guardian
(Saturday August 20,
2005) /
Hist.Cam
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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update 26 July 2008
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