Being Human After 1492

Richard Pithouse

• Publisher: Daraja Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781988832869
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Imperialismo

In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach. The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet. The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire's famous phrases, is "made to the measure of the world". There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter's phrase, as 'pariahs outside of the new order'

1492

In 1324, when Musa Keita I, Emperor of the Mali Empire, made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca, news of his fabulous wealth in gold and slaves arrived in Europe – an altogether poorer part of the world. The Catalan Atlas, drawn and written in Majorca in around 1375, was, for some time, the best map of the known world available in Europe. In this map, painted onto vellum leaves with lapis lazuli, silver and gold, Keita I appears, in regal dress, with an inscription that notes the source of his wealth: “This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands.”

In the European myth of Prester John, which reaches back to at least the 12th century, the fabulously wealthy Christian King was first believed to be in Persia, and then India. After Keita I made his pilgrimage to Mecca, Prester John’s imagined location shifted to Ethiopia. Portuguese traders began looking to Africa as a source of wealth. In 1419, the Portuguese crown claimed Madeira, an uninhabited archipelago in the North Atlantic. In 1444, Portuguese traders arrived at the coast of Senegal, began to purchase slaves and built a settlement on Gorée Island. They went on to build stone fortresses, feitorias – from which the English word factory is derived – along the Northern part of the Western coast of Africa. The feitorias were used as nodes in a set of trade networks that included gold, ivory and enslaved people.

Sidney Mintz tells us that sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea around 8,000 BC. Two thousand years later it was carried to India where the army led by Alexander the Great encountered it. By 500 AD, sugar was being produced near Baghdad, where it was known as ‘the Indian luxury’. It arrived – along with rice, wheat, cotton and citrus fruits – in Southern Europe with the Arab invasion of Spain in 711. In the Crusader states set up in the Levant after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, sugar cane was grown with a mixture of free and forced labour. “Europeans”, Mintz concludes, “became producers of sugar as a result of the Crusades.”

In 1452, sugarcane plantations, based on the model of the Crusader plantations but worked by African slaves, were set up in Madeira. In the same year Pope Nicholas V issued a bull, Dum Diversas (Until Different) authorising the Portuguese King to “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans . . . as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property . . . and to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude”.

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies, led by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453. Athens fell in 1458. The Ottoman Empire was building an army, and a navy, that would become the most powerful in Europe. At the same time the European elites depended on Muslim traders to access spices from Asia. The desire to capture this lucrative trade, and to undermine part of the basis for Muslim prosperity, lead to increased interest in the possibility of a sea route to Asia.

Christopher Columbus, an ambitious trader born in Genoa, sought to stake a personal claim on this possibility. He had read Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the East and concluded that he could sail west and reach Japan. Columbus was married to the daughter of a sugar plantation owner on Porto Santo, an island close to Madeira. In 1482, he had sailed with the fleet that built São Jorge da Mina, a Portuguese feitoria on the coast of what is now Ghana.

On 3 August 1492, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos, in Andalusia in Spain. The opening line of his diary records that: “In the same month in which their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.” His diary reveals an obsessive interest in gold.

Columbus, expecting to arrive in Japan, arrived at the Bahamas on 12 October. His diary entry for that day observed that the inhabitants of the islands “should be good servants”. He left a group of men on an island he named Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), with the instruction to search for gold. In May the following year, Pope Alexander VI issued a bull granting Ferdinand and Isabella the right to conquest, to “full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind”, in the New World. This affirmation of a right to conquest and expropriation drew on a set of ideas – like Terra Nullius – first developed during the Crusades.

For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.” For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”. For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a single history that we all now live, and while it led to incredible techno-scientific and other such dazzling achievements, as well as to the material well-being of one restricted portion of humanity, it also led to the systemic large-scale degradation and devalorization, even the extinction, of a large majority of the peoples of the earth.”

When Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1495, his journey funded, in part, by wealth expropriated from Jews and Muslims in Spain, he took sugarcane with him. But his first priority was still the pursuit of go...