As we know, the voyages of Columbus opened the way to the European conquest of the Western hemisphere, with hideous consequences for the indigenous population, and soon for Africans brought here in one of the vilest episodes of history. Vasco da Gama soon opened the way to bring to Africa and Asia the “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” to borrow Adam Smith’s rueful phrase, referring primarily to Britain’s terrible crimes in India, plain enough even in his day. Also in 1492, Christian conquerors extended their barbaric sway over the most advanced and tolerant civilization in Europe, Moorish Spain, forcing Jews to flee or convert to the civilization of the Inquisition and initiating the vast ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population (“Moors”), while also destroying much of the rich record of classical learning that they had preserved and developed—rather like the Mongol invasion of Iraq two centuries earlier, or the even worse destruction of the treasures of civilization in the course of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq that continues to take a terrible toll.¹ The conquest of most of the world by Europe and its offshoots has been the primary theme of world history ever since.

The basic reasons for Europe’s remarkable military successes are well understood. One was European filth, which caused epidemics that decimated the much healthier populations of the Western hemisphere.² Apart from disease, “It was thanks to their military superiority, rather than to any social, moral or natural advantage, that the white peoples of the world managed to create and control, however briefly, the first global hegemony in history,” military historian Geoffrey Parker observes.³ From America to Southeast Asia, he continues, the population was astonished by the savagery of the Europeans and “equally appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare.” The victims were hardly pacifist societies, but European savagery was something new, not so much in technology as in spirit. Parker’s phrase “however briefly” might turn out to be correct, in a much more grim sense than he meant. Some of the most prominent and judicious strategic analysts in the United States warn of “ultimate doom” or even “apocalypse soon” if the government persists in its aggressive militarism⁴—and looming not too far in the distance is the threat of anthropogenic environmental catastrophe.

Today’s gap between North and South—the rich developed societies and the rest of the world—was largely created by the global conquest. Scholarship and science are beginning to recognize a record that had been concealed by imperial arrogance. They are discovering that at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, and long before, the Western hemisphere was home to some of the world’s most advanced civilizations. In the poorest country of South America, archaeologists are coming to believe that eastern Bolivia was the site of a wealthy, sophisticated, and complex society of perhaps a million people. In their words, it was the site of “one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the face of the planet, with causeways and canals, spacious and formal towns and considerable wealth,” creating a landscape that was “one of humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece.” In the Peruvian Andes, by 1491 the Inka had created the greatest empire in the world, greater in scale than the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, or other empires, far greater than any European state, and with remarkable artistic, agricultural, and other achievements.⁵

One of the most exciting developments of the past few decades is the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and the struggles for community and political rights. The achievements in South America have been particularly dramatic. Throughout the hemisphere and elsewhere there are indigenous movements seeking to gain land rights and other civil and human rights that have been denied them by repressive and often murderous states. This is happening even where the indigenous communities barely survived the conquest, as in the United States, where the pre-contact population of perhaps seven million or more was reduced to a few hundred thousand by 1900. I need hardly mention that the issues are very much alive right here in Temuco, at the frontier with the Mapuche.

My own department at MIT has played a significant role in the revival, thanks to the extraordinary work of the late Kenneth Hale. Apart from working on human rights issues for indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, and fundamental contributions to the study of their languages and to linguistic theory, he also brought people from reservations who had had few educational opportunities and devoted great effort to helping them gain doctoral degrees in a very demanding program, with dissertations on their own languages that surpassed anything in the literature in depth and sophistication. They returned to their homes, and have established educational and cultural programs, several of which have flourished, revitalizing marginalized communities and helping them to gain broader rights. I will mention only one really spectacular achievement. One of the major languages of New England before the conquest was Wampanoag. The people themselves were mostly expelled or murdered, with a bounty offered for their heads, while those who surrendered and did not want to fight were sold into slavery—men, women, and children—by the early English colonists.⁶ The last known speaker died a century ago. Hale and some of his students were able to reconstruct the language from textual and comparative evidence. Hale’s primary collaborator was a Wampanoag woman, Jesse Little Doe, who helped reconstruct the language and then learned it. At a memorial for Hale, she paid her tribute to him in fluent Wampanoag, and also brought her two-year-old daughter, the first native speaker of the language in a century. There is a good chance that the culture and community will flourish and find a proper place in the larger society, a model for what might be achieved elsewhere.

On the other side of the world, at the time of the European conquests, China and India were the world’s major commercial and industrial centers, well ahead of Europe in public health and probably sophistication and scale of market systems and trading areas. Life expectancy in Japan may have been higher than in Europe.⁷ England was trying to catch up in textiles and other manufactures, borrowing from India and other countries in ways that are now called “piracy,” and are banned in the international trade agreements imposed by the rich states under a cynical pretense of “free trade.”

The United States relied heavily on the same mechanisms of “piracy” and protectionism, as have other states that have developed. Britain also engaged in actual piracy—now considered among the most heinous of international crimes. The most admired of English pirates was Sir Francis Drake. The booty that he brought home “may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investments,” John Maynard Keynes concluded. ⁸

England finally adopted a form of “free trade” in 1846, after centuries of protectionism and state intervention in the economy had given it an enormous advantage over competitors, while it destroyed Indian manufacture by high protective tariffs and other means, as it had done before in Ireland. The United States adopted free trade a century later, for similar reasons. But in both cases the “free trade” commitments were carefully hedged, matters to which we return. In general, with extensive state intervention and violence at home, and barbarism and imposed liberalization in conquered areas, Europe and its offshoots were able to become rich developed societies, while the conquered regions became the “third world,” the South. While history is too complex to be reduced to just a few factors, these have been salient ones.

The effects are dramatic, sometimes startling. Consider the poorest country in the Western hemisphere: Haiti, which may not be habitable in a few generations; it was probably the richest colony in the world, the source of much of France’s wealth. By 1789, it was producing 75 percent of the world’s sugar and was the world leader in production of cotton—the “oil” of the early industrial revolution—as well as other valued commodities. The plantation slave economy set in motion the processes of destroying arable land and forests that have been carried forward since, regularly enhanced by imperial policies. French ships returning from delivery of slaves brought back Haitian timber. The destruction of the forests by the French rulers, later poverty-driven, caused erosion and further destruction. After a brutal and devastating struggle against the armies of France and Britain, backed by the United States, the colony finally won its freedom in 1804, becoming the first free country of free men in the hemisphere, twenty years after the slave society that now dominates the world had liberated itself from England. Haitians were made to pay a bitter price for the crime of liberation. The United States refused to recognize this dangerous free society until 1862, when it also recognized Liberia for the same reason: slaves were being freed, and there was hope that the country could be kept free of contamination by non-whites by exporting them to where they belonged. The project withered when means were found to reinstitute a new form of slavery through criminalization of Black life, a major contribution to the American industrial revolution, continuing until World War II, when “free labor” was needed for military industry. France imposed a huge indemnity on Haiti as punishment for liberating itself from vicious French rule, a burden it has never been able to overcome. The civilized world agreed that France’s punishment of Haiti was just, and still does. A few years ago, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide politely asked France whether the time had not come to compensate Haitians for this crushing debt, at least slightly. France was outraged, and soon joined Washington in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Haiti in 2004, instituting yet another reign of terror in the battered society.⁹

The immediate consequences were investigated by the University of Miami School of Law, which found “that many Haitians, especially those living in poor neighborhoods, now struggle against inhuman horror [as] [n]ightmarish fear now accompanies Haiti’s poorest in their struggle to survive in destitution [in] a cycle of violence [fuelled by] Haiti’s security and justice institutions.” In August 2006, the world’s leading medical journal, the Lancet, released a study of human rights abuses from the February 2004 overthrow of the government until December 2005. The researchers found that some eight thousand individuals (about twelve per day) were murdered during the period, and sexual assault was common, especially against children, with the data suggesting thirty-five thousand women and girls were raped in the Port-au-Prince area alone. The atrocities were attributed primarily to criminals, the Haitian National Police, and UN peacekeepers. They found very few attributed to the pro-Aristide Lavalas forces. The study passed without notice in the United States, very little elsewhere.¹⁰

Perhaps the most extreme of the many disasters visited upon Haiti since its liberation was the invasion by Woodrow Wilson in 1915, restoring virtual slavery, killing thousands—fifteen thousand according to Haitian historian Roger Gaillard—and opening up the country to takeover by U.S. corporations. The shattered society was left in the hands of a murderous, U.S.-trained National Guard serving the interests of the Haitian elite, mulatto and white, who are even more predatory and rapacious than is the norm in Latin America and who regularly appropriate the aid sent to the country. This is one of the many triumphs of what has passed down through history as “Wilsonian idealism.”

The takeover of Haiti by U.S. corporations was accomplished by disbanding the Parliament under U.S. Marine guns when it refused to accede to the U.S. demand that it accept a U.S.-written Constitution that permitted these “progressive” measures. True, the U.S. occupiers did conduct a referendum, in which its demands received 99.9 percent approval with 5 percent of the population participating. That the measures were progressive was widely accepted. As the State Department explained, Haitians were “inferior people” and “It was obvious that if our occupation was to be beneficial to Haiti and further her progress it was necessary that foreign capital should come to Haiti…[and] Americans could hardly be expected to put their money into plantations and big agricultural enterprises in Haiti if they could not themselves own the land on which their money was to be spent.” Thus it was out of a sincere desire to help suffering Haitians that the United States forced them at gunpoint to allow U.S. investors to take over their country in an “unselfish intervention” carried out in a “fatherly way” with no thought of “preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise” for ourselves (New York Times).

The terror and repression increased under the rule of the National Guard and the Duvalier dictatorships while the elite prospered, isolated from the country they were helping to rob. When Reagan took office, USAID and the World Bank instituted programs to turn Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean” by adhering to the sacred principle of comparative advantage: Haiti was to import food and other commodities from the United States while working people, mostly women, toiled under miserable conditions in U.S.-owned assembly plants. As the World Bank explained in a 1985 report, in this export-oriented development strategy domestic consumption should be “markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports,” with emphasis placed on “the expansion of private enterprises,” while support for education should be “minimized” and such “social objectives” as persist should be privatized. “Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported” in preference to “public expenditures in the social sectors,” and “less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption.” In contrast, the Taiwanese developmental state, free from foreign control, pursued radically different policies, targeting investment to rural areas to increase consumption and prevent the flow of peasants to miserable urban slums, the obvious consequence of the progressive policies dictated for Haiti—which remained Haiti, not Taiwan. Subsequent disasters, including the earthquake of January 2010, are substantially man-made, the consequences of these policy decisions and others like them since the U.S. invasion of 1915 exacerbating the disasters set in motion by France as it enriched itself by robbing and destroying its richest colony.

The Reagan administration was particularly pleased by an “encouraging step forward” in Haiti in 1985: the legislature passed a law requiring that every political party must recognize president-for-life “Baby Doc” Duvalier as the supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any party without reasons. This achievement of Reagan’s “democracy enhancement” programs enabled the administration to keep providing military aid to the vicious and venal dictator who was democratizing the country so successfully. And the Reaganite judgment about the progress of democracy was not entirely with merit. The law was passed by a 99.98 percent majority, not very different from the 99.9 percent under Wilsonian idealism. Cynics might say that the divide reflects the spectrum of approved choices for our dependencies as domestic politics veers from one extreme to the other.

Haiti’s first free election, in 1990, threatened the rational programs imposed by Washington and the international financial institutions. The poor majority entered the political arena for the first time and, by a two-thirds majority, elected their own candidate, the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide—to the surprise and shock of observers, who had been paying little attention to the extensive grassroots organizing in the slums and hills and took for granted that U.S.-backed candidate Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official who monopolized resources and had the full support of the wealthy elite, would win easily; Bazin received 14 percent of the vote. During Aristide’s brief tenure in office, the refugee flow reversed: instead of refugees fleeing from terror and repression, and being turned back by the U.S. Coast Guard (or sometimes dispatched to Guantánamo) in violation of international conventions on refugees, Haitians were returning to their homeland in this moment of hope. U.S. refugee policy shifted accordingly: though they were few, refugees were now granted asylum, since they were fleeing a democratic government that the United States opposed, not vicious dictatorships that the United States supported. Aristide’s success in controlling finances and cutting down the bloated bureaucracy was praised by international lending institutions, which accordingly provided aid. The situation was dangerous: Haiti was moving toward democracy, drifting from the U.S. orbit, and adopting policies oriented to the needs of the impoverished majority, not the rich U.S. allies.

Washington instantly adopted standard operating procedures in such a case, shifting aid to the business-led opposition and moving to undermine the Aristide regime by other devices labeled “democracy promotion.” A few months later, in September 1991, came the anticipated military coup, with probable CIA participation, confirmed by Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the terrorist organization FRAPH (Front pour l’Advancement et le Progès Haitien) which killed thousands of Haitians; he was later protected from extradition to Haiti by the Clinton administration, very likely because he had too much to say. Probably for similar reasons, the U.S. forces sent to restore the president in 1994 confiscated 160,000 pages of documents that the Clinton administration refused to provide to the democratic government—“to avoid...