The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2

The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America

Theodore W. Allen

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677702
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689707
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King outlined a dream of an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin. That dream has yet to be realized, but some three centuries ago it was a reality. Back then, neither social practice nor law recognized any special privileges in connection with being white. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, that had all changed. Racial oppression became the norm in the plantation colonies, and African Americans suffered under its yoke for more than two hundred years.
In Volume II of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen explores the transformation that turned African bond-laborers into slaves and segregated them from their fellow proletarians of European origin. In response to labor unrest, where solidarities were not determined by skin color, the plantation bourgeoisie sought to construct a buffer of poor whites, whose new racial identity would protect them from the enslavement visited upon African Americans. This was the invention of the white race, an act of cruel ingenuity that haunts America to this day.
Allen's acclaimed study has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a select bibliography and a study guide.

PART ONE
Labor Problems of the European Colonizing Powers

1

The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case

In 1497, within half a decade of Columbus’s first return to Spain from America, the Anglo-Italian Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot as he was known in his adopted country, made a discovery of North America, and claimed it for King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch of England. The English westering impulse, after then lying dormant for half a century, gradually revived in a variety of projects, schemes and false starts. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, an interval of peace with Spain having arrived with the accession of James I to the throne, English colonization was an idea whose time had come.¹ In 1607 the first permanent English settlement in America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia. By the end of the first third of the century four more permanent Anglo-American colonies had been established: Somers Islands (the Bermudas), 1612; Plymouth (Massachusetts), 1620; Barbados, 1627; and Maryland, 1634.²

The English were confronted with the common twofold problem crucial to success in the Americas: (1) how to secure an adequate supply of labor; and (2) how to establish and maintain the degree of social control necessary to assure the rapid and continuous expansion of their capital by the exploitation of that labor. In each of these respects, however, the English case differed from those of other European colonizing powers in the Americas, in ways that have a decisive bearing on the origin of the “peculiar institution” – white racial oppression, most particularly racial slavery – in continental Anglo-America.

European Continental Powers and the Colonial Labor Supply

The continental European colonizing powers, for economic, military and political reasons, and in some cases because of access to external sources, did not employ Europeans as basic plantation laborers.

Spain and Portugal

The accession in 1516 of Francis I of France and in 1517 of Charles I of Spain, and the installation of the latter as Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1519, set off a round of warring that would involve almost every country in Europe, from Sweden to Portugal, from the Low Countries to Hungary, for a century and a quarter. The Spanish-headed Holy Roman Empire was at the same time heavily engaged in war with the Ottoman Turks until after the defeat of the latter in the Mediterranean naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Portugal, with a population of fewer than 1.4 million,³ was involved in protecting its world-circling empire against opposition from both Christian and Moslem rivals. France was Spain’s main adversary in the struggle over Italy, the Netherlands and smaller European principalities.

These wars imposed great manpower demands on every one of the continental governments seeking at the same time to establish colonial ventures. Belligerents who could afford them sought to hire soldiers from other countries. The bulk of Spain’s armies, for example, were made up of foreign mercenaries.⁴ Portugal, however, lacking Spain’s access to American silver and gold to maintain armies of foreign mercenaries, had to rely on its own resources.⁵ So critical was the resulting manpower situation in 1648 that Antonio Vieira, the chief adviser to King John IV, felt obliged to advocate the temporary surrender of Brazil to Protestant Holland as the best way out of the sea of troubles besetting the Portuguese interest in Africa, Asia, America, and, indeed, vis-à-vis Portugal’s Iberian neighbor. Portugal was so depleted of men for defense, he said, that “every alarm” took “laborers from the plough.”⁶ Even if, despite this circumstance, a ploughman did manage to get to Brazil, he was not to be expected to do any manual labor there: “the Portuguese who emigrated to Brazil, even if they were peasants from the tail of the plough, had no intention of doing any manual work.”⁷

Bartolomé de Las Casas, concerned with the genocidal exploitation of the native population by the Christian colonizers in the West Indies, suggested that, “If necessary, white and black slaves be brought from Castile [Spain] to keep herds, build sugar mills, wash gold,” and otherwise be of service to the colonists. In 1518, Las Casas briefly secured favorable consideration from King Carlos for a detailed proposal designed to recruit “quiet peasants” in Spain for emigration to the West Indies. The emigrants were to be transported free of charge from their Spanish homes to the colonies. Once there, they were to be “provided with land, animals, and farming tools, and also granted a year’s supply of food from the royal granaries.” But, again, these emigrant peasants were not expected to do much labor. Rather they were to be provided with slaves from Spain. It was specified that any emigrant who offered to build a sugar mill in the Indies was to be licensed to take twenty Negro slaves with him. With his assistants, Las Casas toured Spain on behalf of the plan and received a favorable response from the peasants he wanted to recruit for the project. But as a result mainly of the opposition of great landowners who feared the loss of their tenants in such a venture, the plan was quickly defeated.⁸ Thus was defined official emigration policy; it assured that Spaniards going to the American colonies were not to be laborers, but such as lawyers and clerks, and men (women emigrants were extremely few) of the nobility or knighthood, who were “forbidden by force of custom even to think of industry or commerce.”⁹ A few Spanish and Portuguese convicts, presumably of satisfactory Christian ancestry, were transported to the colonies early on, but they were not intended and themselves did not intend to serve in the basic colonial labor force.¹⁰

The single instance in which basic plantation labor needs were supplied from the Iberian population occurred in 1493. In that year, two thousand Jewish children, eight years old and younger, were taken from their parents, baptized as Christians, and shipped to the newly founded Portuguese island sugar colony of São Tomé, where fewer than one-third were to be counted thirteen years later.¹¹

In Spain, seven years of plague and famine from 1596 to 1602, followed by the expulsion of 275,000 Christianized Moors in a six-year period beginning in 1602,¹² reduced the population by 600,000 or 700,000, one-tenth of all the inhabitants.¹³ Thus began a course of absolute population decline that lasted throughout the seventeenth century.¹⁴ As it had been with the Jews before, the expelled moriscos were officially ineligible for emigration to the Americas, since émigrés were required to prove several generations of Catholic ancestry.¹⁵

Holland

For the better part of a century up to the 1660s, Holland, in the process of winning her independence from Spain in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), was the leading commercial and trading country of Europe. Holland’s 10,000 ships exceeded the total number held by the rest of northern Europe combined.¹⁶ On this basis the new Dutch Republic developed a thriving and expanding internal economy. Large areas were diked and drained to increase the amount of cultivable land.¹⁷ Up until 1622, Dutch cities grew, some at a phenomenal rate; in that year, half of Holland’s population lived in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants.¹⁸ The population of Amsterdam alone had grown to 105,000, three and a half times its size in 1585.¹⁹ These cities were expanding not from an influx of displaced Dutch peasants, but because urban needs were growing faster than those of rural areas,²⁰ and because Holland’s “obvious prosperity … acted as a lodestar to the unemployed and the underemployed of neighboring countries.”²¹

Although the casual laborer in Holland was frequently out of work, “unemployment … was never sufficiently severe to induce industrial and agricultural workers to emigrate on an adequate scale to the overseas possessions of the Dutch East and West India Companies.”²² Those who did decide to emigrate to find work “preferred to seek their fortune in countries nearer home.”²³ Plans for enlisting Dutch peasant families for colonizing purposes came to little, outside of the small settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, which in the seventeenth century was mainly a way station for ships passing to and from the Dutch East Indies.²⁴ As far as the East Indies were concerned, it was never contemplated “that the European peasant should cultivate the soil himself.” Rather, he would supervise the labor of others.²⁵

France

In seventeenth-century France the great majority of the peasants were holders of small plots scarcely large enough to provide the minimum essentials for survival. The almost interminable religious wars that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had ravaged much of the country, and epidemic disease had greatly reduced the population.²⁶ But while French poor peasants groaned under the burden of feudal exactions, they were still bound by feudal ties to the land;²⁷ they had not been “surplussed” by sheep, as many peasants had been in Spain and England.

The first successful French colonization efforts were undertaken on the Bay of Fundy (1604) and at Quebec (1608). The laborers for the colony’s upbuilding and development were to be wage workers, transported at the expense of the French government or other sponsoring entity, and employed under three to five year contracts. But New France was not destined to become a plantation colony, indeed not even a primarily agricultural colony.²⁸ A century after these first Canadian settlements were established, their population was only ten thousand, including a few persons representing a soon-abandoned notion of supplying the labor needs of Canadian colonies from African sources.²⁹ Some time before the end of the seventeenth century, the French government turned to the idea of Christianizing and Gallicizing the Indians as a means of peopling New France and developing a labor force for it; that plan also failed, however, because the Indians did not perceive sufficient advantage in such a change in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part One - Labor Problems of the European Colonizing Powers
• Part Two - The Plantation of Bondage
• Part Three - Road to Rebellion
• Part Four - Rebellion and Reaction
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index