Forty-eight years prior to Christopher Columbus arriving in Hispaniola in 1492, the first enslaved Africans were taken to Portugal after being captured in Senegambia, West Africa. The Portuguese became the first European country to be actively involved in what would become the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historian Ibram Kendi has argued that Prince Henry of Portugal began to prefer the enslavement of Africans because it was tough for them to escape slavery in Portugal due to their skin color. Prior to Africans, the Portuguese had a long history of enslaving European Slavs. Indeed, slav is the root word for slave. However, according to Kendi, melanated Africans faced more challenges in attempting to escape the system of enslavement because it was difficult for them to blend into Portuguese society.[1]
From the 8th century, feudalism had taken root in Western Europe. Feudalism was a hierarchical social, economic, and political system during the Middle Ages that primarily revolved around the ownership and control of land. Kings owned most of the land and managed their power and control through relationships with lords and nobles who demonstrated military loyalty to the crown. The nobility controlled these lands for the crown by distributing land (fiefdoms) to vassals who worked it in exchange for taxes, tribute, loyalty, and military service. The vassals controlled serfs, peasants, slaves, and other lower-class groups and became part of a series of feudal networks that obligated one to serve the King.
Feudalism was an enduring economic system that facilitated the racialization of the lower rung of European society. The peasants, gypsies, Roma, Slavs, and others were systematically dispossessed of their lands and relegated to working in the service of the nobility. Over the centuries, they were victimized by land enclosures and the colonial process of invasion, settlement, and expropriation. Racialized hierarchies were established, and the powerless were othered, marginalized, and deemed disposable. According to Cedric Robinson,
the class that ruled, the nobility, by its orchestration of the instrumentalities of the state, imprinted its character on the whole of European society. And since much of that character had to do with violence, the lower orders were woven into the tapestry of a violent social order. By the nature of hierarchal societies, the integration of the lower classes–wage laborers, peasants, serfs, slaves, vagabonds, and beggars–into the social, political, and economic orders of the Absolut State was on the terms of the clients of the latter.[2] (Robinson 2000, )
Indeed, during the Middle Ages, the nobility believed themselves to have blood superior to the peasants, slaves, and serfs–disparagingly labeled commoners. These developments were the roots of European racialism, which blossomed in the 18th and 19th centuries when ideas of superiority merged with modern nationalism in Germany, England, France, and elsewhere. These practices anticipated English conceptions of Anglo-Saxonism and German ideas of Herrenvolk, both of which propagated racial supremacy and justified colonialism, genocide, and unceasing violence within their borders and beyond.
As the feudal order began to fade, one of the most critical factors that led to the development of capitalism in Western Europe was the rise of the Enclosure Movement, particularly in England, where common lands were privatized as a result of a series of legislative acts that forced peasants off the land. Historically, the commons referred to land and natural resources shared for livestock and subsistence agriculture. The enclosures enriched the nobility by creating private estates that transformed the peasantry into a rural workforce that came to depend on jobs in the emerging industrial economy.
Capitalism and Racism
Racial Capitalism rests on the idea that “capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flowered into the cultural soil of Western civilization, already thoroughly infused with racialism.” Building on the insights of Cedric Robinson, Robin Kelley argues that “Capitalism and racism… did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Indeed, five critical processes shaped the birth of modern capitalism: conquest, colonization, dispossession, slavery, and environmental destruction.[3] (Kelley 2017)
The Africans that were packed in the bottom of slave ships and violently whisked across the Atlantic became the cornerstone of early capitalist development and foundational to the Industrial Revolution. For more than four centuries, Africans were enslaved in the Americas and the Caribbean. This practice facilitated the accumulation of tremendous wealth for joint stock companies and merchants throughout Western Europe. This money was reinvested in banks, insurance companies, and new technologies in shipping and manufacturing. Historian Walter Rodney noted in his classic, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for most of the nineteenth century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, the formation of companies, capitalist agriculture, technology, and the manufacture of machinery. The effects were so wide-ranging that many are seldom brought to the notice of the reading public. For instance, the French Saint-Malo fishing industry was revived by the opening up of markets in the French slave plantations; while the Portuguese in Europe depended heavily on dyes like indigo, camwood, Brazil wood, and cochineal brought from Africa and the Americas. Gum from Africa also played a part in the textile industry, which is acknowledged as having been one of the most powerful engines of growth within the European economy.[4]
In short, slavery generated capital (money). That capital was reinvested in other sectors of the economy responsible for the development and expansion of infrastructure that was foundational to industrializing society.
To understand just how pervasive slavery was in the Americas, let us turn to just one of many examples that illustrate this point. Here, we will examine the early development of higher education in the thirteen colonies in what was to become the United States of America. Harvard University was founded in 1636, but Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth were all established roughly during the first half of the eighteenth century. Cornell would join the fray much later, in 1865. Harvard, Yale, and Brown established their endowments through money fundraised and donated by families and benefactors involved in slavery. Harvard received money to establish its law school from Isaac Royall Jr., “who earned his wealth from the labor of enslaved people”[5] deeply connected to slavery in the Caribbean. (Harvard Law Today 2022)
Even where there was no direct investment, most of these universities depended on money generated by slavery for their economic survival. In the case of Brown, Rhode Island’s entire economy revolved around slavery. As a port city, Rhode Island recorded its first slave trading voyages in “the early years of the eighteenth century.” One hundred years later, “by the close of the [slave] trade…, Rhode Islanders had mounted at least a thousand voyages, carrying over one hundred thousand Africans into the New World.” (Hagen and Garrison 2006) Moreover, Rhode Island managed about sixty percent of the slave trading voyages that launched from North America. In some years, those numbers were as high as ninety percent.
Numerous Rhode Island families made slavery the centerpiece of their business enterprise. Although there are gaps in the records, a Steering Committee assigned to research the role of slavery in Brown University’s history found that over seven hundred individual names in the state could be attached to the peculiar institution. The Steering Committee also noted:
Even those who did not invest directly in the trade often depended on it for their livelihoods. Boatwrights built ships, and blacksmiths and blockmakers fitted them out. Sail lofts and ropewalks prepared canvas and rigging. Caulkers scraped and sealed hulls. Carpenters built shelving below decks to hold the ships’ human cargo. Distilleries churned out rum, sealed in barrels fashioned by coopers from local pine, oak, and iron. Factories and foundries produced whale oil candles, cloth, and iron bars, all important trade goods on the West African coast. Farmers supplied beef, flour, tobacco, and onions. In the words of historian Rachel Chernos Lin, one of the speakers sponsored by the Steering Committee, the Rhode Island slave trade was literally the business of “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.[6]
In addition to direct investment in Brown University from numerous business magnates wholly immersed in the trade, the most palatable example of slavery’s impact on the University can be found in the construction of the “College Edifice” known today as University Hall. Wood for the building was “donated by Lopez and Rivera, one of the largest slave trading firms in Newport.”[7] Moreover, “a few donors honored pledges by providing the labor of their slaves for a set number of days.” In addition to discovering the names of four enslaved Africans who contributed to building the Hall, “a facsimile print of the construction records, including references to enslaved workers, has hung for years on the first floor of the University Hall, more or less unnoticed. It is an apt metaphor for a history that has long hidden in plain sight.”[8]
