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Kay Bradley

Precedent for the New World: The Spanish Conquest of the Canary Islands | The Anarchist... - 1 views

theanarchistlibrary.org/...conquest-of-the-canary-islands

shared by Kay Bradley on 11 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Columbus lived for a time on Portugal’s plantation island of Madeira, with its then ample population of slaves. He married the daughter of Bartolome Perestrello
  • Columbus had also worked as a sugar buyer for the Genoese banking family of the Centuriones; and ... must have seen slaves in the Canary Islands, working on the sugar plantations which he himself knew well
  • Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the New World has often been identified as a turning point in the history of the last millennium. His governorship of Hispaniola — during which the native Caribs (from which the Caribbean derives its name) were enslaved and 90% died of disease or abuse within the first decade thanks to Columbus’s quest for gold — is said to have set precedent for Cortez and Pisarro’s looting of the Aztecs and Incas and the destruction of their civilisations. The gold and silver extracted from these was, in turn, said to have funded Habsburg domination of Europe for the next two centuries and the creation of the modern world out of the feudal order that preceded it.
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  • The other half of this story is Africa. The very basis of the ease of the conquistadors’ take-over of the New World — the indigenous peoples’ vulnerability to European diseases — also made them useless as a labour force and so Africans had to be shipped in instead as slaves.
  • For the next three centuries, the exploitation of Africa made that of the New World possible.
  • the Triangular Trade that ensured the maturation of capitalism and underpinned the elaboration of Enlightenment high culture — the shipping of slaves from Africa to harvest such staples of European life as sugar, cotton and tobacco in the New World. It built the investment infrastructure of capitalism.
  • Ultimately, the Portuguese proved more adept at the ‘great game’ of imperialism than the Spanish — the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas gave them the best slave ports in equatorial Africa and Brazilian plantations which proved so extensive and productive that they supplied even north America with tobacco
  • it was the Spanish that came first, and it was they that set the pattern.
  • but a key
  • was the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Azores, Madeiras, and Canary Islands during the 15th century.
  • Alfred Crosby argued in his 1986 history, Ecological Imperialism:[2]
  • [T]he Iberian conquest of the Azores, Madeiras and Canaries [w]as a pilot program for the reshaping of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Oceania. In all these places, the newcomers would conquer the human populations and Europeanize entire ecosystems. They dared this because they had seen from the Iberian experience in the Canaries that European crops and herds would thrive in all but the most hostile, unfamiliar environments, and that the fiercest indigenes could be beaten despite their superior numbers and home-ground advantage. As a result, tens of millions of natives around the world would die.
  • Kay Bradley on 11 Sep 16
     
    From "The Anarchist Library"
Kay Bradley

Olaudah Equiano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Olaudah_Equiano

shared by Kay Bradley on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • During the American Revolutionary War, Britain had recruited blacks to fight with it by offering freedom to those who left rebel masters. In practice, it also freed women and children, and attracted thousands of slaves to its lines in New York City, which it occupied, and in the South, where its troops occupied Charleston. When British troops were evacuated at the end of the war, its officers also evacuated American slaves. They were resettled in the Caribbean, in Nova Scotia and in London. Britain refused to return the slaves, which the United States sought in peace negotiations
  • Equiano became involved in helping the Black Poor of London, who were mostly those African-American slaves freed during and after the American Revolution by the British.
  • The black community numbered about 20,000
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  • After the Revolution some 3,000 former slaves had been transported from New York to Nova Scotia, where they became known as Black Loyalists
  • Equiano was appointed to an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, at present-day Sierra Leone. The blacks from London were joined by more than 1,200 Black Loyalists who chose to leave Nova Scotia.
  • He was one of the leading members of the Sons of Africa, a small abolitionist group composed of free Africans in London
  • Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797),[3] known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/),[4] was a prominent African in London, a freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade.
  • His last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766.
  • Equiano settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom.
  • in 1792 Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen and they had two daughters.
  • In Virginia, Equiano was bought in 1754 by Michael Pascal,
  • He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the West Indies.
  • He and a few other slaves were sent on to the British colony of Virginia.
  • Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England, and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War with France. Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain, so that the youth could attend school and learn to read and write.
  • At this time, Equiano converted to Christianity
  • Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.[1
  • King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds, the slave could buy his freedom.[14] King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his master's behalf
  • The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner, but the African found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into slavery.
  • By about 1767, Equiano had gained his freedom and went to England. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the British Royal Navy ship Racehorse, he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition to find a northern route to India.[15] On that voyage he worked with Dr. Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Vassa for a project on the Mosquito Coast in South America, where he was to use his African background and Igbo language to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar cane plantations. I
  • Equiano expanded his activities in London, learning the French horn and joining debating societies, including the London Corresponding Society. He continued his travels, visiting Philadelphia and New York in 1785 and 1786, respectively.
  • n the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement.
  • Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors.
  • As part of settling in Britain, Equiano/Vassa decided to marry and have a family. On 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local girl
  • The couple settled in the area and had two mixed-race daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857).
  • Kay Bradley on 21 Sep 15
     
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