2023-10-16 23:45:16
Marcus Rediker (Owensboro, Kentucky, 1951) is one of the most renowned historians in the United States. His studies of the slave trade from Africa to America to serve on infamous plantations in the southern US, the Caribbean and Brazil have earned him prestigious recognitions such as the George Washington Book Prize. Author and co-author of a dozen books – such as Slave Ship: The Trafficking Across the Atlantic (Captain Swing 2021) or the recent Villains of All Nations (Traffickers of Dreams, 2023) –, Rediker is one of the betes noires of who strive to reinterpret the conquest of America to wash away contemporary consciences of what was an atrocious period. “All colonizing states, like Spain, create false stories about their past,” says this professor of Atlantic History whose pulsating way of telling history “from below,” something he shares with his colleagues in the Midnight Notes Collective movement, Peter Linebaugh and Silvia Federici, has brought him countless followers. A brilliant essayist, he unceremoniously throws overboard the theories that idealize the role of the Spanish conquistadors now that October 12 approaches. “What freedom, peace and prosperity brought to the millions of indigenous people who lost their lands and died in their millions from diseases to which they had no immunity?” he asks. The answer, Rediker adds, was already given by William Faulkner when he wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even
The British abolitionist William Wilberforce already told the harsh truth about the enslaved people who were transported crammed into the holds of slave ships when he wrote that “so much misery condensed into so little space is more than human imagination had ever conceived.” That was an extreme nightmare. On an average ship, there were 300 men, women and children crammed into a small space below deck where they had to stay during an ocean crossing of nine to twelve weeks. They only went up to the main deck for a few hours a day and only if the weather permitted. Seasickness, stench, epidemics and mass death defined those ocean crossings. The captain of a slave ship used whips and other violent means to try to control the slaves. Violence ruled the slave ships and was, in itself, an instrument of terror. Many Africans did not survive. During the time the slave trade existed, approximately between 1500 and 1870, one in eight people, about two million in total, died en route. Their bodies were thrown overboard to the sharks that followed the ships that crossed the Atlantic. Those who survived took the fight to the land and to the plantation system to demonstrate, as the great African-American writer Ralph Ellison explained, that a people “is more than the sum of its brutality.”
—How could such infamy be tolerated for so long?
—There are two main reasons to understand why the slave trade, with all the horrors that it entailed, continued for so long. Firstly, the slave trade was crucial to the creation of wealth. Many powerful people around the world benefited from it. They promoted and protected human trafficking. Secondly, because the majority of white Europeans and Americans believed that slavery was a “natural” system and considered, in a racist way, that African peoples were adapted to it. Even after abolitionist movements emerged at the end of the 18th century, the slave trade continued to be active for another eighty years.
—Was slavery one of the greatest genocides committed in the history of humanity?
—The slave system caused millions of deaths. In this sense it could be considered a genocide like many others. But the difference is that the objective of slavery was not to kill people but to keep them alive so that they could work, to create benefits for the enslavers and their governments. Those who directly benefited from slavery considered that the millions of deaths it caused were perfectly acceptable “collateral damage” as long as the system was kept intact, because that allowed them to continue accumulating capital and power.
—How many millions of people could have been kidnapped in Africa and sold in Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Brazil?
—The current estimate of the total number of people transported to America in the Atlantic Slave Trade is around 12.5 million. Most of them were sent to Brazil or the Caribbean, which together accounted for more than 80 percent of arrivals.
—And the illegal slave trade?
—After Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and signed treaties with Portugal (1817) and Spain (1835) to end its slave trades, the trade continued illegally until around 1870 because demand was still high in Cuba and Brazil. It is estimated that Spain and Portugal illegally imported 1.3 million slaves.
—Many of the owners of those slave companies amassed enormous fortunes. Have they survived to this day?
—Yes, they have lasted. Many of the wealthy families in Europe and the United States today amassed an important part of their fortunes in the slave trade or in slavery. The same is true for businesses, especially in the banking and insurance sectors. Lloyd’s of London, for example, insured tens of thousands of slave voyages and continues to prevent historians from researching its records today.
—There are those who believe that the moments of maximum enrichment of the elites of an Empire coincide with great atrocities. What do you think?
—That would undoubtedly describe the period in which Spanish imperial officials extracted enormous quantities of gold and silver by exploiting the indigenous laborers of Latin America. In the slave trade and the slave system it was more difficult because it lasted for more than 400 years. Too much time. Most periods of extreme violence in human history were rather brief.
—The king of the Belgians apologized in 2020 for the colonial abuses of Leopold II in the Congo. The Netherlands has done something similar, but few have assumed their responsibilities for slavery. Do you believe that the past is history or that so many centuries of oppression continue to have repercussions today?
—We live with the lingering effects of the slave trade and slavery every day of our lives. That is, the slave ships continue sailing. I argue that in the United States the influence of slavery and the slave trade endures through racial discrimination, multigenerational poverty, deep structural inequality, racialized incarceration, and premature death. The American novelist William Faulkner already wrote: «The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.
—Can you ask for forgiveness for four centuries of slavery?
—Asking for forgiveness is easy. Taking concrete steps to overcome the injustices that persist today due to the slave trade and slavery is much more difficult to achieve. Reparations are necessary to overcome the damage that that long period caused throughout the world. For those who want to understand the variety of forms reparations can take, I recommend reading William A. Darity’s book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. African Americans in the 21st century).
—In Spain, slavery is associated with the United States, Great Britain and France, but little is said about the Spanish Empire. What role did it play in the slave trade?
—Over the lifetime of the slave trade, between 1500 and 1870, approximately 1.6 million enslaved people were imported from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. One million of them were transported on Spanish ships, the other 600,000 on Portuguese, French and British ships thanks to a contract that the Spanish Crown signed with individuals called “asiento” to outsource human trafficking. Spain was one of the main actors in the Atlantic slave trade.
—But here there is still resistance to assuming responsibility for the atrocities committed during the colonization of America. From a conservative political sector it is claimed that “Hispanization” brought freedom, peace and prosperity to the American continent. As a specialist in Atlantic History, what is your opinion?
—What freedom, peace and prosperity did the Spanish bring to the millions of indigenous people who lost their lands and died by the millions from European diseases against which they had no immunity? Freedom, peace and prosperity for the millions of Africans who died in the Atlantic slave trade and for the millions more who worked to exhaustion producing the sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton that made their enslavers rich? Defenders of US imperial expansion, from the 19th century to the present, say the same thing. All colonizers create false stories about their past. Their self-interested views have been challenged by approaches to “history from below,” which studies the lives of ordinary workers in the bloody construction of global capitalism.
—A few months ago, the British government chartered the Bibby Stockholm, a floating prison for immigrants. Do you find any similarity in the humanitarian treatment with the slave ships of 400 years ago? Do you think that in today’s world there are still slavers at the service of power?
—I have seen images of the floating prison and I find them absolutely chilling. There is a direct line of continuity between the infamous Brooks slave ship diagram of the late 18th century and this latest figment of the ruling class’s imagination designed to transport and commodify human labor. I should add that the sociologist Kevin Bales has calculated that there are currently about 28 million people working as slaves around the world, more than existed at the height of the Atlantic slave system, although in a much smaller percentage compared to the world population. These are people subjected to terrible working conditions under the threat or reality of violence. Slavery is still part of the world we live in. In the last two decades, new abolitionist groups have emerged to combat the resurgence of slavery. We still have a lot to do to achieve a world without slavery.
Taken from ctxt
Cover photo: Historian Marcus Rediker during the presentation in Madrid of his book ‘Villains of All Nations’. / Dream Dealers
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