Plurk paste

Preface
FOR AS LONG AS HUMANS have taken life and told stories, for as long as we have wanted something that is not ours, we have sought to make sense of our cruelty and penchant for bloodshed. We have beseeched our gods, demanding explanations for both the tragedies that befall us and the harms we have inflicted on others. We have sought relief in myths with their tales of heroic founders in a world where everything is divine and the future is preordained. We have invented religions and rituals, attempting to create order and meaning from the chaos of human creation and our seemingly boundless capacity for violence that so often defeats our capacity for love and the simple recognition of the lifeworlds of others. We have spun tales to create some distance, to offer a modicum of solace, to turn away from killing and, “from the mystic chords of memory,” toward what Abraham Lincoln optimistically called the “better angels of our nature,” a phrase he penned little more than a month before the American Civil War’s catastrophic beginning.
Over the last few centuries as our gods deserted many of us for some distant home and the West especially grew ever more secular, we have looked to the explanations of historians.
History seemed to offer a way forward, a modern scientific discipline that explained humanity’s foibles and possibilities as to why things turned out the way they did. But in its quest for objectivity and scientific rigor, the discipline of history often stripped the past of its soul, turning even the worst atrocities into “events.” History’s nightmares became ordered into periods and places, as if the devastations of human conduct could be found in archaeological strata beneath our feet, with most layers distant and settled and one epoch neatly following another.
But what if we think of history not as chronological layers but instead as accumulated wreckage, an extraordinary storm that has swept across our planet? This is the contemporary nightmare of global warming.1 In the twenty-first century, death, violence, and danger haunt us in unprecedented ways. We live with the sense that history has been so powerfully inscribed into the earth and into our daily lives that it confounds the very tenses we use to manage time and to distance ourselves from the past and its horrors.
What we thought had disappeared into the obscurities of annihilation has suddenly become visible and insistent. Histories long thought to be hidden now stand right before our eyes, speaking directly to us.
The presence of our current climactic nightmare is unmistakable and insistent. By the end of the century, well over half of all species might be lost. Every day a bit more of Bangladesh dissolves into the Bay of Bengal, as does southern Louisiana many thousands of miles away. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the small nation of Kiribati will vanish beneath the Pacific Ocean, the final insult of a seemingly irrevocable history two and a half centuries in the making; to the islanders, the disappearance of their homes and the scattering of the Kiribati people will be a kind of genocide.
Storms have grown more ferocious everywhere. In the United States, Hurricane Harvey dumped a record of nearly fifty inches of rain on Houston in just a few days in 2017, a once in a five hundred thousand–year event (more than the history of the species Homo sapiens).
In 2022 the monsoons arrived early and violently, turning large areas of Pakistan into a fetid lake and displacing millions of people. On the other side of the planet, much of the American West has been in the grips of a megadrought, the worst in over a thousand years. The Northern Hemisphere’s 2024 summer was the warmest on record.
Greenland’s glaciers are disappearing with ever-increasing rapidity. Since 1972, Greenland has lost over ten thousand gigatons of ice, much of it in just a few years. Just this one part of the world has lost enough water to bury Manhattan in more than five thousand feet of ice. Once-silent spaces now rumble with hundreds of millions of tons of ice succumbing to the Atlantic and roaring waters plunging down moulins, with Cold War waste newly exhumed in the process. Vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, are being released from disappearing permafrost. Equally huge amounts of methane drift into the atmosphere from the oil wells along the Niger Delta, where two centuries ago millions of slaves were forced into ships heading to the Americas. Spillages amounting to one Exxon Valdez yearly for the past forty years (some 440 million gallons) have made the area one of the most polluted on the planet.
A warming planet brings biological threats. Long-frozen pathogens have come back to life as if out of a horror movie, while habitat destruction has led to an increase in zoonotic diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19.
Human migration is increasing drastically as vulnerable populations flee inhospitable zones and seek refuge in cities or in other countries, where they are often met with bigotry and xenophobia. Between 150 million and 250 million people now live on lands that will disappear; by 2100, a billion or more people may be displaced by encroaching seas. Large areas of the world may become uninhabitable, too hot for humans to survive.
Devastation and displacement will be greatest in the Global South, including those urban coastal areas that grew tremendously from the middle of the eighteenth century with the rise of the capitalist world economy. The population of Calcutta (now Kolkata), for example, has swelled to over 15 million, 125 times its population of 120,000 in 1750. Kolkata is a city of profound inequalities, as is the case in cities the world over. Kolkata’s poor are uniquely vulnerable to rising seas and ferocious storms, while the rich can build at higher elevations and buy air conditioners.
How did this happen? How have we created a world that may well threaten our survival as a species? We might recognize that humans are having an impact on our planetary home, but we are only just beginning to understand the conditions that made our present nightmare possible and precisely when and how these disasters have unfolded. When did human relations become so entwined and globalized that they began changing the planet in such irrevocable ways that we can see them in the earth under our feet and the skies above our heads? How might the past look differently if we resist the tendency of opposing cultures and nature? What role does history, with its traditional focus on people, events, and periods—its concern with individuality and contingency and not the general forces determining human existence—have in the twenty-first century?
These questions stand at the center of contemporary global controversies ranging from environmental policy to demands for reparations from the West. Across the continents, millions of people are asking how we wound up here. How did we create this nightmare that has left us on the brink of planetary devastation? In 2020, thousands gathered in Bristol, England, to protest global warming and government inaction. A few months later, a different group of antiracist protestors smashed the bronze statue of slave trader Edward Colston (1636–1721) and tossed it into Bristol’s polluted harbor. Bristol’s protests resembled those unfolding in cities across the United States, with one group pursuing one kind of politics and another group pursuing something very different. Elsewhere, people have begun putting together what the English and American protestors pulled apart, demanding attention to the interconnections of global warming, inequality, colonialism, and racism.
This book offers one answer to the questions people have been asking about our current crisis. The Killing Age tells the story of how our world emerged from the worst violence and destruction in human history, a cataclysm that ranks second only to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event sixty-six million years ago, when a giant meteor smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the reign of dinosaurs and paving the way for the rise of mammals. This more recent cataclysm took place roughly between 1750 and 1900 and before the great world wars of the twentieth century and was made possible by the global spread of weapons and modern finance. It was an age of human possibility and greed and epochal destruction of human and nonhuman worlds, paving the way for the best of times for the privileged few and the absolute worst of times for the majority. Killing created global interconnection and the world we now inhabit, a world born in blood.
This is a different story about the origins of our present than those we have grown used to hearing recently. In 2000, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word “Anthropocene,” the Age of Man, in an off-the-cuff remark at a conference. For Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the effects of aerosols on the ozone layer, the Anthropocene began with “carbonic” (CO2 ) gases belching out of England’s textile factories and eventually spreading across the world, altering planetary systems and bringing an end to the Holocene era that had begun about twelve thousand years before and had established a generally hospitable world for humans.
Crutzen gave a precise date for the launch of the Anthropocene: 1784, the year inventor James Watt designed a new steam engine.
Crutzen’s new word had staying power. From the mid-2000s, references to the Anthropocene developed a life of their own, appearing in newspapers, magazines, books, academic journals, conferences, college courses, a school, movies, popular fiction, poetry, the fine arts, the popular media, and even video games. “Anthropocene” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014. Debates soon followed: When, precisely, did the Anthropocene begin? Many followed Crutzen’s dating, but some pointed back to the age of European discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or still earlier to the beginning of agriculture at the dawn of the Holocene era. Others argued for a more recent date, the so-called Great Acceleration. These advocates highlighted the globalized spread of industry and fossil fuels and other technological developments, such as the widespread use of fertilizers and nuclear weapons that began permanently scarring the planet. Many pointed to a single moment: the morning of August 6, 1945, when an atomic mushroom cloud reached tens of thousands of feet above an incinerated Hiroshima.
To some, the Anthropocene serves as a call to action, rising from the simple recognition of our deleterious impact on the planet, most importantly the industrial emissions responsible for global warming. To others, the word can be paralyzing, leaving us feeling helpless before inevitable and abstract processes, hostages of our own progress once the genies of technological innovation have been set loose upon the world. Definitions of the Anthropocene that peg it to CO2 emissions tend to fixate on heavy industry and technical solutions to global problems: carbon capture, new systems for producing energy, or geoengineering the climate. But here the story becomes, yet again, all about the Industrial Revolution, a history of northern England spreading outward, with global warming the unintended consequence of technological marvels. Writers will mention the invention of the steam engine and then leapfrog to the present as if the development of capitalism was as natural as the sun rising every morning. The rest of the world is typically minimized or left out of these accounts, perpetually waiting in the wings of a history that is never quite their own.
Individuals also tend to disappear from these accounts: the decisions people made, what they did and didn’t know, how they lived, and what they believed. Human actions fade under the weight of abstraction and inevitability and with them our capacity to imagine a different future. Most of all, the violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the Industrial Revolution. We forget—or don’t want to remember—that the Industrial Revolution emerged out of a century and a half of untold predation, made singularly possible by the modern manufacturing and global spread of guns, which made killing infinitely easier. Guns unleashed the most concentrated and widespread slaughter in human history, so much so that—as I will argue—killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history. Without this globalized violence, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened. It would have emerged in dribs and drabs instead of the explosion that now threatens our existence. To comprehend the predicament we face today, we must return to the beginnings, to all the messiness and dramas of human existence, to the relationships people made and unmade under conditions they inherited and confronted, the awful painful yawing of a history that offers few consolations. We need a narrative that places these detailed social and political histories alongside—indeed in lockstep with— an accounting of the stark planetary destruction humans have wrought during the same period.
Instead of the Anthropocene, we should consider speaking of the Mortecene, the Age of Death and Killing. The Industrial Revolution in England and the United States cannot be explained without understanding the enslavement of Africans and their exploitation in the Americas and the changed landscapes that both created. The factories of Europe and North America cannot be explained without understanding the dispossession of Native Americans and the conversion of their lands into cotton fields and the spread of disease and the destruction of soils in Egypt. The actual workings of coal-fired factories in the United States cannot be explained without also understanding the near extinction of the American bison, whose skins became industrial belts, while large areas of the western United States became one of the world’s most polluted areas. The Anthropocene effectively leaves out human predation, slavery, and even imperialism. It leaves out the massive killing at the heart of the creation of a fossil economy, an era when violence reduced everything, including human beings, to goods that could be exchanged in a so-called free market. All this death left its own markers. The Mortecene has shaped who we are, what we value, what we fear and what we have forgotten, and the precarious present we inhabit today.
This is the past we will be exploring in this book: how the world was pulled together and torn apart by greed and violence, how the engines of history that had begun centuries earlier suddenly sped up and surged out of control like a runaway train or a storm that never ended.
We will turn to scenes of terror and suffering and to those who resisted and warned of the world being made as well as to the origins of denialism. The Killing Age is the story of the men who wrought this destruction, for it has been men who have largely killed and who have inflicted physical violence on one another and on women and on the innocent. It is also about the people who fought them and who offered and defended alternative visions of a world grounded in communal values such as sharing and environmental responsibility.
We live in troubled times but not ones without hope. Writers, artists, and social movements of all sizes invite us to consider pasts that are still present and, most importantly, to refuse to accept the world as it is and how it has been represented. We will have occasion to meet some of these figures in the pages that follow and, from “the mystic chords of memory,” visit “the better angels of our nature.” These voices of hope and resistance have their own deep histories in the warnings, sorrows, and dreams of the subjugated, and they are not without their own contradictions. But they are also invitations to take responsibility, to collectively grieve for what we have done, and to create new histories, weave stories that shape us, and prepare, together, for our shared future. Introduction THE PROFESSOR ARRIVED IN LONDON in the spring of 1773 to finish the book and shepherd its publication. He had been thinking about the manuscript for a long time. Fretting over his health and anxious to make progress, for over a decade he had buried himself in a bewildering array of texts on the price of corn as well as on banking, taxation, money, labor and wages, and international trade and the colonies. Now settled into an elegant neighborhood of resolute white limestone homes near King George III’s residence at St.
James’s Palace, he put pen to paper. Occasionally, a short ride carried the professor away from his desk to the dappled light of the British Museum’s Montagu House, where he continued his labors surrounded by one of the world’s greatest collection of books.1 Adam Smith (1723–1790) lived in a rarified world of intellectuals, politicians, aristocrats, scientists, and inventors. These extraordinary men gathered at the Royal Society (women couldn’t be members), to which our esteemed professor was admitted in May 1773. There they sometimes discussed weighty philosophical matters. More often, the assembled group would address more practical topics: how to design better weapons or how best to safely store the thousands of tons of gunpowder that had a nasty habit of blowing up and reducing entire neighborhoods to a smoldering rubble. Smith also belonged to the Literary Club, where he struck up friendships with intellectuals such as Edward Gibbon, then struggling to complete the first installment of his six-volume history of humankind’s shortcomings and tragedies, and Edmund Burke, the conservative politician, muckraker, and prolific author who lived nearby on Gerrard Street.
Smith discussed his project with the visiting colonial Benjamin Franklin, whom he had known previously from Franklin’s time in Scotland. Smith harbored a particular fondness for the relentlessly inquisitive and loquacious colonial. America fascinated Smith; he believed that it would one day rule the world. He admired the settlers and sympathized with their cause, part of his broader criticisms of British imperial policies as “a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind,” which he interpreted as the right to profit from a country’s resources and its industrious people.2 Smith’s book saw the light of day three years later in 1776, the same year his friend Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia and Gibbon’s first volume arrived from the printers. Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (commonly known as The Wealth of Nations) would become one of the most famous books ever published in the English language; two and a half centuries later, his work remains a bestseller. In its pages, Smith deplored war and excoriated mercantilism, the policies of government protectionism that he saw as akin to tyranny. He set out a vision for how a free market of commerce and manufacturing might guarantee individual liberty and advance human progress. He fervently believed that under the protection of good government humankind thrives, while those “exposed to every sort of violence” are reduced to “their necessary subsistence.”3 Sickly, reserved, and generally preferring books to people, Smith rarely left the comforts of his posh neighborhood for the bustling commercial and manufacturing districts of the great metropolis. London had entered its golden age, and one could see the wealth generated by commerce and industry in the estates and expensive well-lit houses ornamenting Richmond and lining Hampstead Heath.
This luxury Adam Smith knew well. This was his world.
Most of the city’s population, however, was living a different story. Many Londoners were desperately poor and lived in dark hovels, even though their combined labors had made the city great. This world Smith knew less well, even if it regularly spilled into even the toniest neighborhoods: tens of thousands of London’s impoverished, workers who cleaned excrement from its streets, bone pickers and scavengers looking for something to eat, rag gatherers, beggar-children, and sewer hunters who lived underground, quite literally in shit.
Prostitution was rampant, and seemingly everyone drank vast amounts of beer and gin, the “liquid fire by which men drink their hell.”4 The working classes rioted with such regularity that protestors knew the names and addresses of officials whose well-appointed residences the mobs seemed ever ready to burn to the ground.
London served as home to the world’s most powerful bank—the Bank of England, established in 1694—in addition to scores of other banks and financial institutions such as stock exchanges and insurance companies. In a city awash in bank notes, a dizzying array of money passed through people’s hands, with everyone praying that their investments would grow.
Jobbers, brokers, and thousands of clerks made their way through coalstained fog so thick they could barely see down the road. Reaching their desks, they set in motion loans that extended around the globe, each one leading to higher interest rates and for the first time in history sending vast swaths of humanity into the maws of crushing, intractable debt. Other institutions issued insurance policies protecting the shipment of goods against loss, including for nearly a century the most brutal trade of all, one responsible for the deaths of millions and untold suffering: the trade in human beings.
Not more than a mile from where Smith completed his famous book on the virtues of free trade and the genius of manufacturing churned a world tainted by “every sort of violence.” Intellectually, Smith knew that the spread of commerce might be good for some but a “dreadful misfortune” for millions of others. But he had convinced himself that this contradiction was the cost of progress, and he would rather focus on the future. With unshackled commerce yielding unparalleled wealth, Smith believed that liberty, justice, and common decency might prevail, with the world ruled by reason and at its center individuals endowed with inalienable rights.
Commerce would create a moral economy, a peaceable world of human progress, specialization, and invention. This vision—for Smith and especially for those who followed him—comprised the essence of capitalism and of modernity in general.
The great theorist kept a comfortable distance from violence and misfortune. Smith never went down to the city’s docks, some of which had direct ties to the West Indies and to islands such as Jamaica, where enslaved people were being worked to death. Had he ventured down to that waterfront, he would have seen ships being loaded with thousands of guns and tons of gunpowder and shot. These weapons and ammunition were meant not for armies but instead for nonstate actors and would spread killing from Borneo to America’s Great Lakes. Other vessels lumbered up the Thames, their holds filled with thousands of barrels of oil rendered from dead whales and millions of North American animal skins. Still other ships arrived quite literally filled with “loot,” a word entering the English language from South Asia, where the British East India Company (BEIC) plundered the region, pocketing its wealth—gold, silver, gems, and whatever had a value and could be hauled away—while millions starved to death.
It is undeniable that much of London’s—indeed England’s—economic miracle depended on killing. The country rose on making guns and gunpowder and on the financial apparatus that made global commerce and destruction—the Mortecene—possible. Along the narrow dirt and cobblestone carriageways of London’s East End, thousands of workers beat and reamed white-hot iron into barrels as deafening noise and black soot rose from the foundries. England was the world’s most important supplier of guns, and London stood as a vital center of gun making, with large gunpowder mills dotted in and around the city, one reason why the learned men of the Royal Society were interested in reducing explosions.
The Industrial Revolution began less with pumping water out of coal mines and with spinning thread and weaving cloth than with making weapons, beginning in the great city on the Thames.5 In 1784, when just about everyone who was anyone was reading Smith’s newly revised book and James Watt walked into the London Patent Office with designs for an improved steam engine, over 200,000 guns entered Africa alone along with millions of pounds of gunpowder and lead, over 1.14 million pounds just from Great Britain and enough charge for 18 million to 47 million musket shots and more. The English monopoly of Indian saltpeter—potassium nitrate, the key ingredient in gunpowder— launched the country’s explosives industry. British guns and gunpowder could be found everywhere along with other European makes. Not to be outdone, the Americans soon followed suit. Between 1750 and 1900, Europe and America exported hundreds of millions of weapons, upwards of half a billion, nearly as many guns as there were people during that period, and enough gunpowder to kill every single person on the planet many times over. Across the world, many weapons ended up in the hands of warlords: men who sought gain and the control of economic resources from the barrel of a gun. With a clump of fiery lead weighing upwards of one ounce traveling up to one thousand feet (about 304.8 meters) or more a second, guns made killing infinitely easier.
* On the printed page at least, Smith’s moral economy offered stability and minimal (albeit responsible) government, a world in which people such as Watt could become wealthy from selling an important invention. Smith hoped for an ethical commercial society, although he and his contemporaries were well aware of the challenges. Humans seemed infinitely capable of corruption or, as his friend Franklin put it, “more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation.”6 Down the block from where Smith wrote his great book and across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, profoundly immoral economies were emerging where violence and near anarchy prevailed. Smith knew this, but he chose not to write much on the world’s “dreadful misfortunes.” At heart, Smith was an optimist. And yet capitalism’s “big bang”—a turning point in the history of the planet—emerged out of nothing less and nothing more than the globalized use of violence to make money. To summarize this book’s argument, destruction made the modern world.
But who were its creators? This was a world wrought less by modern armies and certainly not by staid businessmen, intellectuals, statesmen, although they all played their part. This modern arena was created by a global proliferation of warlords, men who sought to profit from selling modern weapons and using them to generate wealth or extricate labor from others. Violence made money in revolutionary new ways. Warlords were directly or indirectly connected to new financial institutions and practices such as banks and even insurance policies. Using guns made in Europe and North America, warlords looted the world, turning what they could kill or capture into salable goods. These merchants of destruction were not especially interested in acquiring territory, at least not initially. Instead, they were interested in combining violence and commerce. In this way, killing became inextricably bound to the birth of capitalism and modernity, including our current age of global warming.
Consider the following facts from the year 1784, the early years of the Mortecene, when The Wealth of Nations was becoming one of the most important books ever published. In 1784 alone, ships carrying hundreds of thousands of weapons and thousands of tons of gunpowder, lead, and other goods to Africa were restocked with nearly one hundred thousand enslaved people headed for the Americas, with its voracious appetite for labor to produce sugar and other export products. This was the highest number of persons forcibly shipped since 1514, when the first slave ship crossed the Atlantic. Many more died on the African continent to produce this already astronomical number, anywhere between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand, as warlords captured people to sell into the slave trade.
In the eight years between the first and third editions of The Wealth of Nations, over five hundred thousand people were forced onto slave ships; over a million people in Africa died as warlords ruled a continent.
Of those one hundred thousand people chained belowdecks in 1784, ten thousand perished on their way westward, literally a decimation (and roughly the same percentage of the total population killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide). Many were headed to plantations on the islands of Jamaica, Cuba, and Saint-Domingue, each founded by men who used money gained from violence to become the earliest plantation masters.
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) would become one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan places in the world, where the well-to-do listened to Mozart’s latest minuet or attended a performance of his The Marriage of Figaro, and would also become one of the most violent.
Plantations were heavily stocked with weapons and served as military garrisons as much as farms exploiting slave labor. Each year, roughly 5 percent of Saint-Domingue’s slave labor force died. In nearby Jamaica, with much of the island turned over to growing sugarcane at the expense of food, many thousands died of disease and malnourishment, producing what was in effect at first a luxury good and later an item of mass consumption. In the cold economic logic of planters, it made sense to let their slaves die from lack of food as well as disease, abuse, and overwork.7 Profit was more important than life at the time and in later reforms that attempted to reduce mortality to better extract labor from the bodies of enslaved peoples.
The slave trade united African and European warlords in a single system.
Human beings were the resource to be looted, stolen in whatever ways possible. Guns made the explosive increase in such thefts possible. Human destruction and environmental destruction became part of a single process of accumulation, one that led to our use of fossil fuels, industrialization, and, consequently, global warming. We cannot understand one without the other. In 1784 when the Atlantic slave trade reached a new dismal record, well over a million wild North American mammals were killed, skinned, and sold, their pelts distributed around the world. North America was experiencing the most concentrated destruction of wild mammals in history, an ecocide largely organized by warlords who either did the hunting or controlled the flow of pelts into the global economy. The great killing of whales was just beginning, making port towns such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, among the richest places on Earth. North America’s industrial revolution started not in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, but instead at sea in the killing and carving up of animals using the finest steels and the boiling of their flesh into oil, an industry responsible for the largest human destruction of wild animal biomass in our roughly three hundred thousand years as a species. The profits from this pelagic genocide would support various industries, including the beginning of America’s fossil fuel economy: the whaling ship with its men, stench, and plume of black smoke uncannily awaiting the twentieth century’s oil derrick.8 FIGURE I.1. Burning Ship. Painting by Christopher Volpe.
To these images of stacks of wild animal skins, men peeling blubber from a whale, and the rotting corpses of tens of millions of bison and elephants and the myriad other images of the natural world’s destruction made possible by weapons and finance, imagine the following scenes of human suffering (we will be returning to these scenes in more detail later): indebted Indigenous Americans engaging in unsustainable trapping and other violence that permanently reshapes the American landscape and losing their land to the same settlers who sold them guns and purchased their pelts so that the earth itself became private property. In West Africa, a man pawns a family member as part of a complex set of credit and debt relations involving the purchase of weapons and ultimately a London bank; the family member ends up on a Caribbean plantation, dying a few years later from overwork, cruelty, or malnutrition. An Asian man’s debt exceeds the value of his body, so he becomes a slave. These tragic incidents would be repeated countless times across the globe, with people’s anguish profoundly shaped by their gender and generation. Women were exposed to sexual violence in ways seldom experienced by men. Children were especially vulnerable.
Each instance, however unique, emerged out of the spread of the weapons and commerce from which the Industrial Revolution and our age of global warming was born.
Now consider the deaths of nonhuman animals. Since about 1500, the planet has lost roughly one thousand species. The rate of extinction took off dramatically from about 1750, likely several hundred times what scientists call the “background rate.” Sometimes extinction is an indirect process.
Pollution kills. People cut down trees for lumber, and a creature vanishes.
Or someone introduces an invasive animal such as a fish or a rabbit that eats its way through the habitat, outcompeting native species. Many of the first to decline were birds and small mammals, some vanishing because of habitat destruction. They went extinct as an indirect result of human activity. Others, however, disappeared because of human desire, hunted out of existence because they could be made into something that sold for money.
Weapons, whether guns or traps, made killing easier. Europeans so liked their fancy feathers that some bird species went extinct for women’s hats and headdresses. Other birds provided down to keep people warm, particularly with the colder temperatures across Europe during the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300s–1850). The lumbering, defenseless great auk, a flightless seabird gone by the mid-1800s, ended up on people’s beds and as fishing bait.9 Extinction grabs headlines but only tells part of the story. The populations of many other species—whales, elephants, and hundreds of millions of North American mammals—were severely depleted during the same period, often brought to the edge of extinction. Each of these became commodities: think oil, piano keys, and false teeth. (Carl Sagan, the popular science writer, noted of our use of fossil fuels that “like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.”)10 More than 70 million bison in the United States during the early 1700s were reduced to just 350 by the late nineteenth century; most were killed in just a few decades during history’s most concentrated killing of wild mammals, with tongues sent to Chicago for cheap food, hides ending up as industrial belts, and bones loaded onto trains heading to factories. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century entrepreneurs depleted and even wiped out animal populations because their bodies might be turned into profitable goods.
How much? We will never know with absolute certainty. Scientists like to use the term “biomass” as a way of measuring organisms living in a certain area. A very conservative estimate of just the annihilation of large wild mammals between 1750 and 1900 is well more than 500 billion pounds (250 million tons, or about 226,796,000,000 kilograms), about 3.33 billion pounds (1,510,461,360 kilograms) of animal biomass yearly for a century and a half.
This yearly figure is about the combined weight of Western Europe’s human population in 1750. Including smaller mammals, the combined total is equivalent to the weight of every single person on the planet today, in other words the complete and utter destruction of our species. Many other animal and plant species were severely depleted as well, including trees and especially fish. All this violence against living creatures was not limited to acts against nonhumans. The spread of weapons closely tracks both the destruction of animal populations and the enslavement of people during the same period.
The export of enslaved persons from Africa reached its height during the Industrial Revolution and in the years Adam Smith was writing his book. In the decades between 1750 and 1840, nearly 8 million people crossed the Atlantic, over half of the total trafficked between 1500 and the 1860s; between 16 million and 24 million people died to produce the 13 million slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean over these three centuries. The capture of people and the development of slavery constituted a global phenomenon, turning human beings into property that could be sold to others. Between 620,000 and 1.3 million Americans were enslaved between 1751 and 1900. The enslavement of people also increased across large areas of Asia. On the eve of the American Civil War, there were many more slaves in Africa and South Asia than there ever were in all of the Americas.
Until quite recently with the rise of environmentalism and human rights, people have been accustomed to living with what today looks like exceptionally high levels of violence against humans and nonhumans alike.
Across the West while our modern world was being forged, people regularly applauded the destruction of nature and the disappearance of human and nonhuman communities.
Extinction was not only inevitable but was also desired, a mark of progress to be celebrated, not mourned. The word “extermination” regularly appeared in print, from local newspapers to government reports. In the United States, “extermination” registered civilization’s westward march as settlers systematically annihilated bison, wolves, and Indigenous peoples.11 Now consider the rise of two countries that became the wealthiest places on Earth and the greatest polluters. Much of this book will emphasize Great Britain/United Kingdom and the United States of America and, as we shall see, for very good reasons. In 1700, per capita GDP in the United Kingdom and what would become the United States was roughly the same as in China and India. By 1850, a tremendous gap between East and West had appeared.
The United Kingdom and the United States were now over four times wealthier than their Asian counterparts and accounted for nearly half of all global wealth. These developments, moreover, took place at precisely the same time as the onset of human-induced global warming.12 The growth of the United States is especially remarkable. Just before the outbreak of the American Revolution, colonists already had higher incomes than many of their relatives back home. The Revolutionary War was an economic shock, but growth took off spectacularly from the end of the century until 1861 and the American Civil War. Less than seventy-five years after its founding, the young country had reached the United Kingdom in per capita GDP. The United States became “one of the first, if not the first, to join the modern economic growth club.”13 Two countries, once part of a single empire, developed in tandem to dominate the world and became responsible for most of the CO2 emissions that by the 1830s were already beginning to alter the planet. In the United Kingdom, CO2 emissions increased by a factor of nearly 400 between 1750 and 1850 and fifty years later by a factor of over 1,700, from 9.35 million metric tons to 16,743 yearly. And the United States? In the century after 1800, emissions increased by a factor of 40,000.
Between 1750 and 1900, just these two countries emitted at least 44.8 billion cumulative tons of CO2 , nearly 99 percent of the global total. (This total is equivalent to the combined weight of over 122,700 Empire State Buildings. Stacking these up would get one nearly thirty thousand miles into space and beyond the many satellites circling the planet.)14 Compared to contemporary emissions of greenhouse gases, forty billion tons seems negligible; in just 2022, after all, global CO2 emissions were roughly the same as what the United Kingdom and the United States released into the atmosphere in 150 years. We are often told that it is the cumulative amount of emissions that matters and that a significant lag—up to a century—persists between emissions and warming. The latest scientific research paints a more complicated picture. Even relatively small bursts of CO2 emissions may create temperature anomalies in just decades. As prominent climatologists recently noted, “the temperature consequences of CO2 emission materialize more quickly than commonly assumed, [and] they are long lasting.”15 This is one piece of strong evidence that “industrial-era warming” began earlier, in most parts of the world by the middle of the nineteenth century; by 1861–1880, it is possible that “a warming of 0.1C had already occurred due to CO2 increases.”16 Admittedly this number is small, and its impact on natural variability is unclear (volcanic activity helped mute rising temperatures). But the data suggest that even small increases can have notable effects, such as on the Indian Ocean monsoon system upon which billions of people depend. Global warming was under way much earlier than we typically think, emerging in this era of slavery, imperialism, and the slaughter of wild animals.
Behind the numbers are stories of the most profound violence and the untold tragedies and struggles of our world.17 This violence was—and still is—inextricably connected to the creation of our world of global warming and planetary peril. These are the stories I will be telling in this book. Here is a history of violence on a global scale we are only beginning to comprehend, a great killing, an epoch of terrible bloodshed and extraordinary predation by people using guns to pursue wealth. Yet it is also the story of heroic resistance by those who rejected this world and in their own ways warned of what was coming.
*
This book may anger those on both extremes of a centuries-long debate on the origins of our modern world: those who insist there was something intrinsically special about the West and that its rise emerged from endogenous forces and, more recently, those who believe that the only thing distinctive about the West is its racist exploitation of the world. Others may object that the search for origins is a fool’s gambit, one that flattens and sacrifices the limitless possibilities of human conduct—the open-endedness of history—in pursuit of identifying general, universal patterns. But the West was distinctive and where modern capitalism first arose in two countries, England and the United States, nearly simultaneously, before spreading to other parts of the world. But capitalism and Western dominance emerged out of an enlargement and intensification of one of the most fundamental features of our species that can be seen in rock art around the world going back one hundred thousand years—the human as killer— and a nearly universal desire to possess what is not ours. The West may have pioneered and driven the process, but the entire world contributed to the horrors of our age, just as those who dissented and resisted are found everywhere from London to America’s Great Plains to the jungles of the Amazon.
Killing became inextricably tied to the spread of modern weapons and a modern commercial system marked by new, often punishing, relations of credit and debt. The combination—primeval killing and modern commerce and finance—created a merciless and ruinous cycle of economic growth that we now recognize is changing the planet, a process of “accumulation by annihilation.” Everything from the exotic to the mundane, it seemed, could be transformed into something else, converted into value: the brain matter of a whale turned into the most exquisite candle, a bison hide into an industrial belt, a piece of ivory into a pie crimper, the inner hairs of an aquatic creature into a felted hat, or captured human bodies into financial bonds, a bit of paper protecting economic interests unfolding across an ocean. For as long as we have lived, we humans have hunted and killed, and for as long as we have been animals capable of reflection, we have spun stories about death and our unique ability to destroy, to take life, often for no other reason than that we coveted what was not ours. It is a story older than Cain and Abel. No sooner had we chased an animal down—perhaps striking an antelope’s head with a stone as it grazed on the African savanna—than we began killing each other. Violence among humans emerged from competition, jealousy, rage, or hunger.
18 All religions and myths, indeed human culture itself, have grappled with the human as killer. Our conundrum has always been a simultaneous capacity to destroy and care for each other, to annihilate and unite, to feel someone else’s pain and cause it, to love and wound anyway.
War as a form of organized violence is ancient. Bands and peoples living in small communities attacked others, at times ferociously. The rise of states permitted new forms of warfare, often (not always) against nonstate peoples seen as “barbarians” and “savages.” Many nonstate peoples ended up as slaves.19 And violence has preoccupied classical and Western thinkers at least as far back as Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War, likely written around 400 BCE. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), often considered the father of modern political science, translated the famous ancient Greek thinker. Hobbes believed the state ruled by the just sovereign —his Leviathan—would end the “war of all against all” and begin expanding the civilizing process.
Hobbes wrote his magnum opus Leviathan in the middle years of the seventeenth century as one world order gave way to another. He was thinking of the ancient world but especially the century of war that began in the mid-1300s and the three decades of slaughter in the early 1600s that swept away 20 percent of the population. In fits and starts, violence in Europe began declining, much as Hobbes had theorized. England, for example, has remained quite cohesive and stable since its Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). Most of Western Europe also experienced a decline in violence especially after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. A more stable period persisted for a century (with important exceptions, such as the 1870 Franco-Prussian War) until the great bloodletting era of 1914 to 1945.
The capacity of governments to kill and to care increased, a process that continued (albeit unevenly and slowly) up to the 1970s, when economic crisis ended a remarkable period of expansion and, across much of the West, spelled the demise of the welfare state. During this decade nonstate violence began accelerating on a global scale, producing what some have described as the “new barbarism.”20 Today, large areas of the world where the state has failed or is absent are controlled by militias.
Although Western Europe, especially England, became more peaceable and prosperous—what many used to call “civilized” or “progress”—during the rise of the modern period, violence did not disappear: it went elsewhere.
Killing for capital, I will argue, is the West’s most profound contribution to world history. This claim takes a little explaining, because at first glance, it seems counterintuitive. When history books discuss violence, they invariably concentrate on the wars between and among states.
Entire libraries are filled with tomes describing battles of armies and navies and the decisions (and debacles) of military leaders. This is sometimes referred to as “grand strategy” and statecraft, topics that the ancient Chinese writer Sun Tzu set out in his The Art of War, still a hit after 2,500 years. Certainly, the military capacity of Western states increased across the modern era.
Armies and navies grew larger, especially those of Britain. Creating, maintaining, and most of all paying for these militaries became an important task of governments, or what some have called the “fiscalmilitary state.”21 This state-centric perspective notes the growth of military prowess—and lauds the lessening of traditional warfare during the same years—but misses another development of this period: the relationship being forged among commerce, finance, and killing. Here, the object of violence was not political but economic, and it was prosecuted not by formal militaries but by warlords. Violence using modern technology (guns) combined with modern finance (banking, bonds, insurance, stock markets, and so on) created a revolutionary and shockingly speculative new mode of generating wealth. This was the “military-commercial revolution,” and it made accumulation by annihilation possible.
When I say that violence “went elsewhere” in the modern era, I mean that it went here: into the killing that made the West rich.
This argument requires us to shift our thinking about violence, if only because our contemporary world of universal human rights abhors violence even if it remains sadly omnipresent. Initially, war may have arisen as a mode of pillaging and confiscating property—“I will pillage and plunder the entire place,” declares the invader Gog in the book of Ezekiel from the Hebrew Bible; “I will steal.”22 In the eighteenth century, however, violence became uniquely productive. Violence paid, often handsomely, generating wealth that could be consumed ostentatiously or, crucially, turned to other activities such as establishing a plantation or a factory. This is a defining feature of capitalism: turning wealth into a thing we call “capital” that is secure from arbitrary seizure and can be exchanged, reinvested, and “grown.” The process requires a set of institutional mechanisms, especially legal systems, that triumphed in England and the United States and expanded elsewhere, albeit more slowly and sporadically.
23 The act of generating wealth that could become capital, however, arose within a Hobbesian world dominated by nonstate actors, a world that was nasty, brutish, and, for some, quite profitable, very different from what Smith and his successors had imagined.
Political consolidation and stability in England and soon in parts of North America developed hand in hand with global destruction and political fragmentation elsewhere, like the hubs and spokes of a wheel. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the planet was more connected—and more violent—than ever before.
This is not the usual story of expanding and aggressive modern states. Nor is it an overseas extension of European political competition that purported to solve anarchy and violence at home by exporting it abroad.24 The conventional tale is how the state—specifically the British state—became both stronger and less arbitrary, especially domestically and then—slowly —internationally. Britain’s navy patrolled the Seven Seas, helping bring an end to an earlier age of pirates and protecting commerce, at least its own. Its military power, however, was sorely tested in the conflict with the American colonies. And in fact well into the nineteenth century, the British depended on private militias, as did other countries, much like today, where some of the world’s strongest states nonetheless depend on subcontractors: think Russia’s Wagner Group and America’s Blackwater. These could be huge. In 1800, the BEIC’s military was twice the size of the British Army, one reason why the corporation was at the forefront of developing weapons to better loot Asia. Other companies also had their own militaries, their own flags, and even their own postage stamps. Large areas of the world were colonized not by states but instead by thugs: nearly anarchical nonstate violence served the West very well during its formative rise to global supremacy.
25 What no one realized at the time was that violence would metastasize and ultimately threaten Western dominance. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the world’s first global war, marked a turning point in the military-commercial revolution. The conflict ostensibly centered on which country would most profit from international commerce. Smith considered the war a prime example of government overreach and of corrupt companies accountable to the few better at plunder than trade.
Britain and France battled on the high seas, and soldiers killed one another across Central Europe’s plains. Other nations with overseas interests waded into the fray, especially Spain and the Netherlands. Mostly, France lost and Great Britain triumphed. With the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France ceded control over vast territories ranging from Canada to South Asia. The war’s end also saw the beginning of looser state control over commerce and the rise of what we call today “free trade.”26 Surprisingly, the great bulk of the fighting during the Seven Years’ War did not take place in Europe or even at sea, nor were battles waged by official armies and navies. Instead, the war was mostly fought in frontier areas by a bewildering and unstable array of largely independent and private militias and proxies, warlords armed to the teeth with guns manufactured in Europe. Participants ranged from the employees of various companies, with their own militaries, entrepreneurs, and collaborators, to South Asian princes and the Iroquois Confederacy and many, many, others.
Viewed in this light, the Seven Years’ War can be seen not just as the first world war but also as the first world war fought with modern weapons and modern (nonstate) actors in what became a bloody scramble to determine who would profit from environmental destruction and the control of natural resources.27 Uniting this motley crew of avaricious men was their unwavering commitment to generating wealth by combining new and more lethal weapons with commerce. They knew that violence paid, even if only a few could turn their wealth into capital and make the transition from predation to production. For these men—and they were all men—the central issue was not conquering territory and creating colonies; it was generating and controlling the flow of resources: North America’s lucrative fur trade, which left hundreds of millions of animals hunted, skinned, and sold; the theft of India’s resources, which left millions of people dead; the sugar and molasses produced by enslaved people in the Caribbean who were unlikely to survive more than a decade; and the trafficking in human bodies that resulted in the deaths of millions. Part loan shark or predatory lender, part gangster and gun dealer, often a member of a group with its own codes and methods of aggressive enforcement and always armed, these warlords combined commerce with spectacular violence and changed the world. They created predatory and looting economies—immoral economies based on extortion and the pervasive use of guns—in which business flowed from violence against anything or anyone who might yield a value.
Predation allowed these men to gain control over resources, including over human beings, particularly in regions marked by instability where power in effect became privatized and in frontier spaces that remained loosely administered or entirely free from state control.
The political structure of most non-Western societies made them uniquely susceptible to fragmentation and warlordism once weapons became more widely available. Around the world, power often rested less on consent than on rulers’ ability to control the means of destruction. This allowed the powerful to demand tribute from those they had conquered or neighbors they successfully intimidated by threatening bloodshed, extract resources, and, to a much lesser extent, acquire land, to extort, in short, whatever was considered valuable.
Few of these regions were states with a capital, ruling dynasties, or administrative offices.
Across Asia, Africa, and North America, tribes and confederacies emerged without the durable institutions usually associated with the state and its compact with those it ruled. With access to weapons, these societies might see the dominance of “big” men, often chiefs who rose to power through predation, such as “General” Ecueracapa, who with guns and horses in the 1780s transformed the Comanche into one of the most dominant powers west of the Mississippi River. But these predatory and tributary systems fractured almost as easily as they took initial shape. Once leaders lost control of weapons, their power proved to be ephemeral. No one, after all, likes being extorted, although many relish demanding things from others. Once they had guns in their hands, those who had paid tribute could declare independence and turn their weapons on others. Westerners were keenly aware of these fault lines; they studied their customers both at home and abroad, tailoring their weapons sales to local demand and, when it suited them, subverting attempts by rulers to control the flow of guns. When rulers complained, gun merchants invoked “free trade.” The military-commercial revolution made possible, even inevitable, the profound democratization of violence, a century and a half of anarchy and barbarism until the late nineteenth century and the first global arms treaties.
Contemporary history since the 1970s offers a disturbing parallel to what unfolded over two centuries ago, sharing in common weak states and political fragmentation, the rapid spread of weapons, free market fundamentalism and accelerated capital flows, and the reemergence of private military companies. The AK-47 is today’s flintlock musket, with approximately one hundred million manufactured since the end of World War II. We live in a world where warlordism has grown tremendously along with globalization and a renewed scramble for natural resources, and at precisely the same time state control of weapons in many areas has all but disappeared. Exceptional bloodshed goes hand in hand with transnational commerce, connecting areas of stability to regions of remarkable insecurity and also connecting industries to mass violence and environmental destruction: to name just a few examples, Khmer Rouge genocidaires selling gems and timber on the global market to the tune of more than ten million to twenty million dollars a month; Sierra Leonean killers hanging out with international businessmen, their headquarters the European capitals; Liberian murderers drinking beer with their foreign business and government buddies; mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and international shipments of the precious coltan and cobalt destined for smartphones and advanced battery systems; criminal syndicates working with multinational corporations to ensure the flow of millions of barrels of oil from the Niger Delta; and the warlords in charge of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry.
28 To a world economy dependent on fossil fuels and especially the urgent and ongoing microprocessor and electrification revolutions, these resources are vital. In each case, the goal of warlords is less to possess territory than to control the flow of scarce resources into the global economy. The situation is especially acute in Africa, where the state remains remarkably weak and in many areas absent and most of its people desperately poor.
Africa produces about 10 percent of the world’s oil. The Democratic Republic of the Congo accounts for upwards of 80 percent of global supplies of coltan and has over 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, in addition to gold, diamonds, and other minerals. Much of the country is ruled by warlords in cahoots with huge mining conglomerates. Between 1994 and 1996, Angola, Congo, and Equatorial Guinea received the largest amount of foreign investment in Africa; at the same time, upwards of two hundred thousand people living in these countries were murdered.29 We live in a world of planetary peril and in a new age of barbarism amid rapid capitalist development. What has unfolded in the past fifty years is remarkably like the spread of violence and the extraction of resources in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For that earlier epoch, the most obvious example of the warlord is the slave catcher. Entwined in global circuits of credit and debt, armed and violent, the slave catcher engaged in capturing and selling people at a time when humans were among the scarcest of resources. There were tens of thousands like him.
If we extend our perspective along these lines, we begin meeting remarkably disquieting people, men such as Robert Clive, the leader of the BEIC and erstwhile “founder” of modern India. Clive spearheaded the looting of a subcontinent, followed by men such as Warren Hastings, whom Burke would drag through a parliamentary impeachment in 1786, accusing Hastings and the BEIC of an “unbounded license of power” and incessant “bribery and plunder.”30 Clive and Hastings were warlords, as was America’s Daniel Boone, commercial hunter, colonizer, and killer, and, like Clive, later a national hero (until British protestors began demanding the removal of numerous statues of Clive across the country, including one near Downing Street). We also meet a man with impoverished roots, born in the Carolinas and later becoming a warlord, hunting Native Americans and profiting from the fur trade, selling guns and merchandise, and engaging in land speculation. Newly wealthy, this fellow reinvested the profits in slaves and a cotton plantation. He entered politics and began to morph from “controversial warlord to consensus candidate,” eventually becoming the seventh president of the United States: Andrew Jackson, known at the time as the country’s “warrior President.”31 The warlord embodies what seems like a contradiction at the center of the modern world’s creation: stability in some areas, fragmentation and violence everywhere else. According to the gospel of Adam Smith, connecting violence to trade, let alone international commerce and capitalism, is inherently contradictory. Merchants can’t successfully truck goods when bandits or pirates threaten their ships or caravans. We tend to think of successful trade as dependent on peace sustained by institutions that protect private property from rapacious “rent-seeking” individuals, including rulers. This association between institutions and economic growth is reinforced by today’s ideologies extolling free trade and free markets and international trade pacts. Our textbooks say the same thing, especially in drawing a bright line separating war from peace, violence from consent, predation from production. England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, or so the story goes, established the conditions for eighteenth-century growth through a sweeping series of legal and institutional reforms that curbed royal power. Thanks to these reforms, English rulers such as Henry VIII could no longer behave like arbitrary tyrants, seizing assets as they pleased.
A century after the Glorious Revolution, Smith would praise this “security of laws” that the English enjoyed, which “is alone sufficient to make any country flourish.”32 Smith was right in his interpretation here, or at least half right. England and a few other places did enjoy a security of laws; others followed. But actions and laws that might have seemed virtuous in one place spilled over as viciousness and exploitation in another. The two were connected.
Violence resided at the very core of these profound developments. As the great historian Fernand Braudel wrote, “the real home of capitalism” is “where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.”33 At the end of the day, capitalism was all about killing and still is.
*
The destruction wrought by warlords and the ties between violence and industry not only permanently scarred the environment but also created our age of global warming. Less than a century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and at the height of slave-based agriculture and rising Western imperialism, greenhouse gases were already warming ocean waters, including in the tropical Indian and western Pacific oceans that profoundly influence global climate systems. These human-created changes, which scientists were already noting and warning about their consequences, formed part of broader natural planetary shifts.
Some readers will be familiar with the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300–ca.1850). For nearly five hundred years Earth was especially cold, particularly in the eighteenth century when the great killing began. Volcanic activity helped delay the end of the Little Ice Age, but volcanic ash could only do so much. The world’s climate entered an especially unstable period after the 1850s, coinciding with the onset of human-created climate change. The next half century would see the weakening of monsoonal systems upon which much of Asia and large parts of Africa directly depended. Droughts and famines afflicted many parts of the world during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and other areas saw catastrophic rains and flooding. For the first time, emissions produced by the burning of fossils fuels were beginning to alter our planet’s future.34 This book may seem like a mostly sorrowful tale, in Edward Gibbon’s words a “melancholy calculation of human calamities.”35 But in these pages we will encounter those who warned that the modern world being created was unsustainable and profoundly wrong. Some were writers, a few were scientists, and still others were shamans, prophets, and other visionaries.
These individuals knew, even if they could not put it into contemporary scientific language, that the world was permanently changing. And they knew that “our history is each other.”36 We can count them as among modernity’s earliest environmental activists. Some led protest movements; many were murdered for their views.
There is much to learn in hearing their voices again, a reminder of the creativity of humankind and our capacity to cooperate and an invitation into ways of being that to some of us might seem otherworldly but also hold the most profound truths: empathy, awe, and the uncanny bewilderments that constitute so much of human experience, even love. To recognize that human beings survive by creating and re-creating intricate webs of mutual obligation and community is to recognize that we depend on persons, animals, and other living things that, in a real and enduring sense, have their own lives, their own separate existences. Diverse peoples have recognized this truth—plants and animals and even objects, they understood, were in some senses “people too”—and accorded these living beings rights, even as they continued to be hunted, consumed, and turned into articles. This was a profoundly personal relationship, embracing the cultural life of a natural world of which Homo sapiens formed just one part. Animals lived in their own countries; animals were kin.
Humans entering animal territory uninvited were trespassers.
Long ago, people knew that animals had rich emotional and cultural lives, whether they were whales, elephants, or beavers. Hunting entailed complex social relationships and emotions between hunter and prey, including affection. Prior to about 1750, these sentiments and ways of being could be found across much of the globe.37 Only recently have we begun rediscovering what others have known for ages, namely the sentience and agency of the nonhuman world.
*
Just months before he took his life while fleeing the Nazi terror, the Jewish German theorist Walter Benjamin lamented that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He was in Spain near the French border, convinced that he would be deported to a certain death. Benjamin found himself returning to a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, that he had first seen nearly two decades earlier. The painting had always haunted him; in it he saw the “angel of history.” “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,” he wrote, “make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”38 The Killing Age reconstructs the storm Benjamin imagined a year into World War II, when thousands of Jews already had been slaughtered and just months before the beginning of the Final Solution. The nightmare began bit by bit in the eighteenth century, swirling along the horizons of people’s lives, at times scarcely noticeable. Few knew that their worlds would be swept up in developments that spun ever more widely and ferociously, events from which no one could escape and few would understand. Some would call it progress. For most, it was catastrophe.
Part One sets out the military-commercial revolution that unleashed this era of destruction and transformation. Part Two takes us to Africa beginning in the mid-eighteenth century into which vast amounts of weapons poured, fueling the enslavement of people, the rapid destruction of elephants, and the devastation of a continent. The human and environmental consequences of this devastation continue today. Africa, we will discover, played a vital role in the rise of the West. Without African slavery, without the black oil of Black slavery that ignited capitalism, the course of global history would have been radically different.39 Part Three explores enslavement as a global phenomenon, one that sadly continues today. Asia and the Americas also saw widespread enslavement. Here, what unfolded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged on top of earlier histories, in the Americas going back to the early 1500s and to such warlords as Hernán Cortés (ca. 1485–1547); these were men who plundered at will but struggled to transform their wealth into capital. Across the Americas, warlords founded the settler societies that thrived at the expense of Indigenous populations. Asia was different, although here too in regions such as South Asia guns and commerce propelled a dramatic increase in slavery and coerced labor.
A central concern of this book is how two areas of the world—Great Britain and the United States—rose to global dominance. The three chapters that comprise Part Four focus exclusively on North America, the most violent place on the planet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where the military-commercial revolution triumphed. Epochal violence and environmental destruction lay at the center of North American history, comprising the main reason for its meteoric rise on the world stage.
Part Five traces how warlords settled down, making the transition from predation to production. The result was a global explosion of slavery made possible by guns from the Caribbean and the American South to Egypt, India, and West Africa. Slavery was not just profoundly modern; it formed the center of the world economy, especially the production of cotton.
Without slavery, there would not have been an Industrial Revolution. Our age of global warming arose not just as the inevitable result of technological innovation but also or primarily as an outgrowth of the enslavement and exploitation of people. Without the systematic trafficking of enslaved peoples that took place during the modern period, there would be no global warming as we know it today.
Violence creates calamity, piles of debris: Benjamin’s storm of progress and catastrophe.
Wherever weapons spread indiscriminately, instability followed. The world of warlords grew increasingly volatile. Predation produced disorder; violence begot violence. Slavery and other forms of unfree labor were riven with contradictions. The six chapters in Part Six explore the dramatic convulsions of the nineteenth century that attempted to resolve these contradictions, to rebuild the world after over a century of destruction. The results redrew the global political map into a configuration that has remained remarkably stable. However scarring, these resolutions marked the emergence of humanity as a planetary force, with all its discontents and possibilities. The Killing Age is less an exhaustive world history—an impossibility in a single volume—than a suggestive one meant for the general reader. Some material will be familiar to readers, especially academic ones. Other material will be quite foreign. Statistical data is located in the appendices. A website offers additional information and allows readers to delve into a particular subject in greater detail. I have designed the website for all readers on an extended journey exploring how our world came to be. PART ONE THE BUSINESS OF DEATH
1 Guns THE MUSKET BALL TRAVELS FOREVER, hurtling through Borneo’s jungle until it finds its victim, killing the person cold. So believed nineteenth-century Dayak headhunters, abruptly encountering large numbers of modern firearms for the first time in their history. “What these people mostly dread is the musket; it is inconceivable what a sensation of fear comes over the bravest.”1 When a gun’s report echoed through the trees, they jumped out of their boats, deserted their stilted longhouses adorned with the skulls of enemies taken by warriors, and flew into the rainforest.
The destructiveness of these new weapons was not the only thing Pacific peoples dreaded.
It was the peculiar way guns killed: at a distance, impersonally and anonymously, with a terrifying unworldly noise and the bullet refusing to respect the most basic cultural norms and social distinctions. All societies and cultures have right and wrong ways of killing.
The musket horrified because it broke all the rules; it was profoundly uncivilized.
The Dayaks also had practical concerns. Across Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to Papua New Guinea, men with guns were raiding communities at levels never imagined.
Heavily armed Bugi warlords from Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula terrorized the Dayaks, arriving in fastmoving ships (prahus) that skimmed over shimmering reefs, their vessels equipped with swivel cannons manufactured in Europe or by Dutch colonists in Indonesia. “A handful of men” with muskets could force people to “deliver over not only the produce of the country for a trifling exchange, but a certain number of children yearly, whom they sell as slaves.” In addition to human beings, goods from the interior were in high demand internationally: wax, camphor, and bird nests hanging from caves and vertiginous limestone cliffs that ended up in Chinese kitchens, along with hundreds of tons of gelatinous sea cucumber (the “ginseng of the sea”), which Chinese men believed would enhance their immune system and strengthen their sexual drive. So great was the demand that the bird population that made these nests from saliva declined precipitously. The sea cucumber population also declined, degrading marine ecosystems across the shallow waters around the Celebes Islands.
Guns had first entered this broader oceanic world from China. Most were not especially good. Beginning in the late eighteenth century as the military-commercial revolution took root, millions of far better guns manufactured in Europe and the United States could be found nearly everywhere in the world, along with thousands of tons of gunpowder manufactured by the British East India Company (BEIC). With breathtaking speed, Western guns now dramatically outnumbered arms from China, where they were invented nearly a thousand years ago.
Over the next century, the Americans became especially aggressive in spreading weapons across the Pacific, something the British Navy regularly complained about as it tried to put an end to Bugi predations and what it described as endemic piracy and contraband trade across Southeast Asian waters. “Almost all the vessels leaving the ports of the United States
. . . convey muskets, pistols, swords, and gunpowder” manufactured in the Northeast, one British observer of the time complained, “which they sell on their outward passage to the natives” in exchange for products in demand on the Chinese mainland.2 American guns drove commerce and dramatically increased slavery in Borneo and elsewhere. On the sprawling island with its dizzying mountains and impenetrable rainforests, traders sold particularly unfortunate captives to peoples living in the interior highlands in exchange for forest products. These captives were subsequently sacrificed, typically as part of burial practices. Slaves became so inexpensive and so readily available—that is, human beings became so cheap—that just about anyone could afford to sacrifice a captive, who at least received a good meal before being killed.3 Five thousand miles (7,600 kilometers) away, Māoris living in New Zealand’s North Island began acquiring muskets in the 1810s, largely by exchanging flax, which Māoris and Europeans turned into the marine rope vital to international commerce. Within just a few years, thousands of muskets manufactured in Birmingham were making their way into the hands of Māori men. Many came via Australia, where guns helped found settler society and made possible the slaughter of Indigenous peoples. Guns and the flax trade began changing political leadership and warfare, catalyzing the rise of powerful warlords. Hongi Hika, the “Māori Napoleon,” traveled to England and Australia in an attempt to position himself as New Zealand’s most powerful warlord. Hika sought to control trade and made war on neighboring tribes. When he wasn’t conquering others, he was transforming the local economy by establishing slave plantations, which cultivated flax, potatoes, and other foodstuffs.
More guns meant more death: subsequent decades saw the rapid, intensified spread of killing in a society renowned for its warrior culture, where violence had been tied to spiritual forces ebbing and flowing through the world—mana—and where violence was central to men’s repute. Now a relentless scramble to obtain weapons became a part of Māori culture.
Men with muskets such as Hongi Hika preyed on those who did not. Many were taken as slaves. Thousands of others were killed, their severed heads carried home as trophies.
Prominent warriors and leaders ended up being cooked and eaten, a sign of not just respect for their onetime prowess but also the belief that power, indeed life itself, emerges from the endless circulation of flesh.
What came to be known as the Musket Wars resulted in the deaths of roughly twenty thousand people, upwards of 20 percent of New Zealand’s population during this period.
Disease followed in the wake of tribal war, and colonial conquest and white settlement began in the 1840s. In less than fifty years, the Māori population declined by nearly half or more.4 Much the same story could be found elsewhere, as muskets, commerce, and warlordism spread rapidly across the southern Pacific Ocean. One result was the equivalent of an archipelagic Thirty Years’ War across much of Polynesia and the rise of men such as the aptly named Charlie Savage.
Originally from Sweden, Savage found himself in Fiji when the American brig he was working on wrecked and was destroyed. With one foot in island culture and the other in Western commerce and the gun trade, Savage sowed violence across Fiji, insinuated himself in island politics, and became a “great chief.” When this businessman warrior wasn’t killing, he was growing wealthy from the sandalwood trade to China, one part of a broader expansion of European commerce across the region. His was a garish if short life, as was the case for many men who sought wealth from the barrel of a gun. Savage met his end in a battle between Fijians and sandalwood traders, but the commerce he helped pioneer continued. Within years, forests of the fragrant wood were razed. Erosion followed as island soils bled into Fiji’s turquoise waters.5 By the mid-1800s, muskets could be found across the entire Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to Palau and from the American Northwest to Australia, along with an increasing array of trade goods. Everywhere, tribes incorporated the new weapons into their cultures. Everywhere, guns led to warlordism and slavery, however much the concentration of power might prove ephemeral once others obtained weapons. And everywhere, violence and death increased.6 Guns also became ubiquitous in Africa and across North America, where the musket had spread over a century earlier. From its sixteenth-century beginnings, African-European trade south of the Sahara had involved weapons, especially swords, knives, and raw iron as well as horses in the early years, since European guns weren’t very good. With the growth of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, many tens of millions of muskets flooded Africa, with the steepest growth from the 1750s onward, along with phenomenal quantities of gunpowder. More explosives found their way to Africa than any other place in the world.
The Atlantic slave trade’s monstrous rise was impossible without guns, as we will explore in more detail in later chapters. Modern weapons have wrought more long-term destruction across the African continent than any other development since the first smelting of iron over three thousand years ago. The proliferation of weapons created frontiers of predation and societal parasitism that sowed fear and mistrust deep into the cultural fabric of people, a distrust that continues to this day. The powerful, which increasingly meant the armed, “ate” the weak, even their own. To be eaten was to be vanquished, consumed, “disappeared,” to have one’s life force appropriated by another, which increasingly meant ending up shackled in the bowels of a slave ship headed to the Americas. “I will erase all their history,” declared powerful warlords, who prayed to the God of War.
7 *
How did it come to be that by the early 1800s the world was awash with hundreds of millions of guns and many tens of thousands of tons of gunpowder and lead? In the eighteenth century, Great Britain alone produced over five hundred million pounds of gunpowder, enough explosive material to annihilate Homo sapiens many times over. In just 1803, British exports were sufficient to kill everyone on the planet.
But just a few hundred years earlier, people around the world had little interest in owning a gun. They much preferred their locally made weapons, whether clubs, spears, or bows and arrows. These preferences had staying power because the way people kill is tied to how they think about the world.
Violence is always already a part of culture. Decorum, prestige, and social distinction organize if not dictate the act of killing, setting the terms for who can be targeted and how lives might be ended and shaping what violence means both for those who mete it out and those who experience it. Guns, however, subverted these time-honored ideas, transforming societies around the world whether they wanted to be changed or not: some saw these weapons as unmanly, precisely because they were so impersonal. After all, there is a huge difference between bashing someone over the head with a two-foot club and shooting someone from one hundred yards away or today launching a drone from a base outside Las Vegas that vaporizes a human being on the other side of the world, sight unseen.
*
In 1510 at the southern tip of Africa, the first viceroy of Portuguese India, Dom Franscisco de Almeida, stopped near what is today Cape Town.
Almeida was as confident as he was cruel. He had proved his mettle fighting the Moors of North Africa and later sacking Mombasa in East Africa in 1505. He liked intimidating people whenever and wherever he could. A violent, avaricious man much like the conquistadors who pillaged the Americas, Almeida needed to provision his ships for the long, arduous voyage from South Africa to his Lisbon home. While he was at it, he thought, he might as well enslave a few people.
The attempt did not go well for Almeida. His soldiers were armed with arquebuses, ornate guns so heavy they required a stout prop for balance and sometimes two people to manage.
The shooter first had to light a long wick: with that in one hand and a gun weighing twenty pounds or more (10 kg) in the other, he then brought the wick to a hole to create a chain reaction, igniting gunpowder that was mostly exposed to the elements. The process was dangerous and cumbersome, with a soldier having to blow on the wick to make sure it was lit and ready. Often, soldiers closed their eyes or turned their faces away from their intended victims, hoping they would stand still and wait to be killed and hoping that the gun wouldn’t explode in their own hands.
The Khoekhoe peoples who lived at the Cape had different ideas. They attacked Almeida in the middle of a downpour, showering the Portuguese with arrows they had poisoned using crushed beetles and plants. Their bows and arrows, as light as could be, were tiny compared to the arquebuses. The Khoekhoes deftly used their cattle as a mobile barrier. The arquebuses were totally ineffective in the rain. Almeida died, and the Portuguese gave up any attempt to colonize South Africa. They left that effort to the Dutch, who settled the region in the next century with better guns in their hands. The early gun that European artisans had spent months producing had performed far worse than the bow and arrow that a Khoekhoe man could make in a day.
Later versions of the arquebus weren’t much better. With their shower of sparks and smoke, these guns made a ruckus, frightening those who had never seen them before, but their bark was worse than their bite. Later arquebuses were largely useless, especially in dense forests and the wet tropics. Matchlocks, used in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and other seventeenth-century European conflicts, weren’t much of an improvement; they were as much theatrical chemistry or physics experiment as anything else. These guns too required one to have a flame at the ready, in this case a smoldering cord that lit priming powder in a pan, creating a chain reaction meant to travel to the powder in the barrel, causing an explosion that sent the projectile forward. Many matchlocks were nearly as heavy as arquebuses and had a nasty habit of breaking down at the wrong moment.
In the rain, the “match” might go out or the wet priming powder might just fizzle. The result, as the saying goes, was a “flash in the pan.”8 Europeans fared much better in the Americas, including Hernán Cortés (ca. 1485–1547), who defeated the Aztecs in the early 1520s, and Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1478–1541), who subjugated the Incas in the following decade.
Guns don’t explain their successes, however. It was steel, swords, lances, armor, and horses that killed the Indians, followed by diseases. The conquistadors had a few arquebuses that made a racket but killed relatively few.
9 But arms makers were nothing if not determined. There was money in making the instruments of death. They kept at it, devising new designs for weaponry. One of the biggest challenges involved developing a quick, effective method for igniting gunpowder. Beginning in the mid-1600s and culminating in the early 1700s, refinements to firearms technology would prove revolutionary. Flintlock muskets marked a particularly significant development.
European armies began adopting them during the second half of the seventeenth century despite their initial high cost, often combining the gun with a bayonet. In one 1691 battle, the despondent French literally threw down their old weapons and picked up whatever flintlock they could find.10 As the name suggests, these guns used a flint to create a shower of sparks, setting fire to the gunpowder using a spring action, which in this design could be kept dry from the elements. After the hammer with its flint scrapes the frizzen, the ensuing sparks ignite a small amount of powder in a protected pan, moving the burst through a tiny hole to the charge in the barrel. The resulting explosion propels the ball through the barrel toward its intended victim. Flintlocks created a more effective explosion than the arquebus.
Subsequent innovations made it far easier to load the flintlock with powder and lead, which increased the rate of fire: an experienced musketeer could set off three rounds inside a minute. Improved designs made the guns lighter too—often just half the weight of the old arquebus— so men could use them on horseback.
Flintlocks became far more lethal than arrows and often killed instantly.
The new gun could kill at one hundred yards or more. The flintlock sent a molten projectile upwards of 0.75 of an inch (19 mm) in diameter and weighing between 0.5 and a bit more than 1 ounce (14 grams, the weight of an AA battery) at speeds up to one thousand feet a second, infinitely faster than the Khoekhoe arrows and over five times faster than the fearsome English longbow, for centuries one of the most lethal weapons an archer could wield. Unlike arrows and today’s bullets, musket balls did not cleanly puncture the body.
Being shot by a musket is like having a thick, white-hot rod being pounded into your body.
These guns left massive, gaping, disfiguring wounds that could be inches in diameter: if you didn’t die right away from blood loss or shock after being shot with a flintlock, you would soon die anyway from infection.11 Compared to the far more accurate and lethal nineteenth-century rifles, let alone to today’s weapons, the flintlock musket seems quaint if not inconsequential. Weapons such as the AR-15, the gun of choice for America’s mass murderers, are infinitely more destructive. Weighing under seven pounds (3 kg), these guns send bullets traveling at three times the speed of a flintlock musket and nine times farther and have a magazine that holds more than thirty rounds. The AR-15’s bullets are dramatically smaller than a musket ball; they do their damage by the shock waves that turn tissues into liquids. These guns are devastatingly destructive, capable of dismembering victims’ bodies. In the United States, it is easy to purchase an AR-15 or similar weapons, including using monthly payment plans for those who can’t pay upfront.
FIGURE 1.1. Entry and exit wound from musket shot during the US Civil War. Gunshot Wound, 1864, George A. Otis (1830–1881). The National Library of Medicine.
But this is to read history backward. Up until just a few centuries ago, communities around the world could see the weapon that was being launched at them, whether an arrow or a spear, one reason why stealth was often the secret to success and killing people became an extension of hunting animals. Far more often, killing was accomplished using a club, a knife, a sword, a stone, or even one’s bare hands. For tens of thousands of years, the killer could see the whites in the eyes of the person whose life he or (far more rarely) she was ending.
Such proximity doesn’t make the job easy. For much of history, killing has been hard work, often very hard work, giving rise to warrior cultures the world over. Since the second half of the eighteenth century, however, with the mass production of flintlocks, killing has become easier, much easier compared to using one’s hands. It takes upwards of five minutes to strangle a person; in that time, an experienced musketeer could fire off fifteen rounds. To many encountering the flintlock musket for the first time, the weapon seemed to kill by magic, one reason why the Dayaks ran into the jungle when they heard the crack of the gun.
Nearly everywhere, people invented rituals to subvert or appropriate its power by, for example, using charms they believed would turn bullets into water. Those efforts failed.
* The flintlock musket became the world’s first global gun, the Toyota Corolla of weapons. It was easy to make, reasonably dependable, customizable, and intended for just about anyone who could afford one.
Thanks to the flintlock, the West became the dominant supplier and innovator in weapons technology, far outpacing China.
The French and the Dutch were early pioneers of the technology. Soon after the invention of the flintlock musket, workshops in Paris and across the Netherlands began busily tailoring their guns to accommodate domestic and international demand. Throughout much of the seventeenth century, the Dutch led the world in arms manufacturing and the production of gunpowder as their mercantile empire grew and the Netherlands became the richest place on Earth. From Gouda to Rotterdam and from Amsterdam to the Hague, small factories of upwards of a hundred people took materials imported from as far away as India and Sicily and transformed them into muskets, powder, and shot. This was risky business, and gunpowder explosions became disturbingly common. The 1654 Delft catastrophe— known as the Delft Thunderclap—destroyed large areas of the city when more than twenty-two tons of gunpowder exploded. People could hear the blast more than ninety miles (150 kilometers) away, many wondering if God was sending a message that the world was ending.
If God was sending such a message, it didn’t stop the Dutch. Mammon was more important than morality. The Dutch were at the forefront of accumulating capital and investing it outside of the state. Their factories kept at it. Soon, Dutch weapons could be found from New York to West Africa to Indonesia’s Spice Islands; guns were central to the Netherlands’ extraordinary prosperity. In one way or another, throughout the country’s golden age the wealthiest Dutch had ties to gun manufacturing. They would provide monetary support to artists such as Frans Hals and Rembrandt, whose paintings in turn often depicted muskets.12 On the other side of the North Sea, the English looked on with envy. They were well aware of Dutch wealth and its origins, and they wanted to do the same. By hook or crook, Dutch capital—along with gun manufacturing expertise—began making the 250-mile trip to London.
It helped that London was England’s financial center and the seat of government and was swiftly becoming the world’s commercial and manufacturing capital. It also helped that Great Britain had plentiful supplies of coal and iron, a wellestablished lead industry, and large quantities of high-quality flint, while the BEIC provided the country with vast amounts of saltpeter.
13 In 1637–1638, the Crown granted London gunmakers their charter of incorporation, and the gates were flung open. The charter initiated a lengthy process by which manufacturers tried to secure control over provisioning their government with weapons, muscling out domestic and overseas competitors. Within half a century, London gunmakers were turning their city into the world’s leader for manufacturing and marketing guns and gunpowder.
14 The Industrial Revolution had its beginnings near the Tower of London, where two of Henry VIII’s queens had lost their heads for the crime of being married to him. The English government had long manufactured money and stored its weapons and massive amounts of saltpeter in the Tower of London (758 tons in 1750, enough to make two million pounds of gunpowder and blow up much of the city). Soon, industry took off nearby, across the city’s rough East End; by the end of the 1700s, London had more steam engines than any other city in the world.15 The area near and extending away from the Tower of London had long been the city’s commercial and manufacturing hub. England’s busiest docks stretched downstream along the river bend at Wapping, through which vast quantities of goods moved daily. These streets were renowned for their violence and criminality, despite the Tower’s proximity and nearby Wapping Wall, where the government left the bodies of convicted criminals to rot into the Thames. Pitched battles between soldiers dispatched from the Tower and irate workers protesting wages and working conditions became such a regular occurrence that officials thought twice before venturing into the area, not being especially eager to confront “evil-disposed persons, armed with pistols, cutlasses, and other offensive weapons.”16 Violence was particularly severe from the second half of the 1700s through the nineteenth century. Coal heavers were an especially troublesome lot, a veritable terror in the eyes of their employers and the authorities. The coal heavers rioted against the low wages that had left their families starving by setting fire to buildings, shooting people, and creating a traffic jam of coal boats waiting to unload the toxic fuel upon which their city depended.
Into this nearly anarchical world of rebellious workers and tens of thousands of impoverished scavengers—the bone pickers and shit scrapers and many more—gun and gunpowder manufacturing now joined other industries such as the silk and linen trades and ironworks.
Gunpowder mills mixed saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur for export and for the military; private manufacturers soon enjoyed “a great and unexpected increase in their trade.” Gun foundries produced the barrels, with highly skilled laborers rolling slabs of red-hot iron into precision cylinders. These and other foundries fabricated the various metal pieces that became the weapon’s lock; other workers fashioned the wood stocks. The gunmakers then assembled the components. A crucial step was for the barrel to be “proved,” or tested to make sure it wouldn’t blow up in someone’s face. The report of weapons constantly reverberated through the area. Once completed, the weapons were boxed up and sent, along with flints, barrels of powder and shot, to the docks, some now wholly dedicated to shipping weapons around the world.17 All of this was dangerous work. Many hundreds of gunmakers helped cover the East End in coal smoke, industrial noise, constant gunfire, and frequent explosions. In the summer of 1794, a barge carrying Indian saltpeter exploded. “Several particles of the petre were carried by the explosion . . . a distance of six miles,” the Times reported. The fire that resulted, “a striking and awful spectacle,”18 was the worst conflagration since the 1666 Great Fire of London that destroyed much of the city. The Ratcliffe Fire, as this one came to be known, was unsurpassed until the Blitz of 1940, when the German Luftwaffe dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs over the course of nearly two months, killing nearly thirty thousand Londoners.
Demand for flintlocks led to relentless innovation until the early eighteenth century, when the basic design stabilized, remaining more or less the same for an extended period. The biggest changes to the basic design involved how the charge was assembled and, much later in the 1800s, in the rifling of barrels, a modification that dramatically improved firing accuracy.
Over the decades, flintlocks became easier to construct, more standardized and easily customizable, and deadlier. Compared to earlier guns, when artisans spent weeks if not months engraving wood and tooling metal to produce an object that looked far better than it worked, flintlocks were not elaborately adorned. The British Army used the same model, the plain Brown Bess introduced in the early decades of the eighteenth century, for nearly 150 years.
FIGURE 1.2. The Ratcliffe Fire, 1794. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.
Great Britain stood at the forefront of this arms revolution, for better or for worse. For the first time in history, globalized violence had become possible, and the spread of weapons proved central to England’s emergence as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world.
From the riotous East End, the gun revolution quickly expanded to Birmingham, England’s industrial Venice, where workshops and factories loaded machinery and goods onto horse-drawn barges headed to London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester. Birmingham was soon producing far more barrels than London, although the latter was still home to more than a thousand gunmakers well into the nineteenth century. Over time, the English Midlands became the world center of gun manufacturing, tailoring weapons for customers near and far, whether in Africa, North America, the South Pacific, or a mere canal’s ride to London.
FIGURE 1.3. Early Industrial Birmingham. From Samuel Griffiths, Guide to the Iron Trade of Great Britain (1873).
Birmingham had a long history of producing weapons going back to the seventeenth century, from knives and swords to harpoons for the Greenland whale industry. Birmingham was Britain’s metallurgical center, with dozens of foundries and hundreds of laborers working in silver, copper, brass, and iron, all of which required large amounts of coal. The town was well situated too, offering easy access to coal, iron, and other ores as well as water to run mills and, through sheer engineering genius, a miasma of canals connecting the city to Britain’s industrial and commercial hubs.
Troves of weapons went to Liverpool, the most important port connected to the Africa trade.19 Other guns ended up in Africa more circuitously: Birmingham supplied Portugal and Brazil with the “Angola muskets” that drove Central Africa’s slave trade.
Birmingham would become an industrial juggernaut, completely devoted to guns and armaments and earning fame for one of the world’s most important weapons, the Lee-Enfield rifle, which the British military used to police its vast empire from the late nineteenth century onward. The city secured its dominance near the end of the eighteenth century when the British government decided to build a factory there to provision its military.
Decades later, the Enfield factory would produce two thousand guns weekly. The many hundreds of workers making guns in Birmingham in the early 1700s became thousands by the end of the century and tens of thousands in the 1800s.20 Becoming the gun manufacturing capital of the world meant becoming the pollution capital as well, so polluted that the air was black during the day from the smoke vomiting from chimneys and a satanic red from the “swaling light of a hundred furnaces and forges roaring all through the night.”21 With industrialization, Birmingham and its surroundings became one of the most highly polluted places on Earth, thanks to its near-perfect demonstration of the theories Adam Smith set out in The Wealth of Nations: relentless specialization, innovation, rising productivity, and most of all the generation of profit. Birmingham’s early industrial center was the Gun Quarter, where in the late eighteenth century once-stately Georgian homes became hubs of manufacturing and production, with belching smoke, effluents draining into the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, the clap of barrels being proved, and the occasional fires and explosions that inevitably went with manufacturing arms.
Many of the most basic features we associate with the Industrial Revolution—the steam engine running on coal, the all-important and precisely honed cylinders, the use of coke and then coke combined with air in blast furnaces—emerged in Birmingham and its surroundings, born of a relentless pursuit to make objects that killed. Before Matthew Boulton teamed up with James Watt, the inventor and popularizer of the modern steam engine, his family had a gun factory in the Gun Quarter. Close by was the most important gunmaker in the city, Galton & Son, that produced vast numbers of weapons, many of which ended up in Africa or in the hands of the BEIC. Like many industrialists, Boulton cut his teeth in the gun and explosives industry, also minting coins and manufacturing other products such as metal buttons.22 Weapons were the beating heart—or at least a major artery—of the Industrial Revolution, including the work of Boulton & Watt, who did everything from designing better gunpowder mills to helping the Galton family come up with a machine to prepare gunstocks.23 It was also in Birmingham that an old mill was converted into the world’s “first steam mill” to become a modern weapons factory using one of Watt’s engines.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, two workers at this factory could produce at least 120 gun barrels a week using a 56- horsepower engine that consumed one and a half tons of coal during the same seven-day period (and emitting 471,900 pounds, or 214,500 kg, of CO2 yearly to boot).24 Other factories soon followed suit.
When most of us think of the Industrial Revolution, we think of Lancashire’s mechanized looms, the spread of industry across Europe, or cotton mills appearing along rivers in Massachusetts and Connecticut. This focus on textiles—and only much later on weapons—belies a darker past that began in the great city of London when businessmen decided to make some money by spreading weapons to the ends of the planet. Guns were big business, especially when they could be produced quickly and cheaply.
Demand seemed nearly universal. As historian Priya Satia reminds us, guns were at the Industrial Revolution’s very epicenter. The gun was not just critically important to the rise of industrial capitalism. Guns also played a crucial role in environmental destruction and the economic transformation and militarization of the world, the Mortecene.25 *
Rulers like weapons. They need weapons to defend themselves from adversaries or to subjugate others, including their own citizens and subjects.
Sometimes rulers like weapons for show. Many a ruler has spent vast sums on impractical or poorly designed weapons that served more of an ornamental and braggadocio purpose than anything else. Navies were especially expensive. During much of the eighteenth century, many European states struggled with high levels of debt to pay for their wars and military adventures. Often, states have too many weapons, particularly after long conflicts, so many they don’t quite know what to do with them. Instead of destroying the weapons—the biblical beating of swords into plowshares —they typically sell them to the highest bidder.
The British state wanted modern weapons for its military. Gunmakers such as Galton & Son happily obliged, as did Boulton & Watt from its Soho factory in Birmingham. War was profitable. “There will be . . . an immense demand for guns, to pop off all the unfortunate wretches,” wrote one associate of the Galtons in 1807, expecting renewed war with the United States, whose people, he declared, were “considerably hotter than Pepper.”26 But guns could be prohibitively expensive for a cash-strapped government that struggled with its public debt from wars near and far.
Throughout much of the eighteenth century, the British mainly focused on building expensive warships, which consumed much of what the government could provide financially. Demand for flintlocks waxed and waned according to international politics, rising dramatically with the outbreak of war only to decline just as dramatically with peace. During a crisis, the British government frantically looked everywhere to obtain guns, including abroad, as well as confiscating them from the BEIC. After the Napoleonic Wars, the military sold guns near and far as well as the occasional warship it no longer needed.
For gunmakers who sought steadier profits, the overseas market and joint stock companies such as the BEIC and the Hudson’s Bay Company comprised a better bet for sales than governments did. European powers had long subcontracted their overseas ambitions to companies or organizations indirectly tied to the state, an early example of colonialism on the cheap. These companies, owned or overseen by yet separate from a state government, needed weapons for their militias and for trade, especially if they had a foreign footprint. By the end of the 1760s, BEIC demand for guns was beginning to exceed that of the English government. The BEIC devoted enormous energy to the research and manufacturing of weapons.
The goal? To equip its massive military, which was busily looting India and beginning to intimidate China. To this end, the BEIC appropriated Indian gunpowder industries and established armories on the Indian subcontinent; these proved crucial to the massive spread of weapons across Asia.
We usually associate the BEIC with opium, tea, cotton, and profligate corruption. In fact, weapons served as one of its most important trade goods, along with many thousands of tons of Indian saltpeter. By the mid1800s, 50 million pounds of the chemical were packed into bags weighing between 112 or 168 pounds each year, enough to make over 75 million pounds of gunpowder. The company had wrested control of inexpensive Indian saltpeter from the Dutch and the French and had a near monopoly on the Asian supply of the chemical, much to the displeasure of London gunpowder makers. From a mere 500 tons yearly in the latter seventeenth century, Indian exports of saltpeter to Britain increased fourfold by the 1740s. In the next century, over 30,000 tons of potassium nitrate made its way to England yearly, enough for anywhere between 1 billion and 3 billion musket shots and enough for an 18-pounder cannon to lob more than 300 million balls.
Making saltpeter was labor-intensive and was associated with accelerated deforestation, the destruction of soils and water, and air pollution especially across Bihar. Specific castes either dug soils rich with the chemical or produced it using urine and animal dung. Soils had to be dissolved in water trenches and then the solution boiled off in earthen or metal pans or set out to evaporate from the sun before being further refined. The results were whitish or brownish saltpeter crystals that could be ground into a powder and then packed and shipped. The BEIC considered saltpeter as “so combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India, that its separation becomes impracticable, and it can only be carried on with the advantage to the Public through the medium of an exclusive company.” In other words, what was good for the monopolistic company was best for Britain, human and environmental impacts be damned.27 FIGURE 1.4. The East India Dock, London, by William Daniell. Reproduced with permission of the British Museum.
The BEIC also expended considerable effort perfecting better ways of killing people. One of the most important works on arms published in the eighteenth century, New Principles of Gunnery (1742), was written by the BEIC’s engineer general, Benjamin Robins. Robins’s research earned him the Copley Medal at the Royal Society, where Adam Smith was made a member a few decades later; this award was the equivalent of today’s Nobel Prize (named after Alfred Nobel, who made his money from explosives).
And little if any distance separated international commerce from the arms industry or, for that matter, from members of Parliament. Merchants and industrialists involved in the arms trade were also members of the BEIC, including its director and chairman.28 And while some politicians may have been aghast at the company’s many depravities, everyone knew that the British military depended on the BEIC.29 The company had a lock on India’s vast deposits of high-quality saltpeter. By controlling the chemical’s trade, the BEIC profoundly shaped the global circulation of gunpowder.
While companies such as the BEIC needed weapons for their own militaries, that wasn’t the main reason they waded into the business. Most guns, gunpowder, and lead were intended for trade, with weapons winding up in private hands, not just in government armories. These guns were exchanged for furs in North America and for human beings in Africa. The territory that became the United States of America would become one of the most militarized places on the planet, no surprise to those of us living in the United States today. In early colonial North America warlordism and slavery took hold, and settlers demanded guns. Without them, European settlement wouldn’t have made it much past the shoreline. Indeed, British restrictions on colonial weapons imports in 1774 helped quicken the move toward war. In newly independent America, politicians would enshrine gun ownership as one of the country’s most basic rights. Whereas many areas of the world developed restrictions on who could possess weapons, the United States became the world’s only modern democracy with unrestricted gun ownership (arguably) written into its constitution.
Because the British kept meticulous customs records, we can estimate official gunpowder exports. In just the eighteenth century, exports not including Western Europe totaled over eighty million pounds, enough for billions of musket shots and worth over £5 billion ($6.4 billion) today.
More than half went to Africa, where it fueled the slave trade. In 1790, a high year for exports, gunpowder represented 0.15 percent of the entire British economy, about the size of the current publishing industry. These are just the official British export figures outside Europe, so the true size of the export weapons trade and its place in the economy was much higher, and it continued growing throughout much of the next century. In fourteen years after 1871, for example, official gunpowder exports of over 467 million pounds (5.7 times the entire amount for the eighteenth century) were enough for tens of billions of gunshots, more than enough to shoot every single person on the planet multiple times.30 These figures boggle the mind. Over two centuries later, it is difficult to comprehend the spread of weapons. It was overwhelming even at the time, a revolutionary development the world over.
We might bemoan the contemporary spread of guns and the fact that in the United States today there are more weapons—nearly 400 million—than people. Globally, more than 1 billion guns are circulating, not including those held by state militaries. But the militarization of the world has a long, if uneven, history.
Between 1750 and 1900, likely upwards of half a billion guns manufactured in the West made their way into the hands of people during a time when the world’s population (in 1800) had not yet reached 1 billion. Along with these guns went hundreds of millions of pounds of powder and lead and many millions of flints as well as knives, swords, and hatchets.
MAP 1.1. Official British gunpowder exports, 1698–ca. 1780s These staggering numbers of weapons and gunpowder refer not to state militaries but instead to individuals and privatized armies and militias. The arming of nonmilitary actors made possible the rise of warlords, who used their new guns to produce wealth, whether by plundering goods, killing animals, or enslaving people. Great Britain may have been the world leader in spreading arms around the world, but it was not the only game in town anymore. The United States would follow closely behind, along with much of Europe. Entire cities depended on the making and selling of arms, beginning with London and its powerful financial sector. Not surprisingly, several leaders in the arms industry were members of Parliament and London’s Common Council. The arms industry, which generated enormous profits, wealth, and opulence, played a key role in financing government debt, some of which went right back into buying guns.31 It is not a stretch to say, then, that guns dominated not just the rise of global capitalism but also the violent economic and ecological transformation of the world. Without guns, the Industrial Revolution would not have unfolded the way it did, if at all, for it was weapons that made environmental destruction, the expropriation of land, and the expansion of slavery possible. And it was the products of slavery that kept the furnaces of many of the earliest factories going. Guns made the Mortecene. *
For millennia in Africa, spears, bows, and arrows served as the most common weapons.
Well over a thousand years ago across the vast scrublands of the Sahel that ranged from Senegal to Sudan and places such as Darfur, rulers combined their traditional weapons with horses they obtained in the great trade routes that crisscrossed the Sahara Desert like a cat’s cradle. The same routes connected West Africa and its coveted gold with the Mediterranean world. Cavalries were omnipresent amid the famed kingdoms and empires of Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Bornu, Oyo, and Songhai, the latter of which at its height extended nearly two thousand miles along the Sahel.32 Armed men on horseback (or on camels) made a terrifying sight, as intimidating as they remain today in parts of the Sudan, where mobile and armed militias terrorize communities, responsible for some of the worst human rights violations anywhere. Historically, the defeated were forced to pay tribute, an exchange that was little more than extortion. Those who could not defend themselves became slaves.
The rise of these rogue bands and other raiders is one reason why societies across parts of West Africa invented rituals to try to tame or subvert the power of men with weapons.
Elsewhere on the African continent, people relied solely on bows and arrows and on spears; horses were ineffective in forested regions, and across much of Africa they perished from disease. Many people in Africa began turning iron, widely available and first smelted thousands of years ago, into weapons. Everywhere, blacksmiths were both revered and feared.
Myths about the founding of kingdoms, perhaps most famously the Epic of Sundiata about the founding of the great Mali Empire, often showcased the smith, who controlled the magic of fire and the alchemies of smelting that produced the instruments of death.
In North America, peoples also killed with spears, bows and arrows, and hatchets fashioned of wood, stone, and animal sinew. These ancient weapons dated back some twelve thousand years, when the continent was first settled by humans who hunted so effectively that they drove many large mammals to extinction. But the violence was also directed at humans.
The successful warrior returned home with captives and the scalps of those he had vanquished. (European settlers also adopted this practice. In the nineteenth century, scalping became part of the wave of genocidal violence sweeping the West: settlers received payment for the scalps of the Indians they had killed.) The scalp was a mark of both warrior prowess and masculine bravery but also of the very intimacies of violence and the role violence played in restoring order to the world. Scalps (as well as other body parts) were not trophies and most certainly not commodities; killing was never taken lightly. For Indigenous Americans, they were important ritual objects, imbued with sacred power, to be cared for, sung to, and used in ceremonies.
Across large areas of Oceania from Australia to Easter Island, killing became the purview of the club, elaborately fashioned of wood, stone, and occasionally whalebone. Other weapons such as spears and bows and arrows were also used. Like people and other objects, these tools were seen as imbued with creative power, mana, although this power’s distribution across the landscape was neither even nor fixed. Mana made the world.
Chiefs and big men enjoyed more of it than others. Mana ebbed and flowed, its movements shaping human lives and their entwinement with one another and the world at large. Mana especially abounded in the renowned warrior, one reason why, when these men were vanquished, their bodies were consumed.33 The eighteenth-century flintlock musket intruded upon worlds where people did not draw distinctions between humans and objects. It was precisely in the intimate and often deeply violent relationship of the two that these cultures made meaning and forged community. Across the world, tribal peoples adorned muskets as a way of domesticating their power and folding the weapon into their cultures, even if at first guns ran against their mores about how violence should be carried out and what it meant to be a man. They carved the stock, added beads and feathers, or fashioned elaborate holsters and containers for powder and lead. This ornamentation did more than just make the muskets prestige items (now coveted by collectors). It made them extensions of the man, enhancing his supernatural powers and connections to the spirits and the forces that ran through all living creatures and created the eternally “enchanted” world.34 For populations across Africa, Oceania, and North America, the gun had a utility, but it was not just a tool. The gun was part of the person, just as when individuals donned the skins of animals they were not impersonating these creatures but instead were becoming them and just as when the dead were never just the departed, cast into time’s abyss. The dead remained present; indeed, they couldn’t be separated from the present. The dead were part of the living.
For these societies, killing was an act that depended on these deep-seated connections. To kill at a distance using a musket was to kill fantastically and magically, part of the cultural work of making human the divine, connecting with the surrounding animate world. Even those who considered the gun undignified soon recognized its mysterious powers.
Within decades of their introduction into new societies, muskets had been incorporated into rituals the world over, just as other rituals were simultaneously invented to protect people from the gun’s destructiveness.
We see these developments in North America among the Iroquois by the middle of the seventeenth century and spreading across much of North America in the ensuing years. We see them throughout Oceania from the early 1800s, and we find them in much of Africa, where the unseen world inhered in weapons. Across Africa, guns were a part of art, burials, and rituals, and people believed that the gunpowder Europeans brought to their towns was made from the ground-up bones of the enslaved.35 In some ways, they were not wrong.
Gunmakers had some knowledge of these beliefs; after all, it was in their economic interest to know what some of their most important customers wanted. They knew, for example, that North American Indians liked muskets with brass serpents affixed to the side plate. Indians likely associated guns with the spirit Thunderbird, who brought fire, thunder, and lightning and often signified courage, success, wisdom, and the movements of sacred power in the world.36 Undergirding all these developments was the persistent—even primeval— idea of man as hunter in a world of ceaseless abundance, together with a recurring impulse, a quintessentially human trait: our desire to possess things that do not belong to us. What a gun meant varied across the world and changed over time, and trade and political structure often shaped the distribution of guns across a given society. Weapons would lose some of their enchanting powers as modernity stormed forth, although for so many there was (and still is) nothing quite as exciting, nothing that so made one feel powerful, as shooting a gun.
But three things are clear and important for the broader picture. First, guns were in demand everywhere. People wanted guns, and they figured out a way of obtaining them even if it meant destroying what was most precious. To acquire guns, populations around the world expanded hunting and predation to generate resources for international trade, much of it tied to industry. A global arms race burst out of the gates, profoundly reshaping world politics.
When one group obtained weapons, it tried lording its might over others, only to see its power weakened once guns spread to other regions. Confederacies, states, and even empires rose and fell in increasingly quick succession. FIGURE 1.5. Dayak musket ball holder. Reproduced with permission of RBFineArts CFL Inc.
Auctions. Second, guns were big business; they were among history’s first global industries.
Acquiring guns ensnared countless people in intricate webs of credit and debt, often ultimately to a loan issued by a Western bank. Third and most fundamentally, killing suddenly became easier with guns. Guns made the Mortecene not just possible but also inevitable. In the end, even Dayak headhunters, those warriors who had so feared guns with their bullets that traveled forever, acquired these new weapons with reckless abandon and in the subsequent years killed relentlessly.
2 Financing the Mortecene MATTHEW BOULTON MADE tons of money, literally. For a time at the end of the eighteenth century, Birmingham was not just the world’s largest manufacturer of weapons, where steam engines made guns; the city also minted a good deal of England’s money as well as a range of coinage for the international economy, including the British East India Company. And in the early 1800s when the Royal Mint moved from the Tower of London to nearby Tower Hill, Boulton & Watt began applying its steam engines to manufacturing coins. Emitting plumes of poisonous smoke, the engines rattled and hissed their way into history, producing what was becoming the world’s most powerful currency, British sterling. Together with his partner, the indefatigable, brilliant, and patent-mad inventor James Watt, Boulton helped launch the Industrial Revolution.
We usually associate this pair’s marvelous, if dangerous, machines with the pumping of water from coal mines and especially the manufacturing of cloth and later with the vast array of items synonymous with modernity. In fact, steam engines warrant recognition for an additional purpose: turning metal into millions of coins for the Bank of England, steam engines helped finance the Mortecene.1 The mass manufacturing of standardized money (copper pennies, silver shillings and crowns, gold guineas, and, increasingly, paper money backed by gold and silver reserves) constituted just one of several industrial and financial innovations that drove the military-commercial revolution. The lucrative global business of making and selling the weapons that sowed planetary destruction depended on the circulation of uniform money and on activities as simple and necessary as going to the bank.
Guns and money, killing and finance, went hand in hand, helping create the first modern military-financial complex.2 England was not just complicit in the slave trade; it was singularly responsible for spreading violence around the world.
From a distance of two hundred years, it is easy to forget just how radical these developments were and the fact that the revolutions in weapons and finance occurred simultaneously. There was a time when merchants and others made their own money so that multiple currencies circulated at any given time, a common feature the world over. In London during the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth century, one might find Bristol farthings and Birmingham coppers in circulation alongside Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese coins, in addition to various forms of paper money, all swirling around, everyone fretting about value and exchange rates. Unsavory practices abounded in this atmosphere. Some would dilute the silver or gold content of coins during manufacture; others would shave off part of a coin to hold onto a portion of its value, a practice known as penny-pinching. In still prior generations, people didn’t use money at all: they bartered.
African gold and American silver helped the rise of coinage; bartering, however, returned during times of economic crisis, when merchants could not access precious metals and coinage was scarce. This was no way of doing business, at least in the capitalist world.
Many of the practices and institutions we associate with modern finance emerged in tandem with the eighteenth-century explosion of industry, commerce, and a global consumer revolution. The spread of weapons, killing, and ecological catastrophe—the creation of the Mortecene—cannot be separated from the rise of banks, uniform currencies, stock exchanges, bonds, insurance companies, loans and mortgages, new accounting practices, patent laws, and laws that turned “things into capital.”3 These events also cannot be separated from the billions of pieces of paper representing value and recording economic transactions, along with other practices we might like to forget, such as bankruptcy laws that regulated how debts would be collected and assets liquidated (although all too often the guilty and the wealthy escaped judgment). We use these financial institutions, practices, and customs every single day, so ingrained are they in our thinking and living that we take most of them for granted. They organize and animate the world economy.
4 I mean “animate” literally. Peoples around the world breathed life into manufactured objects, hoping that somehow something that is entirely dead held meaning in the present and might be a secret to divining the future. These are not uncommon sentiments. Gem diamonds have no real value, but we spend billions of dollars on them, some of us hoping they will lead to marital success as if a lump of carbon has magical powers. We regularly imbue economics with human, at times godlike, behavior even if valuation can’t feel pain and the stock market is not omniscient.
In one of the great paradoxes of modern history, guns and killing would become entangled with consumption and the indebtedness that so often accompanies it and ultimately with people’s innermost fears and desires.5 People were willing to kill to possess things they believed might have life forces.
How did this come about? And how did banks such as Barclays and financial innovations such as bonds end up in such places as Borneo?
*
Across England, money found its way into people’s pockets and into bank vaults and occasionally into the hands of audacious robbers. From the second half of the eighteenth century, banks began sprouting up all over the country. In just five decades leading up to the Panic of 1825 caused by easy money and reckless speculation that some see as the beginning of modern economic cycles of boom and bust, banks increased thirtyfold outside the metropolis, and the number of banks inside London doubled. London was the “capital of capital.”6 Other countries followed suit, establishing banks that served more than just governments and the extraordinarily rich and powerful. Early in its history, the United States developed an extensive, if politically contentious, banking system. By 1820, the country had over 300 banks. Four decades later and on the eve of the American Civil War, that number had grown to over 1,500, a nearly 500 percent increase.7 English banks were tied to the world’s most powerful financial institution, the Bank of England, founded to finance and manage the country’s public debt.8 Once plagued by an unsavory reputation and considered usurious, banks became respectable. “Charles is very rich I am sure,” Jane Austen would write approvingly, for “when a man has once got his name in a banking-house he rolls in money.”9 People passed through their doors in droves, making deposits, checking on accounts, taking out loans, gossiping, and even engaging in reckless speculation, although the rich and powerful generally skirted responsibility for the harm they spread when the value of their investments evaporated. Banks were hives of activity and occasionally scenes of riotous mayhem. The eighteenth century saw both the ascendance of modern financial institutions and the meteoric rise and stupendous crash of speculative runs that made mind-boggling profits for some and left others penniless and despairing. Stock transfers grew fivefold over just the first half of the century, an indication of rising speculation as well as general confidence in the financial system. Panics were jarring and economically crushing. The collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720 shook the British economy to its core. The company was little more than a Ponzi scheme, albeit one commonly seen in the history of modern finance. In its initial days, the South Sea Company promised tremendous returns. But the stock soon failed, and investors such as Isaac Newton lost their shirts; London saw a rash of suicides.
The disaster even inspired lines from the poet Jonathan Swift. In “The Run upon the Bankers” (1721), he observed that The Multitude’s Capricious Pranks Are said to represent the Seas, Breaking the Bankers and the Banks, Resume their own whene’er they please. . . .
So Powerful are a Banker’s Bills When Creditors demand their Due; They break up Counters, Doors, and Tills, And leave his empty Chests in View.
The security of credit and debt made this new financial world go round, becoming one of the secrets to Britain’s economic miracle if also coming close to crashing it on more than one occasion.10 For the most part, money was cheap, at least in some core areas within the West such as England.
Between 1750 and 1910, yields of long-term government bonds rarely rose above 5 percent and usually hovered around 3–4 percent.11 In economic jargon, this was generally a period of liquidity for core areas of the international economy. There was a lot of money slushing about even if some of that money was built on a fiction, including imaginary countries promising untold wealth. Credit remained readily available even if at times inconsistent.
Low-interest rates supported investment, drove industry and trade, accelerated innovation, and encouraged speculation. England was awash in money, real and imagined.
In the West, guns made big money both domestically and internationally.
Both China and India had long histories of making guns, as did the Ottomans; only the tiniest trickle of these weapons, however, were exported. No Mughal potentate and only a small handful of Chinese businessmen ever grew rich from selling arms to foreigners. A few Ottoman guns ended up in India and a bit farther afield, but the vast majority never left the empire. The West was different. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, the loosening of the British Crown’s control over weapons and powder opened the stopcocks of trade. The global weapons industry yielded uncommonly high profits—often higher than the cloth manufacturing sector and the slave trade—and led to vast nonlanded fortunes for the privileged few who cornered the market. Over the eighteenth century, the relationship between the gun industry and finance drew ever closer. England’s most powerful bankers and gunmakers were joined at the hip; sometimes they were one and the same person.12 Take the Galtons, for example. The Galton family stood among England’s most important eighteenth-century gun manufacturers and was deeply implicated in the slave trade. The family’s Quaker conscience eventually led them out of that business but only after they had made a killing. They moved some of their fortune into finance, converting a weaponmanufacturing building on Steelhouse Lane in Birmingham’s Gun Quarter into a bank. Connected by marriage to one of the country’s most powerful private banks, the Barclays, the Galtons held investments in an array of financial institutions (such as Barings Bank) and in various insurance companies. Samuel “John” Galton made a fortune in guns and banking; when he died, he was worth the equivalent of more than £20 million ($24 million). In similar fashion, the Lloyd family, who founded Birmingham’s first bank with their associate John Taylor, made their money in the iron and gun trades. Lloyds would become one of the country’s most powerful banks and insurance companies. And down the highway from Birmingham, Thomas Leyland (1752–1827), cofounder of the bank Leyland & Bullins (now HSBC UK and one of the world’s largest financial institutions) used his access to guns to become Liverpool’s wealthiest slave trader. Leyland left an estate that today is equivalent to more than £40 million ($48 million).
Outside the royal family, Leyland was one of the country’s wealthiest men.13 There’s an old saying that guns make the man; in these and many other cases, they also made the man’s fortune. * Great Britain was an industrial and commercial behemoth. It was also a financial one. As two prominent historians have noted, finance “generated fortunes which were much greater than those acquired in industry before the twentieth century.”14 In order for banks and new financial practices to create and sustain a world of guns, violence, and commerce, these institutions first had to create and sustain a new trade environment. Banking and other modern financial practices made possible a remarkable increase in world trade, with guns joining a vast array of other consumer goods, everything from beaver hats and bricks to bushels of salt to Boulton’s buttons and, in Africa especially, large quantities of cloth and alcohol.
Cloth, of course, can’t kill, although alcohol drives some to violence.
Weapons were unique in both their capacity to destroy and the profits they generated for makers and merchants.
Trade led to unimaginable wealth and made England the richest place on Earth. An astoundingly complex web of credit and debt soon entangled the globe: loans made, collateral promised, and payments enforced; merchandise advanced on credit; insurance premiums paid; profits accrued and reinvested; material possessions accumulated, displayed, and consumed; and, of course, debt collection, bankruptcy, and liquidation.
Trade was increasingly global. British trade with Europe fell by half between 1700 and 1772, and Asia, Africa, and the Americas became more important. The number of ships departing Europe for Asia doubled in the eighteenth century. Between 1700 and 1790, British exports to “East India” rose by a factor of more than eighteen. In the 1800s, Asian commerce skyrocketed as ships carried more and more goods in their holds. Weapons were a vital part of this Asian trade; they were better than Chinese guns, and the global arms race meant that everyone wanted a gun. Ships returned with an assortment of products: tea, lumber, cotton, and other textiles and, deep in the hull, saltpeter in bags weighing more than one hundred pounds. By the early nineteenth century, Britons were consuming more than twenty million pounds of tea yearly. American silver that for centuries had headed to China and India now reversed course, much of it ending up at the Royal Mint or turned into teapots and silverware.15 The Atlantic was the most heavily trafficked ocean by a very wide margin, involving every country that had a coast. Maritime commerce had been increasing from the beginning of the eighteenth century, much of it tied to the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1750 and the 1860s, nearly twenty-three thousand voyages brought enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, representing 64 percent of the total number of voyages over three centuries.
During the early 1800s, the annual tonnage of American ships increased nearly twentyfold.
The export of slave-based products such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco rose steeply, as did the shipment of other commodities originating in the Americas, ranging from hundreds of millions of animal skins to grains and lumber. A triangular trade relationship connected the Americas with Europe and Africa, and a more bilateral trade dynamic emerged between West-Central Africa and Brazil.
FIGURE 2.1. British shipping, ca. 1750–1850. Graphic based on “Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans, 1750–1850.” Library of Congress, LCCN 2020449236.
Between the 1750s and the 1850s, well over one hundred thousand voyages were made across the Atlantic. Investments in Atlantic commerce promised terrific profits. Between 1750 and 1800, Atlantic trade profits tripled in comparison with the previous half century. This rapid accumulation of wealth widened the differences between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The British proved especially adept at navigating the aftermath of the 1807 ending of the slave trade across their Atlantic empire, smoothly shifting from trafficking in human beings to purchasing products such as palm oil. On the eve of the 1833 Abolition Act, British exports to Africa and the Americas nearly equaled exports to all of Europe and Russia. Guns, powder, flints, and shot made up a vitally important part of this trade (in 1832, over three million pounds of powder went to ports on the west coast of Africa), in addition to millions of knives and swords as well as metals that local smiths forged into arms. Second only to cloth, the total value of weapons sold that year is equivalent to about £145 million ($180 million) today.
FIGURE 2.2. Profit from the Atlantic trade, 1570–1800. Adjusted to 1600 prices, in pounds sterling.
Adapted from Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95, no. 3 (June 2005): 546–79.
Finance, finance, and more finance made these developments possible, however catastrophic the results. The English weren’t the only ones flooding the world with weapons, although they became the best at it; everyone involved in the overseas slave trade was now exporting guns to Africa, just as they were exporting them to other parts of the world.
Portugal and later Brazil bought many guns from other European producers, especially the English, and they promptly used these weapons to fuel the slave trade out of Angola.16 For observers such as Adam Smith, these trends marked the triumph of free trade and the transformative capacity of a fully commercial society.
Profit was good, even righteous, offering a reasonable degree of luxury along with the responsibilities that came with good fortune. Smith (who was keenly interested in banking) considered these developments the “moral economy.” As he and generations of free market economists and billions of their supporters believed, wealth and freedom would work their way down to the masses and from them would spring upliftment and human improvement.17 * Smith was right, or at least half right. Living standards did eventually improve for the great majority of people in England following the Industrial Revolution’s convulsive beginnings, although those standards were miserable to begin with: wages pitifully low, laborers working themselves into an early grave, and the government squelching protest, often sending working-class leaders to the gallows.18 Other places also saw marked improvements, most profoundly the white settlers of the United States.
General standards of living rose in other parts of the West as well and, especially in the twentieth century, spread elsewhere in the world.
It would be myopic to imagine that life didn’t improve for millions (or later billions) of people because of the Industrial Revolution, to indignantly maintain that nothing good ever came out of the West. The Enlightenment and technological changes brought extraordinary improvements in the human condition, ranging from modern medicine to human rights. And of course, no one knew where things would end up, although many had premonitions. The past, after all, was the present for those who have long since disappeared into history’s abyss.
But across Asia, Africa, and much of the Americas, something very different was simultaneously taking root: the creation of immoral economies. The global arms industry, together with increasingly internationalized systems of credit and debt and other financial innovations, began joining forces to unleash planetary violence and destruction. With their weapons and access to credit, warlords preyed on others and generated and controlled the flow of scarce resources into the world economy. Yet the riches generated by this violence and flow of resources very often ended up in the increasingly wealthy West. Paradoxically, or hypocritically, Western thinkers repeatedly disavowed these connections, explaining the “miracle” of the West’s supposed successes as the result of its own hard work, innovation, and cultural or even racial origins.
*
The increasingly speculative nature of commerce that helped drive violence from the middle of the eighteenth century ignited an explosion of debt and economic misery in many areas of the world. What emerged was nothing less than the world’s first global debt crisis. The spread of weapons and commerce helped create a “debt pyramid” that at times resembled the Ponzi scheme that had rocked the English economy in the 1720s with the South Sea Bubble.
The trick went something like this. An English merchant took out a loan from a bank such as Lloyds or Barings against an interest rate of, say, 6 percent annually. If his credit was poor, the interest rate rose and so did the urgency (and anxiety) of making his payments. This transaction was made possible and secured by the institutions that took shape during the financial revolution: standardized currencies, paper money, banks, insurance companies, and the courts and lawyers, lots and lots of lawyers.
The merchant used this loan to purchase cloth, metals, alcohol, and other goods, especially guns, musket balls, flints, and gunpowder. (Wealthier capitalists had employees do their buying work or loaned out goods to others so that, in reality, a chain of individuals quickly became involved; men such as Leyland, the wealthy Liverpool merchant, never stepped foot in Africa.) These purchased items became the trade goods used to obtain what the merchant really sought: people, furs, sandalwood, and sea cucumbers, whatever could be bought cheaply and sold dearly. He might also take out an insurance policy to hedge his risk, as happened in 1781 when the captain of the Zong threw 133 Africans overboard, deliberately drowning them, and then sought (unsuccessfully) to claim their insured value.19 TABLE 2.1. Expenses and profits of the ship Perseverance, ca. 1791, in pounds (£) Purchase of the ship 1,700 Repairs to ship 1,300 Provisions for crew and slaves 500 Cargo 7,000 Insurance 2,520 Wages 2,650 Captain’s commissions 1,500 Privilege to officers 150 Commission on sale of slaves and guarantee in the West Indies 2,600 Freight out 3,000 Total 22,920 Proceeds from sale of 527 slaves at 50 per person 26,350 Freight for West Indies 3,000 Total 29,350 Net Profit 6,430 Notes: £6,430 is about £689,000 today ($871,000). Note the substantial cost of insurance.
Upwards of fifty enslaved people may have died on the voyage. The industrialist Galton family invested in multiple slave voyages. Based on Galton Papers, MS 3101/b/6–8, Wolfson Centre, Birmingham Archives (UK).
In parts of the Americas, Asia, and especially Africa, trading was risky and encouraged speculation. Profits might be high, but so were potential losses: ships might sink or goods might perish, including human beings, as in the case of the Zong massacre when disease broke out and the captain hedged his investment by murdering his captive property. Onboard mortality rates in the Atlantic slave trade averaged about 10 percent; merchants were buying and shipping human beings, who could and did perish on these journeys, one reason why slave traders were anxious to cross the ocean as quickly as possible. Their ‘merchandise’ might be deemed inferior or unacceptable, might become unwanted or unavailable, with the terms turning unacceptably high.20 Wherever they ended up, Western merchants depended on an array of people to obtain what they desired. (The less they depended on locals, the more merchants became warlords themselves.) They took on, as one European merchant observed, the “risque of trusting the inhabitants.”21 Often, they did not know the local language and possessed little knowledge of the society they were entering. In the tropics, the threat of disease loomed ever-present, especially malaria. The longer European merchants spent at or near shore, the greater their chances of dying. In Africa especially, rulers confined European merchants to trading forts or forced them to remain on their ships.
But even when Westerners traveled into the interior, trade remained impossible apart from the cooperation of Indigenous peoples.
Most of all, this business hung on the relationship with the local warlord, to whom a merchant often advanced goods on credit. These warrior men were not just the gates through which resources and goods passed; with guns in their hands, they also used violence to forcibly generate whatever goods the Western businessman sought to procure.
The relationship between merchant and warlord involved complex negotiations, largely determined by the warlord’s cultural mores and expectations, so each area of the world was different even if the general patterns were the same. These exchanges might last for days.
In parts of North America, for example, the meetings involved many hundreds of people in a highly ritualized bricolage of Indian and European customs; and weapons played a dominant role. In Canada’s Hudson Bay, where millions of animal skins left for Europe, the governor, chief European trader, and an Indian warlord all gathered in a room sharing a calumet pipe and exchanging various gifts. “You told me last year to bring many Indians,” one Indigenous leader is said to have noted, and then added, “You see I have not lied, here are a great many young men come with me. . . . Let them trade good goods I say! We lived hard last winter and hungry, the powder being expended. . . . We paddled a long way to see you. . . .
The guns [last year] are bad; let us trade light guns, small in the hand and well shaped with locks that will not freeze in the winter.” The warlord would leave his pipe at the fort if he was happy with the trade and intended on returning. The European trader would make a record of the debts the Indians owed for goods the Europeans had advanced them. At the same time, the Europeans competed among themselves “to enlarge trade by seducing leaders from other Forts, which causes a paper war between them.”22 In parts of West Africa, the situation was very different. Here, warlords boarded ships and negotiated the trade. An African warlord might receive various presents or “dashes” and would offer pawns as collateral for loans received. To the European merchant, African demands could be maddeningly fickle, seemingly changing by the day. Western traders scarcely understood the cultural logics by which Africans created and sustained social relationships by and through the exchange of material items. As the eighteenth century ground on, they knew only one thing for certain: African demand for weapons remained more or less constant.
Reflecting on these trade encounters, we glimpse the emerging entanglements of the modern world, enmeshments that became possible— or unavoidable—with the marriage of guns and finance that would drive violence and planetary destruction. Western businessmen with guns loaned some of the goods they had received to Africans and others, creating chains of credit and debt (and sowing violence) that might move thousands of miles into the interior. Almost immediately, interest rates on these loans jumped from 30 percent to 100 percent or much more yearly, an increase by a factor of five to sixteen times the rate in England. In this way, a London bank debt insinuated itself into far-flung parts of the world.
We might think of this process as a kind of rudimentary derivative in which risk moved from one person or entity to another.
23 The result was the spread of indebtedness, as borrowing for a whole range of goods skyrocketed. From the Indian Ocean to North America, increasing numbers of people found themselves perpetually in debt, trapped in the jaws of financial penury, from which there was little hope for escape. Making matters worse, creditors held accountable whole communities—kin and relatives by marriage—and not just individuals. The community was the collateral.
Today, we associate these sorts of predatory rates with organized crime, payday loan sharks, and title loan schemes, each an example of an immoral economy. (In the United States, title loans typically charge around 25 percent monthly, or about 300 percent a year.
These wildly predatory practices are concentrated in poor neighborhoods, from which wealth has been extracted for decades if not a century or more.) Money lending has long served as one of the most important revenue sources for organized crime, including small loans that come due in a week at a rate of 20 percent.
The crime boss is the quintessential modern warlord. Invariably, these figures can be found in places where credit is hard to come by, political fragmentation abounds, and power has become privatized. The world being created in the eighteenth century reflected just such an environment, a domain of warlords made possible by the spread of commerce, guns, and violence.24 Here is “where the great predators” at the dawn of capitalism were roaming.25 More than any other single commodity, weapons spread debt relations across the world.
People may have abhorred debt and the vulnerabilities that came with the financialization and militarization of daily life, but they could scarcely escape it. And although a few saw fabulous wealth, for many the world’s first global arms race ultimately was a race to the bottom.
The consequences were far-reaching and in many areas of the world devastating. The profits generated by immoral economies helped sustain the shift to fossil fuels in core areas in the West. Elsewhere, human and natural resources were plundered as individuals, companies, and countries tried to extricate themselves from debt and continue acquiring weapons. Resolving debt meant losing whatever goods or possessions were most in demand by Westerners: metals, furs, land, and people. In North America the most prized item was land, especially in the wake of overhunting and environmental destruction and as settlers began expanding westward.
Indigenous Americans were forced to resolve their debts by selling millions of acres increasingly coveted by white settlers, with many in the South interested in establishing slave plantations. In Asia, rising indebtedness saw an intensification of forced servitude; a dramatic increase in slavery, landlessness, and environmental destruction; and a hollowing out of indigenous polities as vast amounts of wealth were drained from the region.
Across India, rulers drowning in debt engaged in violence to generate the resources they needed to service their debt obligations.26 And in sub-Saharan Africa, resolving debt meant capturing human life, for this was the resource that was most in demand internationally.
“Innocent relations . . . have been made available, to raise the funds to liquidate the debt, either by bondage as pawns, or by actual sale.”27 Many thousands of people were thus “condemned to sale for debt”: a life for a promissory note.28 Communities were held liable for an individual’s debts. The equivalent of bankruptcy and foreclosure was enslavement, with the warlord little more than a repo man.29 So arose the immoral economies that became entangled with the world Adam Smith and others celebrated and that yielded so much wealth for the West at the expense of globalized destruction. Warlords arose where scarce resources were in demand and their flow into and out of the world economy could be controlled, especially when violence was intrinsic to producing what the West desired, whether it involved hunting animals or enslaving people. Credit and debt combined with guns invariably accelerated predation against humans and nonhumans alike, depleting regions of resources. In Africa, some areas suffered depopulation. In other parts of the world, such as North America, animals were slaughtered by the millions, driven toward extinction.
This was an inherently competitive and violent environment, and conflict regularly erupted.
Promises were broken, and misunderstandings abounded.
Most everyone was in debt, including merchant warriors. Beholden to others, they might sell their own people to avoid default. Warlords had their own interests, consolidating and expanding power, competing internally, and making sure they controlled the gate through which resources and goods, weapons especially, moved. Losing control meant losing power.
European merchants—often warlords in their own right—played these competitors against one another. They also competed among themselves, trying to monopolize trade whenever possible. This was the setting for the global Seven Years’ War, the first of a series of conflicts that would continue into the nineteenth century and set the stage for European imperial conquest of much of the world. That war was waged mostly between and among these rapacious men, who fought over who would control the flow of resources and who would profit from the ensuing destruction.
*
Modern finance made its way into the fabric of societies the world over.
Things became commodities and in some places converted into capital that was invested in industries burning fossil fuels. Without modern finance, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. But the process was never uniform even if the results would become nearly universal as capitalism spread globally. Things meant different things to different people, often radically, even if credit, debt, and desire were everywhere.
Debt is not invariably bad. Far from it. Without debt, economies past and present wouldn’t function, although almost all of us at some point have found ourselves paying more interest than we could afford. Over millennia, credit and debt have meant different things to different people, but broadly conceived, they are about trust and risk. “To you, Antonio,” Shakespeare has the ne’er-do-well Bassanio say in The Merchant of Venice, “I owe the most in money and in love.”30 The loans we extend often involve those to whom we are most closely attached and whom we trust; these transactions do not always end well. But even a gangster must have a sliver of trust in the person to whom he loans money as well as the means of violence to enforce the relationship should trust fall short of its mark. Across the world, credit and debt set the terms for creating relationships and building power.
Disseminating goods meant establishing obligations and dependency. To accept something meant entering a relationship that would require something else in return, whether immediately or deferred. In this sense, even gifts are a kind of loan; the payment might be another gift in return or an expression of thanks that reaffirms a connection. How all this unfolds is the work of culture as people create and re-create meaning, tell stories, and make and remake their lives. Across North America through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, Indians believed that accepting goods on credit connected them personally to an individual trader whose merchandise held spiritual powers. Indian debt—the ability to receive goods in advance—augmented this trader’s status through his ability to redistribute goods and thus create relations of dependency. This emerging dynamic reworked the ancient ethic of the successful hunter who shares his good fortune with the community and in doing so becomes more powerful. Much the same happened in Africa, where power depended on the distribution of objects or things and the willingness (forced or not) of others to accept them.31 This approach worked if there were resources that might be turned into other things, gifts that might become commodities in the world economy, such as animal fur that became felted hats. But when those resources disappeared or were no longer desired, the world sometimes came crashing down.
Goods accomplished intrinsically social work, which is why they needed to circulate.
Accumulation might be important but often remained secondary to distribution. Giving and accepting gifts (or accepting loans) bound people to one another, just as they continue to do today. Cloth, shells, metals, and even guns might have multiple social lives, at one point serving as a kind of monetary currency and at another point being incorporated into a piece of art or simply used and consumed in the rhythms of daily life.
People existed in their objects, and objects existed in their people. A bolt of cloth might be sold in the market or become a currency. Or it might be cut up and distributed as gifts that generated prestige for the giver or as goods lent out as loans. Both of these scenarios created personal relationships and dependence, which might be why people generally preferred giving rather than receiving: the latter meant acknowledging one’s subordinate status.
Iron smelted in England might become weapons, but it could also be transformed into farming tools or a medium for other exchanges or hammered into a sculpture that held secret ritual powers. The cowries Europeans brought from the Indian Ocean became a currency in Africa but also were used in multiple artistic forms, even as many Africans believed that these objects grew on the bodies of drowned slaves and thus were tied to what everyone knew was ultimately an immoral economy. Guns too might become ritual objects, not just instruments for killing but also an extension or part of a person.32 In this framework, the true value of an object resided not in the costs of producing it or the laws of supply and demand that Adam Smith had helped explicate but instead in the depth and durability—the thickness—of the relationships that object helped create and sustain. Debt created especially thick relationships, in which one person acknowledged his or her dependence on another, although with the military-commercial revolution, debt also created vulnerability. And these relationships were not limited to those between human beings.
Most of us tend to erect a border between people and things—the “I” versus the “it”—but in this scenario and for some cultures, objects possessed a kind of charisma,33 even a kind of personhood. And as they entered these cultures, guns quickly assumed supposedly magical powers, becoming one with the person who possessed a weapon. Killing enhanced power and authority even if it also entailed destruction of the very world people most cherished. It is hard for many of us living in secular worlds to think of an object as a person or a spiritual being, although for some what we own is an extension of who we are. Our gods have long since departed for the heavens, leaving us mostly alone to make and unmake our lives. But in the past and across much of the world, the distinctions between things and persons and other beings were never clearly drawn. Life forces migrated across bodies and things, the invisible somehow always inhering in the real, the distinctions between the dead and the living at best uncertain and at most capable of producing rich imaginings, varying emotions, and the narrative we call history.
34 It is as if a thin gauze separated the visible and invisible worlds through which the living sought to look and across which others traveled.
Across large areas of the non-Western world as the 1700s slipped into the nineteenth century, the military-commercial revolution tugged at these ways of being and increasingly subverted them, particularly in societies where capital as we usually think of it was scarce, private property was virtually nonexistent, and relationships were secured by human bodies: “capital,” in short, “was people.”35 A world awash in things, especially things that killed, radically expanded consumption (often eroding local production of goods) while depreciating the social and societal work a particular good might do. As a result, it took more and more to accomplish what once had required much less. And as demand grew more relentless, the desired objects themselves began to depreciate or disappear: cloth degraded, gunpowder was expended, goods were ritually destroyed, and human lives were lost to slavery. What didn’t disappear was the desire for these goods, the conspicuous consumption that Western merchants, with their massive ships that today we might think of as floating Walmarts, were more than happy to support. In North America and into the Pacific region, we find an example of this cycle in what came to be known as the potlatch: rituals led by warlords in which European trade goods were distributed or ceremonially destroyed. Guns were often important objects in these ceremonies. Similar developments unfolded in Africa, where ceremonies such as funerals became ever more ostentatious and where ever larger amounts of goods— including people—might be consumed by their destruction. The well-to-do were literally covered in things: clothes with “fetishes, charms, and various ornaments.” They sat under “immense umbrellas . . . of the most showy cloths and silks . . .
crowned at the top with . . . birds and beasts.”36 Warlords controlled the flow of scarce resources and produced these goods through violence, people considered objects to have life forces, and societies did not enjoy the protections offered by Western institutional innovations. Into these areas flowed indebtedness, along with guns and other goods, and valuable resources flowed the other way. Traditional or non-Western ways of seeing the world heightened the desire for new goods once they began arriving; every new object brought forth a spiritual energy and intensified the allure of the individual who possessed it.
These outlooks also permitted the accelerated acquisition and distribution of goods, processes made all the easier by the spread of guns. The age of weapons proliferation and of growing markets, credit, and punishing debt, created by warlords and ultimately connected to Western institutions, led to both rapidly expanding frontiers of predation by the powerful upon the less powerful and a kind of social parasitism, a self-devouring within communities that is difficult to acknowledge or name directly. People were willing to kill even if it meant enslaving their own neighbors, making war, or destroying their own environment.
What resulted were worlds riven with fear and mistrust, opportunity and avarice, worlds in which everyone seemed in debt to someone else and dreaded when it was time to pay up.
The world’s first global debt crisis unfolded in lockstep with industries burning fossil fuels and the world’s first consumer revolution, as vast numbers of people around the world found themselves suffering extraordinary, chronic indebtedness. North American native peoples lost land and suffered impoverishment; halfway around the world, Egyptian peasants sank into debt, landlessness, and despair (in the second half of the nineteenth century, the entire country went bankrupt). In India, where “indebtedness became more hopeless and inextricable,” people spent their lives paying interest rates of up to 50 percent to moneylenders ultimately tied to London banks; peasants “sowed their crops in sorrow and tended them in fear.”37 Farm suicides became a fixture of rural life. When the rains failed, famine and starvation followed.
And in Africa, debt produced familial catastrophes, and parents “sold their own children” to satisfy creditors.38 These developments led to new spasms of violence and political cataclysms. Everywhere, debt led to brutality. More immediately and profoundly, they produced enormous spiritual unease. People knew there was something wrong with the world being created, even those who profited from it. This was the cultural universe arising from the new immoral economies: both the reality and the underlying awareness that one’s desires and the deeds necessary to fulfill them bore enormous costs for others, for the earth, and ultimately for one’s soul. If the cosmos is filled with life, including what many of us today might consider inanimate objects such as trees and the wind, what were the costs of extinguishing those life forces in the pursuit of baser longings?
Warlords might not have curbed their aggressive behaviors in response to this nascent awareness, but they absolutely sought ritual protections.
Profiting from violence meant making pacts with the occult to ensure economic success, even if it meant consigning one’s own children to death as well as protecting oneself from the magic of others. In Africa, cultural institutions such as poison oracles whereby the accused ingested a substance that would determine their guilt or innocence were reshaped “for the purpose of regulating trade.”39 War medicine to ensure success in acquiring slaves required human sacrifice, and the West African trading towns ruled by warlords would see a “profuse slaughter of human victims.”40 Similar activities cropped up from the jungles of Borneo to the forestlands of North America: violent men making deals with the spirits, atoning for their actions even as they continued committing them.
People believed that these warlords had special connections to the occult world. The very language of witchcraft and a world of enchanted things encouraged the dissemination of goods; doing so, warlords hoped, might help offer protection from the jealousy and hatred of the less fortunate.
Otherwise, they might be perceived as especially selfish individuals deploying occult power.
The explosion of ideas about magic during the first emergence of the Mortecene had roots in a world of warlords who owed their existence to the military-commercial revolution and turned their weapons on other people: humans hunting humans. Africans considered Europeans arriving in their strange vessels to be cannibals and evil witches. They arrived from beneath the ocean, from the Land of the Dead, with all their fabulous goods. These visitors “ate” Africans; fleshly consumption was at the heart of perceptions of the slave trade and of Europeans’ unique powers.41 The blood of the disappeared became wine, brains became cheese, and bodies became cooking oil. The bones of slaves became the gunpowder warlords used to prey on others. The disappeared returned to become the force that kills and reduces others to slavery.
42 These descriptions were not metaphors. People really believed that gunpowder was made from the bones of slaves, just as many knew that muskets were animate objects and that possessing them connected the owner to a universe of gods and other nonhuman beings who oversaw daily life. It was obvious to anyone who stood on a shore that ships came from below the water and the Land of the Dead, since the first part of a seafaring vessel to appear on the horizon was the mast; only later did the hull rise from the ocean. The everyday world within which people lived was connected and ultimately beholden to a cosmic world populated by ancestors, gods, witches, and multitudinous other beings. The living not only depended on these beings; they were fully determined by them.
Understanding these connections produced its own anxieties and reflections among these non-Western peoples. We glimpse this unease in the art people made, in the stories they told one another, in the rituals they performed to gain some control over the vagaries of an increasingly modern existence, and in the social movements that repudiated the immoral economies destroying their world. FIGURE 2.3. Funerary screen with European ship, Kalabari, nineteenth century, Nigeria. The screen was located in a trading house where people made offerings to ensure wealth from trade with Europeans. Af1950,45.334.
Reproduced with permission of the British Museum.
The military-commercial revolution became an ineluctable part of this world making, this emerging Mortecene, including critiques that this new cultural and economic order was profoundly wrong, encompassing as it did the enslavement of people, the wanton killing of animals, the destruction of entire ecosystems, and an increasingly polluted planet. One result was a crisis of trust across large sectors of the globe.43 Societies saw an explosion of objects saturated with enchanted forces, objects that people hoped might confer power, ensure wealth, or offer protection in a world where “cupidity and blighting avarice” now reigned “supreme.” “It is you,” an African elder complained, “you Whites . . . who have brought all the evil among us. . . .
The desire we have for your fascinating goods . . . , bring it to pass that one brother cannot trust the other, nor one friend another. Indeed, a father hardly his own son!”44 It should not surprise us, although it might run counter to some of our assumptions about modernity, that across much of the world, communities and peoples became more ritualistic with the modern age, not less. At the same time, the West was developing its own peculiar spirituality: its faith in science, rationality, secularism, materialism and conspicuous consumption, and a veritable cult of the individual. Consumption might bring happiness, Western thinkers and consumers prayed; economic growth would be endless and inconsequential for the planet, despite emerging warnings and the pollution that turned skies gray and buildings black with soot.
Europeans would write disparagingly about how Africans and other peoples were “primitive” because of the rituals they practiced and the spiritual forces and divinities they worshipped, but the West had its magical gods as well. And those who wrote never quite realized their own embeddedness or enmeshment with the cultures they so readily denigrated.45
PART TWO AFRICAN HOLOCAUSTS
3 Lands of the Dead THE CHILDREN HAD GROWN ACCUSTOMED to scampering up the large tree, boughs bending to their weight, shadows sliding across the red African soil.
Theirs was not idle childhood play undertaken while parents tended fields, nor was it the labor elders expected of the young. A certain terror impelled them. The children were on the lookout. They expected violence and death; communities were attacked and preyed upon, and people disappeared. The children knew that men might suddenly come among them, men with debts to pay, desires to quench, and insecurities to pacify, led by their vicious leaders and strengthened by magic and the flintlocks they held tightly. In a single moment, these men would carry off as many as they could take, stuffing cloth in their victims’ mouths to silence their cries, binding their hands, tying one captive to another, and secreting the unfortunate to the Land of the Dead, the Americas. Those who resisted too strongly lay mortally wounded, left to die. The fortunate managed to flee with their lives.
On that day in the middle of the eighteenth century in a place in southeastern Nigeria that sustained all the intimacies of human existence— play and laughter, sadness and reflection, labor and rest—the simple terrifying fear of being killed or captured and sold occupied the minds of children. Their dread of being transported to the Land of the Dead arose precisely from the burgeoning military-commercial revolution as men applied their guns in the service of hunting that most precious resource: other people.1 This was not all. The same societies that supplied slaves were themselves becoming slave societies. Many of these hunters did not come from faraway lands, foreign invaders in search of spoil, with children as their easy targets. People knew what they were doing to their neighbors and to those who lived on the borders of their communities and what at any moment might happen to themselves. No matter how many spiritual objects people kept, they seemed to offer less and less protection against the malevolence swirling around them. More troublingly is the hard reality that communities, at times even families, might capture and sell their own kin, their own people.
This was one prominent meaning of being “eaten,” a word once used figuratively but, with the rise of the eighteenth century, increasingly referring to the disappeared, those millions whose bones were said to be crushed into the gunpowder that sowed destruction and sorrow. “Eaten” speaks to life’s unfairness as well as the inescapable ties between people and things: who we are (as individuals or communities) and the forces and objects that comprise our world. People believed that those profiting from enslavement had access to powerful magic or were witches transforming people into things, experts in the alchemies of commodification and destruction. Somewhere inside Africa, some thought, lay secret plantations worked by zombies and yielding fantastic wealth. Others understood that life itself, the forces that make the world, was somehow being drained away, a slow annihilation.
Still others gravitated to ritual protection to forestall or escape the violence, desperate to not be one of those sold, eaten, or turned into the dead, forever laboring in some forsaken land.2 *
We now have a detailed understanding of the numbers of African slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean; we have a much weaker grasp of the scale of enslavement elsewhere in the world, including within Africa itself.
What has become unmistakably clear is that the capture and sale of human beings closely tracks the diffusion of weapons and the growth of markets.
One of the first things people did with guns was to turn them on others, spreading enslavement across much of the planet. This violence produced unfathomable suffering; it also profoundly shaped world ecology and the course of world history.
Over some 350 years, approximately 12,521,322 enslaved people left Africa’s shores for the Americas, by far the largest forced migration of people in history. Much of this ghastly traffic—nearly 7.9 million enslaved people, or 63 percent of the total African slave trade—was concentrated in the century beginning in the mid-1700s as the military-commercial revolution took hold and more than one hundred million pounds of gunpowder entered the continent. Two major regions in Africa supplied the bulk of captives in the period after 1750: the region of West Africa that runs roughly from contemporary Ghana to Nigeria and Central Africa from Angola to Zambia. The latter region provided over 3.5 million slaves, nearly half of all those shipped to the Americas in this period.3 We might have a detailed knowledge of the numbers of people enslaved, but far less understood are the deaths behind these numbers: the people who perished to generate and sustain the Americas’ plantation system and its voracious demand for labor, which extended from Brazil to Maryland’s eastern shore, where the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass grew up before escaping slavery in the 1830s. Across the history of the Atlantic slave trade, more than 1.4 million people (just over 12 percent of captured people) died in transit to the Americas.
Slavers unceremoniously tossed the dead into the ocean so often that sharks grew accustomed to following the ships across the Atlantic.4 Although numbers tell us little about the processes behind these horrors and even less about human experience, they do cast a light on the scale of human calamities. Unfortunately, the appalling statistics do not end here.
We have to ask how many people died to generate 9.6 million to 12 million enslaved people shipped abroad. What was the direct or indirect human wastage of enslavement? On average, did it take one or two or even three of the dead to “produce” a single captive?
This is where the military-commercial revolution—the devastating modern marriage of markets, profit, and weapons—becomes key to our understanding of these developments and to the broader emergence of the Mortecene. Guns and gunpowder galvanized a remarkable increase in violence; nowhere has the proliferation of weapons brought peace.
The number of people killed, directly or indirectly related to enslavement, ranged from 9.6 million to 36 million. Add to this the people enslaved and intended for export, and one comes up with a demographic loss ranging from 19.2 million to 48 million people from the middle of the eighteenth century until just before the beginning of the European colonial conquests of Africa in the second half of the 1800s, a period also marked by massive violence and death,5 in other words, an African holocaust.
For well over two centuries, people in Africa and across the West have asked, Why Africa?
Why did Africans exchange others for various goods, especially in societies that so treasured human life? Why would someone capture and trade another human being for a bolt of cloth or a musket? To the first question, scholars have proffered such answers as the unavailability of European and American slaves, the proximity of Africa to the New World, Western prejudice, disease environments, and the fact that no one could have imagined that the small number of enslaved peoples transported in the early years would grow so monstrously.
6 An older and still common answer has focused on the slave as outsider: the foreigner vanquished in war or the criminal deemed an outcast by virtue of some transgression. The slave, in this view, is fundamentally the stranger.
Enslaving people through warfare or as a form of punishment is an ancient practice dating back at least to early Babylon, more than four thousand years ago. Imagine you have subdued your enemy: What do you do with them? The choices are fairly simple. You can kill them, demand tribute, put them to work, or sell them to others.
The increasing demand for and rising price of slaves, so the argument continues, encouraged warfare, permitting the expansion of political frontiers as states preyed on outsiders. This reality was especially the case in so-called stateless societies, which lacked a centralized government and thus remained especially vulnerable to attacks by soldiers on horseback and/or armed with guns. Enslaving and selling a foreign enemy or a miscreant might have seemed logical, relatively unencumbered by moral unease, for those in these scenarios. It is far easier to harm someone you don’t know, especially someone you don’t like or actively despise, than someone you do know.
7 This is an easy and still stubbornly common answer. It is also inaccurate, especially in the last century of the Atlantic slave trade as warlords sowed destruction, a time marked by the enormous spread of weapons and other goods and the phenomenal rise in widespread indebtedness. Warfare against outsiders certainly happened and even expanded, but many of those who were made slaves were locals, at times even family. In other words, the enslavers did know their captives, sometimes intimately.
“Would we have sold one another,” lamented an elder Fante man from what is now the coast of Ghana around the 1750s, “if you . . . had not come to us?” He was referring to the European merchants arriving in ships carrying millions of pounds of gunpowder and shot, many thousands of guns, and a vast assortment of goods.8 Here people knew that the enslaved were destined for the Land of the Dead and that farther in the interior, thousands were dying from malnutrition or disease on their way to the slave ships. Coast dwellers knew of the dead bodies being thrown overboard, with sharks swirling about the ships “in almost incredible numbers.”9 The weight of such knowledge must have been unimaginable, at least to some.
Africans received an astonishing array of goods in exchange for people: vast amounts of cloth from both the Indian subcontinent and, increasingly, industrializing England; metals (iron, brass, bronze, and copper); weapons (swords, guns, shot, and gunpowder); and alcohol, in addition to cowrie shells and even such items as beaver felt, coveted for millinery and hat making. These things entered people’s worlds, sometimes ostentatiously: the calicoes one wrapped around one’s body, the Virginia tobacco stuffed into a pipe, Venetian beads, Indian Ocean cowries, and bottles of Caribbean rum. Other goods were kept more discreetly, even in secret. People incorporated their new possessions into ritual objects they hoped might confer protection or ensure worldly success, hoping that the enchanted articles these foreigners brought would continue to bring success or power or protection.
And if they could secure human beings in return, preferably at the lowest cost, Europeans were more than happy to satisfy these African demands, whether through the “Manchester cottons and China silks” found in just about every village or especially guns and gunpowder, the latter yielding “the greatest Gains” for the European merchants of destruction.10 The prices Europeans paid for slaves generally rose in accordance with the latter’s productivity, as did the numbers of slaves exported. In West Africa, prices likely rose threefold over the course of the eighteenth century; prices surged in the 1760s, 1780s, and then again after 1795, precisely the time the import of weapons also soared.11 On the European side, £1 purchased less over time, although precious metals such as silver and gold rarely made their way to Africa, in contrast to the large movements of mostly American silver to Asia and Europe, where they were put to use as currencies. Instead, Europeans often converted money into goods that could be turned into African currency, accepted locally and regionally across African towns and villages but not internationally.
Once the captives reached the Americas, slaves were then exchanged for currencies most of us are familiar with or were used as collateral for loans.
The wealth they generated generally increased over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the volume of goods and the number of enslaved peoples were not the only commodities that soared dramatically. The rates of exchange, circulation, and consumption were on the rise, and slavery’s profitability was seen as offsetting the rise in prices paid for human beings on Africa’s shores. Profitability for some but not all: much the opposite was happening in Africa, at huge costs to its peoples and its ecologies. “Trends in slave prices and terms of trade suggest,” one scholar has noted, “that further increases in slave exports after 1750 made disproportionately large claims on the human and other resources of West and West-Central Africa.”12 Over time, the value of many goods traded for slaves declined as wealth was drained from a continent that was collapsing into debt. But consumption continued, even if the social work of goods accomplished less and less.
These developments had deeper histories linked to the movement of people and things: think especially of the plunder, exploitation, and global trade pioneered by the Portuguese and Spanish from the sixteenth century onward. But something quite different was happening now, something that marked the birth of the modern world. It was as if a gyre that had been slowly turning since the 1500s suddenly accelerated and started spinning out of control, destroying everything in its path. More people and things moved with greater rapidity amid still greater violence in what seemed to be an ever-expanding market. This gyre turned so quickly and forcefully that people could not escape it. The pace of destruction and consumption sped up at every level, from drinking alcohol to wearing cloth to sacrificing human beings. People pursued what they desired to possess, even if for some the acquisition came at the cost of losing their soul.
*
Guns and enslavement went hand-in-glove. Without modern international finance, commerce, and the development of modern weapons, the Atlantic slave trade and its monstrous numbers would not—could not—have happened. And in its earliest emergence, few could have predicted where that trade would lead. As one historian wrote, “the inescapable fact . . . is that we know how it all came out, and they did not.”13 True enough.
But if people could not foretell the future, they still knew what was happening in the present: they could see that an immoral economy was emerging, a network of commerce and power that was becoming all-consuming.
This system rested on the all too human desire for things and on complicities that turned into compulsions. Ordinary human greed, combined with the warlords’ lust for power, rendered societies more dependent on the outside world, creating extraordinary suffering and producing feelings of vulnerability deep in life’s most intimate domains. In these villages, with their festoons of cloth and other commodities acquired in the slave trade, credit and debt became “general,” that is, a ubiquitous feature of daily life. People were not simply being reduced to property, violently seized and sold into slavery. Humans were becoming collateral, payments on debts incurred. That most valued resource—human life—had become the principal resource against which people borrowed or by which they were held accountable.14 As more lives were sucked into this pernicious vortex, the resulting violence shattered both psyches and villages, upending individual families.
Many of us are used to a story of enslavement and the slave trade that emphasizes the growth of predatory kingdoms: powerful rulers who used their administrative capacity and access to weapons to control exchange and trade routes and to raid weaker peoples unprotected by states. This dynamic produced a shifting slaving frontier whereby captives—now regarded as foreigners from the interior—were moved along trade routes toward coastal ports or entered expanding slave societies within Africa itself. In this scenario, war became economic production by another means.15 But as the Fante elder we met earlier reminds us, waging war to generate slaves is only one part of the story. Captive peoples were not just defeated enemies, outsiders, or foreigners, seen by their subjugators as alien and inferior, or at least they were not only seen in those ways. Nor were kings, princes, and their soldiers the only ones involved in enslavement. Just about everyone with the means and the opportunity to enslave others did so.
Violence became endemic, just as politics became more fragmented and resistance against the impositions of the powerful became ubiquitous.
Localized banditry and kidnapping by petty warlords and others became far more common, along with the abuse of judicial processes, accusations of adultery, and the manipulation of rituals, all to generate slaves. Even the gods seemed to have turned against the defenseless, as men prayed and offered sacrifices in hopes of growing rich at others’ expense, and oracles that once provided advice and safety were now beseeched for the gift of slaves.
These mechanisms unfolded within states as well as in stateless societies.
In fact, they cropped up wherever the new world of credit and debt, of guns and the commodification of human life, took root. In decentralized societies, warlords (many up to their necks in debt) sought guns and iron that could be turned into weapons, even if procuring these items meant enslaving their own, “neighbor against neighbor, village against village.”16 Into this world of violence and mistrust and unquenched desire arose “wicked” men willing to enslave even the young, men “violent” but also “great,” said the Temnes of Sierra Leone, men who had “plenty of money, and many slaves, and plenty of cattle, and many servants.” People envied such men’s success and trembled in their presence. As we will soon see, these emerging brawlers of the Mortecene “did just as [they] pleased, and troubled all [their] people.” The warlord was a man who “became the author of death in the world.”17
4 Gods of War THE EMPEROR WAS WORRIED. Every day, the pernicious combination of guns and debt sowed ever deeper levels of mistrust, paranoia, and cruelty as humans became the very currency of international trade and a new economic order. Every day, the towns on the coast grew stronger, and what little control the emperor had over the warlords with their guns was fast slipping through his hands. He felt perpetually beholden to others, including and perhaps especially the forces that foretold if his reign would bring success and peace or discord and misfortune. The emperor might be divine, but it was precisely his divinity that left him vulnerable, for the emperor was but the vessel of spiritual power in which all past rulers, indeed time itself with its endless weal and woe, resided. Emperors lived mostly secluded behind a beaded crown. Alaafins (rulers in the Oyo Empire) were known to rule for just months or even days before being assassinated or forced to commit suicide, their divinity and its eternal burdens passing on to their successors. Emperor Awonbioju’s reign (1754) lasted just 130 days.1 Less than half a century had passed since the legendary Oyo Empire’s founding in Nigeria’s grasslands, just north of the coastal forests and 190 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The new regime represented the culmination of extraordinary political innovations going back centuries or to the beginning of time, some people said. In the seventeenth century, the rulers (alaafins or obas) of Oyo, located in the northern part of the empire, adopted horses acquired from the north and, combined with locally made spears and swords, created a legendary cavalry that became an instrument of enslavement and subjugation, with the figure of the horse soon intimately associated with the emperor’s rule.
The Oyo Empire expanded both northward to secure slaves and horses and southward to control developments within the oceanic trade and its rising tide of weapons and other goods. For a while the Oyo Empire successfully pressured the smaller coastal kingdoms of Allada and Abomey to pay tribute. In this way, the empire connected interior regions as far away as Katsina, in the Hausa heartland (located in today’s northern Nigeria), with the Atlantic coast.
In previous times, for Oyo’s rulers the means of destruction had come from the north, ultimately all the way from Africa’s Mediterranean shores, where merchants brought horses across the Sahara Desert to trade for West African gold and slaves. It was relatively easy for rulers to centralize control of horses. Not so for the weapons arriving from Europe and the Americas, whose merchants coveted one thing: human beings. The export of slaves from the Bight of Benin more than quadrupled between 1651 and 1700. It nearly doubled again in the next fifty years and remained unimaginably high for the rest of the century and into the 1800s.
Increasingly destructive muskets insinuated themselves into Oyo politics and ultimately tore the empire apart. Emperors knew that the slave ports Porto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos were growing in importance; these were the ports from which weapons moved inland and millions of enslaved peoples headed to the Americas. As the slave trade metastasized in the 1700s, the relationship between Oyo and the coastal kingdoms repeatedly fractured. In addition to dealing with their powerful inland neighbor, coastal leaders confronted other problems as they struggled to maintain their control over the slave trade and the storm of guns flooding the region.
In the early eighteenth century, King Agaja, ruler of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, expanded southward and conquered the neighboring kingdoms of Allada and Hueda, giving his regime access to the coastal towns. Oyo’s leaders feared the rising independence of the coastal areas and invaded these regions several times, laying waste to towns and killing and enslaving people. But its cavalry was far more suited for grasslands than fighting in the coastal forests, where muskets were more effective.
Simultaneously, the rising import of weapons was shifting the regional balance of power. In 1730 Oyo reached a treaty with Dahomey, recognizing the empire and providing tribute but granting the coastal kingdom significant independence. By this time, Dahomey and its warlords controlled Whydah (Ouidah), a port through which nearly one million enslaved people left the continent between the late 1600s and the 1800s, the vast majority in the five exceptionally horrifically violent decades after 1750. More slaves left Whydah than any other port in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.2 As for Oyo, the 1730 treaty proved to be a devil’s bargain in an age of devil’s bargains. Dahomey would break free from Oyo and in the 1820s, armed with muskets, would defeat its onetime overlord.
MAP 4.1. West Africa and West-Central Africa in the era of the Atlantic slave trade But something far more insidious was unfolding within the Oyo regime.
Horses made empires, some lasting centuries, while guns yielded polities as ephemeral as they were violent, the perfect instrument of both anarchy and tyranny. In Oyo, muskets were falling into the hands of aristocrats and other increasingly powerful warlords. The result was intense competition, internecine conflict, and, in the end, a catastrophic civil war. Horses alone no longer held sway in who ascended to greatest power.
Oyo’s kings never wielded monopolistic control over the army or the enslavement of people; they were perpetually beholden to others. With the rise of trade and the diffusion of weapons, their control grew more fragile.
Political succession had always been fraught, as multiple people might assert their claim to kingship. But in the mid-eighteenth century, political paranoia began taking root. Kings anxiously sought the elimination of real or perceived claimants and struggled to contain the pretensions of powerful warlords. Behind their beaded crown was the reality that their reign was as fragile as the parrot eggs the alaafin would receive indicating that his reign had come to an end and that he would have to commit suicide or be strangled by his wives.3 Across the eighteenth century, Oyo became less a tightly controlled empire than a conglomeration of city-states, each with its own ruler amid a proliferation of warlords busily accumulating wealth by deploying their private militias to enslave people. Society became thoroughly militarized, with guns serving an increasingly dominant role, especially in the south closer to the coast.4 Tensions frequently erupted between kings trying to centralize their authority to create administrative states and the realities of political fragmentation, which privatized power, allowing warlords to forge and marshal their personal armies.
Even at the Oyo Empire’s height, warlords were the dominant players.
These strongmen took many forms. They rose on a wave of weapons, commerce, and violence, and ultimately they would be central players in the empire’s dissolution. Obas, the rulers of towns, became trader-rulers, often little more than tyrants. War chiefs, who prosecuted violence, became accomplished traders. Other chiefs transformed themselves into merchants, using their private soldiers to acquire slaves. Most perniciously, members of the aristocratic council responsible for choosing the alaafin devoted themselves to personal aggrandizement even if it meant not just selling their souls but also mortgaging the future of the empire and its people. When it suited them, they consigned newly appointed leaders to death, debasing the king’s divinity and his historic role in restoring order and bringing fertility to the world.
The legitimacy of political leaders used to be grounded, however imperfectly, in their capacity to provide protection and ensure a bountiful future for their people. Leaders descended from heroic founders, civilizers in newfound areas. Now, however, they had become little more than pioneers of barbarism, squarely tied to international commerce in slaves, guns, and merchandise, the easiest ways to “get rich speedily.”5 It was an age when “confiscation and slavery for the slightest offence became matters of daily occurrence, and the tyranny, exactions and lawlessness of the Princes and other members of the royal family” corrupted life across the empire. People no longer took an oath “in the name of the gods,” hoping for success and a long and peaceable life. The old gods seemed “indifferent.”6 Many would seek new avenues of protection and social healing while critiquing the powerful for failing their duties. When they could, they fled for safer areas or, less often, rebelled.
Woven into these developments, into tyranny itself, were pervasive indebtedness and dependence on imported weapons. Tyrants were tyrannical because in the end they were so weak. Warlords might be powerful, but they were beholden to others. Many received guns and other goods on credit from Europeans or accessed capital from lenders or through a mutual credit system.7 More generally, borrowing for a whole range of things skyrocketed.
Punishingly high levels of interest—100 percent annually—were common. Debt took a sinister turn. People might spend their entire lives unable to pay off the principal, exposing them and others to uncertainty and violence when a creditor called in a debt.
One consequence was that a substantial portion of the slaves exported into the Atlantic came not from a frontier distant from their captors’ homes but instead were acquired locally.
Enslaved Yoruba speakers, the largest ethnic group within the Oyo kingdom, shared the same cultural practices and beliefs as their capturers. Localized raiding for slaves became rife. Friends might suddenly turn on one another. Others were rendered slaves by what came to be known as “panyarring,” or “man-stealing,” in which warlords took people to force payment of a debt. Raiding and demanding payment by seizing people sowed vulnerability and violence. It also meant that strongmen had to continually militarize to ensure that they themselves were not enslaved, which invariably encouraged others to arm themselves as well.8 The devastating Yoruba civil wars of the 1820s and 1830s had their immediate roots in the disruptions caused by Britain’s ending of the external slave trade and the very instabilities caused by a social and political order that had come to be heavily reliant on enslavement, debt, and weapons. British gunpowder exports to Africa dramatically declined between 1803 and 1808, dropping by nearly 75 percent. The spigot of guns turned off, sending shock waves among those who depended on them. But the disruption only lasted a short time; by 1822, gunpowder exports exceeded one million pounds and continued increasing through much of the century. The Yorubas soon had more weapons, not less. The results were nearly apocalyptic.
The political crisis in Oyo continued for decades, with civil wars breaking out elsewhere in the greater West African region especially around Lagos. A man enslaved in the early nineteenth century wrote about how war seemed to have arrived “unexpectedly,” but the “people that raised up this war” were “not [from] another nation. We are all one nation speaking one language.”9 “The enemies satisfied themselves with little children, little girls, young men, and young women; and so they did not care about the aged and old people.” In these spasms of barbarity, “abundant heaps of dead bodies” littered Oyo’s streets.10 Slave exports out of Lagos destined for Brazil increased tremendously, nearly thirty thousand people in just four years in the 1840s, a record, only to collapse the following decade.
Chronic indebtedness and the dominance of warlords also continued. As the Atlantic slave trade finally staggered to its end and the age of empire loomed on the horizon, successful warlords adapted quickly, moving into the expanding market for palm oil that helped lubricate the Industrial Revolution, an early example of African capitalism.11 * Sometimes West African rulers attempted to curtail panyarring and other brutal practices, perhaps fearing that these activities might spin out of control. The Hueda king allowed it, but once Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdom in the 1720s, new rulers prohibited the practice. Dahomey became infamous for its participation in the Atlantic slave trade in the region that came to be known as the Slave Coast, particularly its army composed of women slaves, the Amazons.
King Adandozan (r. 1797–1818) bragged that his people “cultivated not with hoes but with guns.”12 He was soon deposed—at gunpoint—continuing a tradition whereby reigns could be as short as kingdoms were brutal. Here, the powerful threatened others with erasing “their history.”13 Ghezo succeeded Adandozan and expunged him from official memory.
Legendarily tyrannical—the defeat of the Huedas left so many thousands dead that the smell of rotting corpses spread for miles amid thick black swarms of flies—Dahomian central authority was not especially powerful, despite royal attempts to control the system of divination through which people accessed the gods that governed the world and offered them powerful spiritual resistance against royal tyranny. The king’s power was greatest near the capital of Abomey, but he constantly had to contend with warlords and aspirants whose access to weapons in return for slaves frustrated any ambition he might have harbored of growing his royal power.
14 Often called “Caboceers,” these men had their own militias and “maintained a great number of domestics and attendants,” according to one European resident. They ruled over smaller towns and villages as their private possessions, often ruthlessly, and were independent enough to act “in defiance of the King.”15 The power of these warlords depended on guns and managing the flow of goods and people, which meant of course that most had debts to pay. Paranoia fed cruelty; brutality spread mistrust and the need for spiritual protection. Even the most powerful remained fearful that they might lose control of the commodities Europeans offered in exchange for people, especially muskets.16 FIGURE 4.1. Amazon with Gun and Severed Head. At the time, Amazons were one of the few instances in the world of women warriors armed with guns. Reproduced with permission of the British Library. The more guns and debt and credit rooted in the Atlantic economy became entrenched in these regions, the more people were driven by greed and a lust for power and the more violent and precarious life became. This is a story we don’t hear as often in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
Everyone knew that participating in this trade yielded wealth and power, however shaky its foundation. Most understood that this was an immoral economy, but a decline in trade could be disastrous. Someone’s powerful magic might triumph over others, resulting not just in death but also in the weaker party being “eaten,” annihilated, forgotten. Everyone also knew that in an instant they might be enslaved, which left many living in fear, awaiting the inevitable. “If a black child cries . . . the father will be sold,” people said, “but if it laughs, the mother will be sold.”17 Distrust and the fragilities of life help explain Dahomey’s orgiastic violence and spectacular consumption, for here was a place as overrun with guns and other imports and slaves as it was by rituals that required blood sacrifice to secure protection, including what has come to be known as “vodun.” Weapons made sheer terror possible.
Confiscating the gods and shrines of the vanquished—conquering the vodun of others—might offer spiritual defense, along with enslaving those healers whose magic sometimes questioned the conduct of the powerful. The redistribution of goods might secure a modicum of subservience as well as edicts (often violated) prohibiting Dahomans from being sold abroad. But no one could be sure what tomorrow might bring. Some, counterintuitively, sought relief from fear in human sacrifice.
Ritual killings played an important role in the always uneasy maintenance of social order.
Beheading became associated with royal power, and many thousands might be sacrificed following the conquest of a neighboring people. The heads and skulls of victims would festoon the capital, a place of exceptional brutality and conspicuous consumption, with human offerings only the most obvious example.18 Across the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, hundreds had their heads severed at the Grand Customs ceremonies for a deceased king and the beginnings of a new reign, perhaps the crudest (and cruelest) form of turning people into things and ostentatious consumption possible. The ability to kill became a mark of wealth and divinity, with the king embodying all those who preceded him.19 These ceremonies might last for up to two years. The Annual Customs ceremonies, where the king collected tribute, also entailed human sacrifice, with the beheaded victims instructed to carry messages to the ancestors but prohibited from returning as malevolent forces. Throughout, warlords attended and provided the king with tribute as well as distributed goods to those in attendance. As one observer reported, “the King takes up a bunch of cowries,” objects people believed grew on the bodies of slaves languishing at the bottom of the ocean and used as monetary currency, “and throws it over the fence among the multitude.” But then “all the Caboceers, and the Europeans if they please,” join in and “follow his example, and toss over all the goods.”20 Tyranny took hold and deepened as muskets became more available and debt tied to international commerce wheedled itself ever more deeply.
Creditors demanded repayment and threatened violence. Weapons and debt led to hundreds of thousands of enslaved people leaving through ports such as Whydah (Ouidah).
Most came from the immediately surrounding areas; only in the early years of the nineteenth century did significant numbers of slaves come from farther in the interior, such as the Nupes, and more distant still the Hausas in what is today northern Nigeria. Those killed or enslaved and forced into ships were not foreigners. Ajas, who lived in the area near the Mono River very close to the capital and spoke a language essentially the same as the Fons of Dahomey, suffered tremendously. Those taken in conflicts with nearby coastal polities provided many thousands of slaves from the area just north of Porto Novo as well as Allada, Savi, Jakin, and Ouidah itself.
As the brutality continued, several areas became virtually depopulated. In 1741 as weapons imports were beginning to take off, the Dahoman tyrant Tegbesu (r. 1740–1774) exterminated the people of Jakin on the coast, just sixty miles from the capital. As late as 1862 on the eve of European colonial conquest, Dahoman predations were taking place just a hundred miles from Abomey: “Upwards of one thousand people were slain and beheaded, and their corpses thrown into heaps.” Soldiers took “about four thousand prisoners [slaves] with them.”21 Year after year, indebted kings resorted to ever more desperate measures.
Tegbesu sold his people to escape what he owed coastal traders, as did the deeply indebted Ghezo (r. 1818–1858), who was busily trying to establish palm oil plantations using slave labor.
22 In these contexts, capriciousness was less evidence of power, let alone authority, than it was a signifier of weakness. No one could escape what they owed others, whether in this world or the next. * West of Dahomey lay the fabled Gold Coast. In the late fifteenth century as the Portuguese sought the luminous metal that made Africa famous, they built a fort hugging the Atlantic Ocean, naming it Elmina, meaning “the mine.” Other European traders followed. The source of the gold that the Portuguese Crown melted and turned into money, however, was not to be found along the coast. It resided in the interior in what would become the Asante kingdom in the early eighteenth century, with its capital, Kumasi, some 125 miles inland. The word “Asante” comes from the local language, Twi, and means “war.” Europe so desired gold that in the 1600s it helped supply the area with slaves who were put to work mining. Keeping enslaved peoples on the African continent would change in the next century, however, with the explosion of plantation agriculture in the Americas and its unstoppable appetite for labor.
Exporting slaves across the ocean proved more profitable for Europeans. Slavers forced three-quarters of a million people into the Atlantic from this area, most between 1750 and the end of the century.
The Asantes would play an important role in the Atlantic slave trade. But the kingdom’s rulers, the Asantehene, continually struggled to control the warlords proliferating along the coast and within its borders. With their access to weapons and trade goods, these rogue warriors easily contested royal pretensions. Like Oyo, the Asante kingdom expanded in various directions, by the 1740s emerging as an empire as it conquered polities such as the newly formed kingdom of Gyaman to the north. Slaves came from as far away as the headwaters of the Volta River in what is today Burkina Faso as well as from nearby polities to the east. Some of the newly enslaved thus traveled perilous distances, brought to the coast along routes that entailed multiple points of sale, so that people might be exchanged four or five times before reaching a trading fort, assuming they did not die along the way.
Asante warriors regularly preyed on peoples living close to the coast, although it took more than a half century before the empire extended effective control over these areas. Many, perhaps most, enslaved people came from close by. Wars frequently erupted among the small coastal polities, such as between Akwamu and Akim, the latter subsequently attacked by the Asante kingdom. However politically fragmented the region, most people shared cultural similarities. More ominously, both slaver and enslaved knew about the Atlantic trade, that selling someone meant sending them to the Land of the Dead.
The more than a dozen European trading posts along the coast created a perfect environment for warlordism. Well-armed militias, large slaveholdings and agricultural estates, and control of the overseas trade gave these powerful men access to luxuries, ranging from fine linens to Danish schnapps, as they pioneered the Africanization of the militarycommercial revolution. With their own armies working closely with international businessmen, they largely controlled local politics so long as they controlled the literal gates through which people, guns, and other goods moved. They would also “advance . . . goods to the inland merchants” so that many people fell into their debt.23 Warlords regularly preyed on coastal peoples, in some areas resulting in significant depopulation, the proverbial “eating the country” that left tens of thousands in coffles heading to the Americas.24 In the second half of the eighteenth century the slave trade had become “a necessary evil.” People lived in a state of near-constant violence and fear. Kidnapping became pervasive, and banditry was widespread. The Akwamus, near the slave port Accra, “sometimes seized their own countrymen and [even] some from their own city.”25 People feared going outside their homes. One might be stolen while shopping at the market. “The solitary traveller was no longer safe,” wrote the great intellectual John Mensah Sarbah, who hailed from a politically powerful merchant family. “The hunter who had wandered too far from his home in pursuit of game, the farmer on his secluded farm, women going to market or to the spring, were ruthlessly captured and sold into foreign slavery.”26 Panyarring was widespread along the coast and was increasingly pervasive farther in the interior, where by 1883 it “flourished” inside the Asante kingdom, which, like the Oyo kingdom a few decades earlier, had by now largely collapsed into civil war and disorder.
27 In 1775, a European on the coast described the relationship of panyarring to the explosion of credit and debt. Europeans made “a practice of trusting & selling the Blacks goods,” he wrote, in other words of extending credit, “and in case of not receiving payment, makes no scruple of panyarring.”28 In a world “where every Body comes for what they can get,” everyday life became extraordinarily vulnerable. People who “become insolvent” ended up “publickly exposed to Sale for the Use of their Creditors.”29 Sarbah bemoaned how the “slave trade stirred up the cupidity and all the degrading passions of men.” To mitigate insecurity, “it became highly expedient for every person to be under the protection of a powerful neighbor,”30 someone with guns, in short a warlord. Protection was transactional; very often, the costs meant enslaving others.
Those “others” even included family members, for while the family offers protection and sustenance, it also nurtures jealousy and hatred. In the context of widespread enslavement, crushing indebtedness, and militarization, the trust and protection ordinarily associated with the bonds of kinship weakened. With that weakening came the deepening fear that someone near might be deploying occult powers to cause harm. The result was an explosion of witchcraft accusations throughout the region, together with a massive growth in people seeking ritual and symbolic protection with the help of a “vast assemblage of objects” that Europeans described as “fetishes.” “The inhabitants of Cape-Coast town congratulate themselves that they enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes,” wrote one visitor in the late 1830s. “Every town has a fetish-house or temple, often more, built of mud or swish, in a square or oblong form. . . . In these temples several images are generally placed.” At the Cape Coast castle, from which hundreds of thousands of enslaved people left in chains for the Americas, a being was supposed to emerge at night and move through the town to “chase away the evil spirits,” a modicum of protection to keep enslavement at bay. One wonders if that protective being ever succeeded.31 FIGURE 4.2. William, son of John Corrantee. William Ansah Sessarakoo (b. ca. 1730, d. 1770), by John Faber Jr., mid-eighteenth century (after Gabriel Mathias, 1749). Being the son of a warlord did not prevent him from being enslaved. Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery.
Woven through all this organized brutality was greed, the ceaseless human hunger for acquisition. Most everyone was consuming and desiring more, just as people were doing in other parts of the world, especially the West.
The growing ostentatiousness of the elite spoke to accumulation and the display of power and also alluded to the precariousness of the world that wealth from guns had made possible, a landscape overpopulated with ritual objects as more and more humans were being emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. In this world, even the most powerful sought ritual protection. They knew that they had made a pact from which they could not escape and that others wished them harm.
*
The sound beats its way down the streets of Duke Town, disappearing across the sluggish waters of the Niger Delta where bloated bodies slowly make their way to the ocean. A warlord has died. Two people will soon be sacrificed.
They call for [the] devil; Devil go on cruise today . . .
You hear [the] drum? They be killed now.
32 The region around Duke Town, which had become a kind of city-state along the Cross River, named after a famous warlord, did not have kingdoms like Oyo, Dahomey, and Asante. Here was a world of riverine villages and small towns, of thick forests, mangrove swamps, rivers, and estuaries. Today, millions of barrels of crude oil pass daily through the region on their way to Europe and Asia. But a different resource flowed in the century after 1750: more than 1.1 million enslaved bodies, whose labors and energies powered the American plantation complex. The slave trade completely transformed what had been small village- and kin-based societies that had lived by fishing, making salt, and trading for yams grown inland.
With the rise of Atlantic commerce in the seventeenth century, Duke Town “houses,” traditionally including an extended family and occasional dependents, developed a more corporate and competitive character. As trade increased and weapons flooded into the area, these “canoe houses” became more hierarchical, more diverse, and heavily armed.
Locals living in Duke Town during these years would have seen European slave ships beating against the prevailing southeasterly trade winds to make their way upriver. Fifteen vessels might lie at anchor outside the town, up a few miles from the mouth of the Calabar River. To Europeans, the place was fetid, impenetrable, and deeply unhealthy, with disease abounding and dead bodies bumping their ships’ hulls. Drums and other instruments sounded through the trees, but the American demand for slaves outweighed any discomfort European newcomers might have experienced, whether real or imagined. They could see slaves moving in canoes large enough to hold one hundred people but knew little about what was unfolding just a few miles from shore.
The warlords wanted it that way. Controlling trade was central to not just their material wealth but also their magic and power; the two arenas had become indistinguishable. To some European merchants, the “dashes” warlords received from the foreigners when they boarded the visiting vessels might seem like presents and gifts to lubricate trade (or, to the cynical, little more than extortion). But these were often highly ritualized encounters, particularly for European agents first arriving to the area or on occasions when trade coincided with the death of an old warlord or the rise of a new one.
Duke Town leaders lived in larger buildings “surrounded with warehouses containing European goods designed for the purchase of slaves” and for conspicuous consumption, according to Alexander Falconbridge, a ship’s surgeon and later the governor of Sierra Leone.33 This was an intensely competitive environment, at times erupting in protracted killing—as in the 1767 Massacre of Old Calabar in which a conspiracy of British traders and warlords left some three hundred people dead. (That year, more than one million pounds of British powder entered West Africa.) Chains of credit and debt moved ashore, facilitating the exchange of European trade goods for humans and agricultural commodities, especially yams to feed slaves, many sick and most malnourished, on the voyage west. Ship captains received pawns as collateral for loans, a pattern that became ubiquitous. Canoes moved upstream with merchandise, “a considerable quantity . . . on credit,” returning a week or so later with their human cargo.34 What Europeans didn’t understand was that some of the men who boarded their vessels and lived surrounded by trade goods were ritual specialists.
They had formed commercial-ritual associations to control credit, debt, and commerce, referring to these associations as the Ekpe, which spread across southern Nigeria and Cameroon and finally reached the Americas. The term ekpe means “leopard,” an animal people associated with power, cunning, secrecy, and most of all violence. The leopard destroys and consumes, often in secret, preying at night and “disappearing” the vulnerable, quite literally eating them up. Ekpe also means “oppressor” from the Ibibio verb fik, to “oppress or suppress.”35 FIGURE 4.3. Duke Town, with Old Calabar, 1850. From the Illustrated London News, June 1850.
To be an Ekpe member meant being a big man, a warlord among warlords: wealthy, influential, able to control trade, adept at amassing dependents and doling out desired goods, including guns and gunpowder. Because entering Ekpe required substantial payments, much of it consisting of goods derived from European trade, the association was intimately tied to the Atlantic slave trade even though its practices grew out of a rich and ancient cultural history across the greater region. As an association of “leopards,” Ekpe offered both a ritual and an institutional route to success. The association had police and judicial powers as well as a governing council that helped enforce trade agreements and reduce the possibility of fratricidal violence breaking out into open war. In short, Ekpe amounted to a mafia-like government, organized almost entirely around maintaining an immoral economy.
The emergence and spread of Ekpe spoke to more than just economic concerns as the slave trade dramatically increased from the second half of the eighteenth century. The development of this association across parts of what is today Nigeria also spoke to heightened competition, mistrust, suspicion, insecurity, and ever-present violence.36 Epke also touched on the moral uneasiness of profiting from a world where humans were not just sold but also condemned to serve strange foreigners, pale men in their ships that came from beneath the ocean. Disquiet was also in the mix, one could argue, since warlords too might be enslaved. And where insecurity was rife, magic flourished. Warlords sought ritual protection from their victims who, they knew, were using powerful magic against them for destroying their lives and the lives of others.
In Duke Town and surrounding environs, intense competition and “mutual jealousy” among the warlords created a situation that hovered “between peace and war.” In an area about the size of Connecticut or Yorkshire, people had more weapons than perhaps any place else on the continent. Trade invariably included guns and kegs of powder, along with metals, cloth, alcohol, and other items. One 1769–1770 sale for fifty slaves included thirty-six guns and eighty-eight kegs of gunpowder, enough charge for hundreds of thousands of musket shots.37 Explosions were not uncommon.
Despite ritual associations to help govern the trade of people, warlords murdered one another with abandon. Competition and conflict continued into the nineteenth century, at times involving the enslavement of prominent Ekpe society men who, along with others, brought Ekpe traditions all the way to Cuba, where it still exists today. By this time life had become precarious across West Africa, creating a world “of instability rarely witnessed.”38 Selling people into slavery became a convenient way of liquating debt. False accusations of theft and adultery condemned others to slavery. Kidnapping grew more common. By the end of the nineteenth century, the “moral economy of the region all but broke down,”39 or, rather, a new and profoundly immoral economy had triumphed.
One famous warlord and Ekpe leader was Antera Duke, the namesake for Duke Town. Duke was also known as the “King of Warr” for his success in subduing competitors, a man of “daring countenance” but also “with some appearance of malignity.” He was known to “catch men” whenever he needed. Like other warlords, Duke armed his canoes with European weapons, heading up rivers, attacking villages, and “taking hold of everyone they could see.” These “war canoes” might be equipped with more than half a dozen swivel guns, each upwards of four feet long; by the early 1830s, canoes regularly had large guns permanently mounted on the bow.
40 People lived in absolute fear of warlords such as Duke. Not only those living upriver who might be killed or captured or a nearby competitor but even their own townspeople feared the warlords. Warlord-governed environments such as Duke Town managed to both attract residents and render them perpetually anxious and threatened, daily reminded of their vulnerability: vast numbers of slaves marched through these coastal towns on their way to the Americas. The towns were saturnalian sites of consumption, destruction, and violence, saturated in alcohol, cloth, and other goods and, for the most powerful, human sacrifice. The towns were densely populated with slaves, many regularly killed in a “profuse slaughter of human victims.”41 “Eja” war medicine required the body parts of a virgin slave, in other words murder and dismemberment. The deaths of warlords entailed especially large slave sacrifices, which continued well into the nineteenth century.
42 Such were the ritual convulsions and convulsive rituals of an economy made possible by guns and finance and upon which the industrializing West rose to global dominance, a kind of social cannibalism where the powerful disposed of their own and in a world where complex cultural practices required an ever-increasing dispersal and destruction of goods, including people. Throughout the Niger Delta and into the interior, indeed across much of the world in the latter half of the eighteenth century, ritual institutions helped solidify the power of warlords even as the weak sought their own magic to secure protection or seek revenge.
FIGURE 4.4. King Duke of Duke Town, Old Calabar, West Africa, ca. 1890. Private Collection, Michael Graham-Stewart/Bridgeman Images. The king was a successor of Antera Duke as ruler of Calabar and possibly a relative.
A bit farther in the Nigerian interior, Aro (an Igbo subgroup) merchants expanded trade and brought punishing credit and debt relations to large areas of southeastern Nigeria. They turned what had been a mostly peaceful trade diaspora into an organized system of militarized predation. At first, the Aros brought European goods such as cloth, weapons, and gunpowder into the interior, which they exchanged for slaves destined for the coast. Accepting Aros into one’s community entailed complex arrangements, including marriage, land allocation, and gift exchanges. In return, villagers gained access to new goods, ritual sources, and, with the rise of the slave trade, a convenient way of getting rid of local people convicted of serious crimes or otherwise deemed unwanted. Each Aro community was tied to oracles and related institutions in Arochukwu, located about sixty miles inland from Old Calabar. Ibini Ukpabi, the “Long Juju,” was the most powerful oracle, a deity seen as being capable of offering protection, settling disputes, and condemning people to enslavement or death.
Communities that comprised the Aro diaspora would create their own shrines and perform rituals to maintain their connections to the Long Juju, which people would come to fear. In these ways, the oracle and other rituals helped provide Aro traders with mobility in a world of deepening insecurity, helping regulate commerce and competition.
Initially, the Aros seemed “averse to martial activities” and committed to nonviolent trade,43 helping spread European goods across the region, just as trade historically across much of the continent had unfolded peaceably. This changed with the flood of weapons and commercial growth. From the second half of the eighteenth century, the Aros grew increasingly militarized, operating as “ruthless” armed bands engaged in predation and as debt collectors demanding payment in human beings. With entire communities held responsible for debts even if the debtor was deceased, collecting payment invariably spread violence and misfortune far beyond the initial debt a single person might have incurred.
As a result, slaves increasingly came from the exact areas where Aro networks were densest. Aro settlements hardened into camps of warlords who traveled heavily armed.
Dreaded Abam and other warriors functioned as Aro surrogates, providing a steady supply of slaves. Raiding villages and kidnapping—banditry—were two principal ways of generating slaves. Sale into slavery from within clans, including the sale of relatives to liquidate debts, became increasingly common (as did sale as punishment). From numerous villages and towns, Aros demanded tribute paid in human beings.
They extorted communities into accepting them and their trade goods and, with these items, the expansion of debt. Those who declined their offer risked being destroyed. An area near the Imo River, which begins near the town of Owerri about seventy-five miles inland and empties near Bonny Island, was nearly wiped out by Aro raiders. It came to be known as “the land of blood.”44 *
People described Benguela, in what is today Angola and more than a thousand miles from Nigeria, as a human abattoir.
45 Other areas were even worse. Bodies were everywhere. Along the beaches that looked west across the Atlantic, slaves languished in pens as they awaited ships that would bring them to the Americas, most sick and malnourished and many dying beneath temperatures that might reach into the 90s (32°C).
From the 1740s, more than 3.58 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade from West-Central African ports such as Luanda, Benguela, and Cabinda.
There were the deaths and violence associated with enslavement itself as people used guns to hunt others. There were also the high mortality rates of up to 50 percent from the point of capture to the boarding of slave ships.
Trails leading to the coast were strewn with the bodies of slaves who succumbed to disease or lack of food. And despite the shorter voyage from Africa to Brazil, where the vast majority of West-Central Africans sent to that location wound up on sugar plantations or in the gold mines of Minas Gerais, enslaved people perished aboard ships in unusually large numbers even in comparison to the ghastly standards of the time.
In this part of the continent, a rich history of African-European contact reached back to the early sixteenth century, the dawn of Western overseas expansion, long before the rise of plantation slavery in the Americas and a world awash in guns. The Portuguese established an embassy in the Kingdom of Kongo, with some members of the Kongo aristocracy traveling to Europe for religious training. The Portuguese and later the Brazilians had a permanent presence all along the coast and into the interior. Portuguese control may never have been particularly firm, but by the early eighteenth century Portugal maintained (however precariously) a fortress at Caconda some 111 miles (180 kilometers) in the interior from Benguela, a nefarious achievement and something not seen anywhere else in West Africa until the beginning of the colonial era.
West-Central Africa saw many variations of the warlord. What united these versions was a commitment to violence as a mode of economic accumulation. African rulers (sobas) used violence and enslavement to pursue personal gain. Portuguese officials did much the same, along with European merchants. Portuguese convicts (degredados) exiled to Africa moved into the interior, sowing violence and seeking economic fortune.
Various members of the Luso-African community played a vital role in Atlantic commerce, including a motley crew of iterant traders (pombeiros from Kikongo, their name referring to the important commercial hub around Malebo Pool on the Congo River). These traders captured people and set up their own tribunals to punish debtors with enslavement. At other times, however, they found themselves enslaved.
Neither Portugal nor Brazil had much of an arms industry, although a few outposts in its far-flung empire manufactured a small number of weapons.
The late seventeenth-century gold revolution in Brazil, however, helped bankroll an extensive system of credit. Brazilian gold (and diamonds) traveled to Portugal and then to other parts of Europe, especially England.
The American windfall helped relieve a deeply indebted Portugal and also led to massive numbers of weapons entering the Luso-Brazilian Atlantic, enough to alarm the Lisbon government. An attempt to ban their importation into Angola failed miserably. Demand remained high, and smuggling was ubiquitous. In the 1760s when the Galtons and others were busily manufacturing their “Angola muskets,” a single slave ship might bring eight thousand or more weapons to port. The flow of weapons closely tracked their availability.
More weapons entered this region of Africa than any other part of the continent, perhaps any other place on Earth, ultimately connecting it to an industrializing Europe. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, huge numbers of surplus weapons went to Brazil and then from there to Africa. Slave exports reached a high, nearly 800,000 people between 1801 and 1825, while millions of pounds of powder and thousands of guns headed to West-Central Africa. In 1865, Great Britain exported 413,580 pounds of gunpowder and 5,360 muskets directly to the region; another 1.4 million pounds went to Brazil.
Brazilian gold may have helped assuage Portugal’s creditors, but in Africa weapons invariably spread debt. As the eighteenth century rolled on, everyone seemed in debt to someone else, if only to secure access to weapons. People may have abhorred debt and the vulnerabilities that came with the financialization and militarization of life, but they could scarcely escape it. Default came with dire consequences.
Especially from the mid-eighteenth century onward, the deluge of guns and the indebtedness that weapons and other goods produced set in motion a long-term and extraordinarily rapid inflation in the relationship between things and the human connections these goods were intended to create and sustain. Possessions grew increasingly less meaningful, even as they remained an important social glue. They also had short lives.
Alcohol disappeared. Cloth wore out. Guns broke, and gunpowder was expended. But wants turned into needs and needs became necessities, rendering debt a permanent new reality in the lives of countless people.
Everyone bemoaned this situation. In material terms, the higher prices for slaves led to more trade goods flooding the region. It took more goods or valuables to purchase a slave and to create a relationship. Inflation and the short lives of goods quickened the vortex of credit and violence. Europeans complained about the prices they had to pay for people. They had their own struggles with debt to worry about, but then so did just about everyone else.
The commercial-military revolution created and sustained a slaving frontier that pressed into the African interior and intensified in regions near the coast. The Lunda state, for example, expanded rapidly from a core area around the upper Kasai River right in the center of the continent and nearly a thousand miles from the coast. The Lunda military conquered communities to the west toward the Atlantic coast and eastward in response to the rising East African trades in ivory and slaves. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Lunda state had become a loosely assembled, remarkably unstable empire with a presence stretching from the shores of East Africa’s lakes to the Kwango River in the west. The Lunda king, the mwaant yaav, directed extensive slave raiding east of the river, as did other Lunda political leaders. Together, they brought the greater region into a long reign of warlords, exacting tribute from opponents and underlings in the form of enslaved people, organizing shipments, and extending credit and debt relations farther into communities.
At the same time, weapons made it possible to revolt, to break away from central authority.
Warlord kingdoms thus rose and fell in quick succession.
Well into the nineteenth century, political fragmentation, protracted violence, and enslavement spread across vast areas of the interior. People fled fertile if poorly protected farmlands to areas where they might better save themselves; as a result, their reliance on cassava, a starchy food imported from the Americas, increased. Nutrition declined, and for many, health worsened. The collapse of the Lunda Empire from the 1850s continued earlier patterns of violence and trade instead of bringing them to an end, with extraordinarily high levels of violence persisting well into the early 1900s.
A significant portion of slaves—likely a majority—came from much closer to the coast.46 Death was ever-present. The Portuguese Crown and settlers caused much of this misfortune and tumult. Several African polities became dependencies, their rulers receiving merchandise on credit and required to produce slaves as tribute owed to the Portuguese Crown as the “Royal Fifth.” Tribute was one way to extricate wealth. Taxation was another.
The colonial state’s attempt to extend control generally led to a “consolidation of violence.”47 In 1761, the Portuguese army attacked the region east of Ambaca: upwards of 11,000 died and 4,000 were enslaved, a ratio of 2.75 people killed to produce a single slave; many of these individuals had been seeking safety from Lunda aggressions.48 Portuguese control was usually weak and always uneven, more disruptive than hegemonic. Officials tried installing cooperative African rulers, and Portuguese ecclesiastical authorities prosecuted the Portuguese Inquisition in vain attempts to stamp out idolatry, witchcraft, and especially the blending of African and Christian beliefs and practices. Their efforts were inconsequential at best. Portuguese officials were as much warlords as those they purported to civilize. Most did whatever they wanted while trying to avoid annoying Lisbon, and even dutiful bureaucrats could scarcely restrain their underlings. The governor, based in Luanda, divided up tribute to Portuguese heavies, often members of the military with their ready access to guns. These powerful men were “not content with what was the settled revenue of slaves,” observed the late seventeenth-century explorer and merchant Jean Barbot, “but often take more; which makes the natives bear them a mortal hatred.”49 Private Portuguese and Luso-African warlords accompanied by armed men established small fortified towns in the interior, often along rivers or other strategic locations, from which they conducted trade and organized attacks on African communities. The thick presence of the Portuguese meant, according to one historian, that they were “directly involved in raids, warfare, and other processes of capture.”50 Banditry became so widespread that Africans from the central plateau who came to the coast to trade might be “massacred,” the survivors put “in irons” and exported.51 In this growing storm of violence, enslavement, and depopulation, local rulers struggled to maintain some autonomy, often because they wanted to profit from slavery themselves. Some rebelled; still others fled inland. Most embraced violence, often working with Portuguese soldiers to attack rivals or neighboring communities. Many of those directly dependent on the Crown or on Portuguese merchant warriors found it impossible to escape punishing debt. When they had not paid sufficient tribute, they were attacked, and their people were enslaved. Others turned to warlordism, becoming heads of “mercantile regimes.”52 Part of their revenues might stem from taxing slave traders moving through their territories, but typically these local rulers hunted people as well.
FIGURE 4.5. Mangaaka power figure (Nkisi N’Kondi). Kongo, second half of nineteenth century.
Metropolitan Art Museum, New York, 2008.30.
In this atmosphere greed triumphed, and the pettiest of offenses could result in enslavement.
Desperation also held sway. Most sought ritual protection, at times by adopting Christianity and often through enormously creative spiritual innovation. People carved nkisi nkondi that connected one to the dead and, by driving into the sculpture iron nails obtained in the Atlantic trade, dispatched hidden forces to vanquish those who harmed.
In this emerging modern world, “internecine strife” also dominated.53 Domestic slaves and family members might be sold to redeem debt or to obtain credit. In order “to settle these [debts] they [Africans] give away their sons and nieces as slaves.” People who could not pay their debts might be brought to an official, “where a certificate of enslavement is produced” and the unfortunate persons were “immediately branded as slaves.”54 The “taking of Pawns” became pervasive, a simple way to pay a debt or to secure credit for goods. In a world of scarce capital yet extensive credit and debt, human bodies served as one of the few available sources of collateral.
“People will pawn their slaves, children, and other relations, to procure goods—some of the great men, will, perhaps, in a fit of passion, order some of their friends to be sold,” testified a British navy man and abolitionist.
“Pawns are always considered slaves [by Europeans] until redeemed.”55 When ships lying at anchor needed more slaves, desperate people resorted to raiding or kidnapping those who lived near the port, “catching in the bush.”56 The enslavement of coastal peoples became pervasive. Kidnapping abounded. The result was a kind of persistent low-level banditry fed by weapons and the voracious demand for more slaves. Greed and debt and guns and finance created the Mortecene: they produced moral debasement, eroding earlier mores that had governed social relations, however imperfectly. Even mixed-race traders might find themselves enslaved. In a world riven by guns and debt, “unscrupulous people found many ways to enslave members of their own kin.”57 And in many ways, the havoc wreaked by this continental holocaust was just beginning. 5 Amerikani SEVEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY from Angola and largely—though not entirely —unaware of the horrors unfolding across the continent, workers in a small Connecticut town labored in a factory with a red brick smokestack and beneath a trail of black smog heading to the Atlantic. From their machines emerged manufactured combs, umbrellas and cutlery handles, toothpicks, billiard balls, false teeth, pistol handles, and especially piano keys. The state’s ties to Africa tightened steadily in the nineteenth century, as also occurred in other areas of New England. Mill workers, using the raw cotton picked by southern slaves, spun thousands of yards of cheap cloth, what in Africa came to be known as “Amerikani.” Connecticut was also famous for making guns, and parts of both western Massachusetts and Connecticut in the heartland of America’s industrial revolution were known as “Gun Alley.” Some now-famous companies—Colt, Winchester, and Smith & Wesson—started here, legendary manufacturers whose guns “opened” the American West. The US military purchased many of their products.
Millions of others were sold around the world, including in Africa, where they played their part in the globalization of violence.1 The town in which these workers labored would name itself Ivoryton after its African product. Early Connecticut industrialists had pioneered ways of working ivory as well as what to do with the scraps. Circular saws cut the tusks into four-inch drums, from which workers then created blocks and veneers that they bleached in hydrogen peroxide and set out to dry and whiten, creating maximum uniformity.
Ivory manufacturing took off from about the 1830s after New England’s participation in the slave trade drew to a close and in the middle of the country’s trading and industrial boom.
(Connecticut was the last New England state to abolish slavery, which persisted until 1848.) Large quantities of ivory headed to Ivoryton and nearby Deep River, much of it coming via Salem and New York City. During a single decade at the end of the century, Connecticut factories imported over 2.5 million pounds of ivory, culled from anywhere between 12,500 to more than 30,000 African elephants, enough to make keys for hundreds of thousands of Steinway grand pianos, knife and umbrella handles, combs, and false teeth.2 In a matter of decades, hundreds of thousands of elephants would be killed in one of the greatest destruction of animals in human history. At the same time, millions of people in East Africa were being enslaved: hundreds of thousands in the Sudan; 750,000 sent to the islands of Pemba, Zanzibar, and the coast; 300,000 shipped to the Americas between 1801 and 1850; and upwards of 2.1 million scattered across the western Indian Ocean region in just six decades in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
3 While the total numbers were less than West and West-Central Africa, the intensity of violence and enslavement in East Africa was unprecedented. Hunting people and elephants was inseparably connected in the violence sweeping a continent, a fact the Connecticut workers were only dimly aware of.
Ivoryton produced many tens of thousands of piano keys if not more, each as white and silken as the next. Demand still outstripped supply; nineteenthcentury Americans had developed an insatiable appetite for pianos. They weren’t the only ones. Middle- and upper-class European households often had or aspired to have a piano in the home, either an upright or preferably a grand piano if the house was large enough. By the outbreak of World War I, the United States was still importing upwards of two hundred tons of ivory each year for the sole use of making piano keys. African ivory—basically an oversized tooth—became a part of the everyday lives of millions of people, both ubiquitous and desired. Ironically given its violent origins, ivory symbolized purity and whiteness as well as cleanliness. Ivory Soap —“99 and 44/100% pure,” or so the advertisement went—entered the American market in 1879 along with indoor plumbing; it became the most widely consumed soap in US history.
*
Elephants once inhabited most of the African continent, and over the millennia they have profoundly affected the environment. Humans and their hominid forebearers walked along paths and roads the great animals created. Elephants consume two hundred to six hundred pounds of vegetation daily, including trees; the great savannas of East Africa have been shaped by their labors over the past 1.5 million years. The elephants’ work, in turn, helped provide an ideal environment for cattle keeping by humans, a central feature of the greater region’s history. The depopulation of these giant animals at the hands of men with guns has led to the new growth of trees and bushes and, across large parts of Africa, the expansion of tsetse flies that transmit sleeping sickness. In the late nineteenth century, that disease devastated human and livestock populations, killing millions of people.4 The relationship between humans and elephants is ancient. Africans connected the animals to ideas of political authority. And long before the rise of evolutionary biology, people recognized elephants’ rich cultural worlds. Like sperm whales, African elephants are matriarchal.
Females especially take care of one another, including rearing their young. If not preyed upon, communities of over one hundred individual animals can remain largely intact over many decades, which means that elephants develop powerful emotional bonds, particularly because their life expectancy can reach up to seventy years. Like sperm whales, elephants can communicate over long distances. They have “acoustic fat” in their feet, nasal cavities, and cheeks. This evolutionary blessing helps them detect vibrations traveling through the earth, with their hearing abilities extending to nearly 150 miles.5 Elephants tend to one another and offer protection when threatened. They take care of the sick, the wounded, and the dying. Mothers despair when a child is sick or dies, and they will do whatever they can to protect their offspring. In short, elephants experience what we used to think was a unique human trait: emotional suffering. When a senior clan member dies, another elephant will announce the death by stomping on the ground.
Elephants visit the bones of departed matriarchs as if they were paying homage by visiting a cemetery.
Violence and murder imperil this social world, especially when communities are robbed of their matriarchs and other elders. Abandoned and traumatized, the young suffer the elephant equivalent of PTSD. They can become inconsolably sad or, especially among males, unusually aggressive and impulsive, even psychotic. In these situations, destabilized elephants will attack other animals, such as rhinoceroses, for no reason or destroy villagers’ farms, a kind of retributive violence against the humans who hunt them. Elephants also engage in self-harm.6 It is impossible to know what an animal truly thinks, of course, or to reconstruct in detail the history of trauma within animal communities devastated by human predation. Recent developments in our understanding of elephant behavior and mammals more generally invite us to think differently of Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to understand it as a continent of untold terror and suffering by both humans and nonhuman animals. Human beings share much in common with our pachyderm relatives, including our historical narratives and, for a time, the simple fact that both elephants’ bodies and the bodies of African people had become international commodities.
* In the nineteenth century as more weapons moved into West-Central Africa, the tusks of animals joined enslaved people on ships plying the Atlantic, with herds living near ports in wooded savanna areas and along the slave trade routes disappearing first. Hunting quickly shifted north, from the grasslands and savanna-tree mosaic areas of eastern Angola into the upper Kasai River region and ultimately the forests around the equator, zones that also provided significant numbers of enslaved people. In many areas, herds were decimated and entire communities were wiped out. In other regions, the great animals left their habitual grasslands and sought the sanctuary of more forested areas. They became refugees attempting to remake their world in a new land. Humans were doing the exact same thing, many fleeing their fertile but relatively unprotected farms in valleys for mountainous, drought-prone redoubts.7 The Chokwes (or Cokwes, which means “those who fled”) were some of the most important hunters of people and animals. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, with the expansion of oceanic slave trades, Chokwes began emerging as an ethnic group out of peoples who had migrated westward in their flight from Lunda violence radiating out from its capital in the center of what is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 135 miles (217 kilometers) from the Angolan border. Chokwe communities were concentrated in the region roughly around the upper Kwango and Kwilo Rivers, a lightly wooded area with large elephant communities.
These were soon obliterated. Chokwe hunters expanded in multiple directions, pursuing increasingly depleted human and natural resources: south into the savanna, east especially into Lunda territory, and north, where they hounded animals that had sought refuge in woodlands. By the latter years of the nineteenth century, Chokwes hunted deep into the equatorial jungle, where elephants lived beneath forests of towering mahogany, ebony, and iroko.
Why did the hunted become the hunters, and how did those in flight from others become such notorious elephant killers? Access to guns made all the difference; warlord chiefs relentlessly sought control of weapons. Guns ignited and sustained Chokwe power and became a vitally important symbol of masculinity. At its height, Chokwe power nearly equaled that of the Lunda Empire, whose politics these hunters increasingly dictated; stories of their terror exceeded that of the most tyrannical king. Chokwe thus emerged as a quintessential warlord society that placed violence and predation, indeed death itself, as the dominant feature of its polity. And this affected not just elephants. Chokwe hunting of humans became legendary; in some areas death rates may have reached 90 percent.
Chokwe warlords sold slaves and, by the 1880s, were organizing large slave caravans despite the formal ending of slavery in the region. Captured people who died en route had their limbs cut loose from iron shackles. The survivors, emaciated from the march to the coast, were fattened up for sale. Some ended up laboring on coastal plantations in southern Angola. Others were forced onto ships as so-called contract laborers headed for the cocoa estates of São Tomé and Príncipe more than 150 miles (240 kilometers) in the Atlantic.8 FIGURE 5.1. Chokwe gun pipe. The gun pipe was a prestige item from a later period, and the owner would have sucked on the end of the barrel. Reproduced with permission of the Metropolitan Art Museum, New York, 1977.462.1. * Guns and violence were also moving south along the Nile River and west from Zanzibar Island on East Africa’s coast, along with thousands of bolts of Amerikani cotton cloth. Slave caravans journeyed the other way, many carrying tusks. By the middle of the nineteenth century, guns and finance, slaves and ivory, helped create a world no one could have imagined just a few decades earlier, including a profound political transformation of a vast area from the Nile Delta to Mozambique.
East Africa dominated the nineteenth-century destruction of elephants, an unfolding cataclysm that coincided with a dramatic increase in enslavement. Large quantities of ivory made their way across the Sahara or were loaded into dhows plying the Indian Ocean or into ships heading to Europe and the United States and ended up in factories such as Ivoryton’s and into the homes (and mouths, as false teeth) of the wealthy.
Weapons poured into Egypt following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815, a time when Europe suddenly found itself with a large surplus of arms. (The same would happen following the 1853–1856 Crimean War.) In the 1820s, Egypt created a vigorous if relatively shortlived arms industry, part of the country’s broader attempt to modernize in the face of rising European imperialism. The result was a thorough militarization of Egypt and, in the south, the beginning of Sudan’s nearly two centuries of turmoil and suffering.9 In the Sudan, empire-hungry Egyptians hunted humans. Under Muhammad ‘Ali (1769–1849), Egyptians made it as far south as Gondokoro, near Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and for many decades now the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. By the early 1840s, Egyptians had reached the great swamplands of the Sudan (the sudd); three decades later, an Egyptian fort stood on the borders of the Bunyoro kingdom in Uganda. By this time, the Turco-Egyptian state had long been raiding throughout the greater region. With horses and newly available guns, many tens of thousands were enslaved in annual slave hunts, also called razzia (Italian for “raid” or “robbery,” ghazwa in Arabic).
The captives of these grim hunts moved north along the infamous Forty Days Road. One of the most important early trade routes centered on Darfur, where the “principal merchandise was black slaves.” At the Darfur market, the sultan took his customary one-fifth; another fifth went to the head of the Egyptian army. Subsequent routes emerged in Kordofan, with its large market based in al-Ubayyid (El Obeid) as well as farther east in Sennar, which provided Nubian and Abyssinian slaves.10 FIGURE 5.2. Slave routes to Egypt. From Alvan S. Southworth, Four Thousand Miles of African Travel (Sampson, Low & Co., 1875). Also reproduced in the New York Herald, October 16, 1872.
Egyptians were viciously racist and considered peoples such as the Dinkas, Nubas, Shilluks, and Azandes—all non-Muslims—as racially inferior and subhuman. The violence they initiated was catastrophic. “So repeatedly has the pasha [Egypt’s ruler] waged war against this chain of [Nuba] mountains that the population has been completely drained,” wrote a contemporary observer. “These slave hunts have produced a great depopulation in the districts where they are practiced.” Mortality rates of enslaved peoples were shockingly high.
“There is not only terrible waste of life in the attempts to capture the negros, but after they are seized there is so much of ill-usage and brutality that I have been assured no less than 30 per cent perish in the first 10 days after their seizure.” Many succumbed to “starvation in the sandy wilderness.”11 Warlordism thrived in this part of Africa, particularly as Cairo loosened controls and opened the Sudan and areas to the south to whoever had the will or the way to profit from violence. Many were known as the Khartoumers, based out of militarized trading forts (zarebas) throughout the southern Sudan and into the headwaters of the Nile and Congo Rivers. In the 1850s, the infamous Zubayr Pasha Rahma Mansur (ca.
1830–1913) began a campaign of terrible violence across the Bahr al-Ghazal in southern Sudan. Like the Janjaweed (“demons on horseback”) more than a century later, Rahma used guns and horses to consolidate his power. By the 1870s, he had grown dominant enough to subjugate the kingdom of Darfur and competing warlords. Rahma later antagonized the British and their abolitionist sensibilities. Eventually exiled to the Isle of Gibraltar, he returned to Cairo and then to the Sudan; by the end of his life, he was one of the wealthiest men in the Sudan and also a prominent partner with the British Empire that had imprisoned him just years before.12 Call him a villain turned, if not hero, at the very least a collaborator.
Organized slave hunts such as Rahma’s captured the attention of Western abolitionists and added fuel to anti-Muslim prejudice. Less formal modes of enslavement also cropped up.
The wide availability of guns helped banditry spread throughout the region, here meaning “small marauding” as well as “individual kidnapping.”13 Outright predation’s close cousin—extortion— also rendered life enormously precarious across vast areas of the Sudan and into Abyssinia. Communities provided warlords with a regular supply of captives and ivory to avoid pillaging and enslavement.
We can only hazard a rough estimate of the numbers of people captured and transported north in these sweeps. In the 1820s, Muhammad Ali orchestrated slave raids into the Sudan to produce troops for his army, with at least 30,000 captured and enslaved in just two years.
There were roughly 11,000 slaves in Cairo during the 1850s (thousands had died in epidemics during the 1830s, along with other Cairo residents). At its height in the 1860s, some 25,000 to 30,000 captives entered Egypt yearly, or about 100,000 to 120,000 people over the decade. These yearly imports of enslaved persons number far more than US imports at any time in the latter’s history and bear similarities to patterns we find in the Caribbean and Brazil. Between 1800 and 1870, upwards of 500,000 slaves may have been imported into Egypt, less than a tenth of the Atlantic trade during this time but still a significant figure and considerably more than the number imported into North America over the course of nearly two centuries.14 Slaves were forced to carry elephant tusks on their terrifying journey north. Many of the large herds that roamed across the Sudan’s grasslands and woody savanna areas disappeared during these same years. Some were hunted by men on horseback using guns. Others found themselves encircled by armed men who would take turns throwing spears; the animal might use its trunk to remove them, sometimes cracking the weapons in two. Mothers furiously attempted to protect their children.15 Still others perished by falling into deep pits or by hunters ensconced in the overstory under which the animals frequently walked. More common was the use of fire during the dry season, when elephants sought access to water. Hunters would trap desperate herds in a ring of fire. “As the grass is burnt,” wrote the British military officer J. A. Meldon, “the elephant[s] rush madly in every direction, seeking escape, and many are burnt, while those who do leave the circle half-blinded and suffocated, are speared by hundreds of natives.”16 Khartoum emerged as a vital trading hub for ivory and slaves. In the 1850s, perhaps as much as one hundred tons of ivory snaked its way northward to the city, roughly at the same time as the rapidly expanding slave trade. The town transformed itself into a cosmopolitan emporium; one could acquire goods from around the world in Khartoum, especially guns and, for those who wanted one, a good English ale. Some merchant firms based here and in nearby towns received agreements from the Egyptian government for sole control over large areas. In other words, the Egyptian state subcontracted to warlords, who in turn ventured into the interior, established zarebas, and extorted and terrorized the countryside. Other Khartoum merchants employed “penniless adventurers, loaning them money at 100% interest, and requiring payment in ivory at one-half its market value.”17 A motley crew of mostly unscrupulous and unsavory people would set forth from Khartoum: acknowledged criminals, Arabs and Coptic Christians from Egypt, a few Greeks and Italians, and the occasional Englishman. “With the aid of the Khartoom merchant companies, access could be had to the remotest parts of the continent without any exorbitant outlay of money,” wrote Georg Schweinfurth, a German explorer, scientist, and collector.
18 The results were predictably devastating. Men with guns stole cattle to barter for ivory.
Other communities were plundered, their ivory and their people seized. As the hunting of humans and elephants expanded across the region, both populations declined precipitously.
Decades later, a famous anthropologist would describe one area as still having “the appearance of a routed army. . . . Some peoples have disappeared altogether as political and cultural units.”19 The “rapid diminution of the ivory in these districts,” according to Schweinfurth, “had caused the Khartoomers of late to direct their expeditions” southward, where, by the 1870s, warlords had long been attacking the Azandes (who themselves also engaged in slave raiding and elephant hunting). Elsewhere, he observed that “since not only the males, with their large and valuable tusks, but the females also with the young, are included in this wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter, it may easily be imagined how year by year the noble animal is fast being exterminated.”20 Schweinfurth traveled when the hunting of humans and elephants in the Sudan was especially rampant.21 Equatoria was a famous Egyptian province in South Sudan that the British had taken over in 1870 and, as we shall see in chapter 15, served as the stage for various imperial dramas that made front-page news across the world. Schweinfurth would have seen the province yielding a steady supply of ivory, over four hundred thousand pounds in 1878 alone, representing the deaths of thousands of animals. The trade was substantial enough to encourage continued Egyptian imperial expansion and to invite European warlords to the region. Take, for example, Emin Pasha (Eduard Schnitzer, 1840–1892), an eccentric Ottoman physician of German Jewish origin who was also an explorer, a naturalist, and opportunist, the head of Equatoria, and later an employee of the German East African Company until his murder.
Deeply involved in the ivory trade, Pasha sent thousands of tusks north to Egypt until a massive Islamic fundamentalist jihad—the 1881–1899 Mahdist Revolt—got in his way. Later in the decade, the “relief” mission to rescue Pasha from the jihadists would become a legendary moment in the official history of British imperialism. It brought renewed fame to its leader, the explorer and relentless self-promoter Henry Morgan Stanley (1841–1904), who a decade earlier had discovered an ailing David Livingstone (1813–1873) on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. That relief mission was mostly a fiasco, as were many European adventures during the Scramble for Africa. Nonetheless, what imperial conquest would accomplish, at least in the end, was a reduction in enslavement and the saving of many peoples “from immediate extinction.”22 * In his worsted suit, spectacles, and fez, the colorful Pasha (who converted to Islam) met his end at the hands of Arab slave traders based in Zanzibar, more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from his fantasy kingdom. Pasha had been traveling along one of the many trade routes snaking its way deep into the continent as vast amounts of ivory and millions of slaves moved eastward to ports along the Indian Ocean coast. The traders were unhappy with Pasha’s escapades, especially his contribution to the wave of Western criticism of the East African slave trade, even though the profit he derived from selling elephant tusks could not be cleanly separated from the enslavement of humans.
The spread of guns and the extraordinary penetration of credit and debt far into the interior conspired to create a massive increase in predation across East Africa.23 Nineteenth-century European merchants in search of ivory and other products arrived in Zanzibar to discover South Asians already well ensconced on the island. The latter bankrolled Arab caravans, charging very high levels of interest (as high as 100 percent) in return and, it seems, enjoying enormous profits from the trade in ivory as well as slaves and copal, which could be burned as incense or used in furniture varnish.
Mumbai companies employed these South Asian merchants, although later in the nineteenth century Western capital would weave itself more and more into credit networks, spreading across ten thousand miles. This was highrisk, high-yield business. Profits might be great, but collecting a debt was never guaranteed. Caravans might not return, and caravan leaders might play one merchant off another. The results of any of these scenarios could be disastrous.
These developments were tied to the Omani Empire and, most directly, to the sultan of Zanzibar, who had moved from Muscat to the island in 1832 in the period when Egypt was spreading violence in the Sudan and as the military-commercial revolution was beginning to take hold across East Africa. What was already an important, indeed ancient, commercial emporium now blossomed on the island: walking the market streets, a person could find cloth from India, Europe, and especially cheap Amerikani; Indian Ocean cowries; beads; silver Maria Theresa thalers minted in Europe; Chinese porcelain; the occasional bottle of Scotch whiskey; millions of pounds of cloves and copal; Yemeni coffee and Asian tea; vast amounts of ivory, ranging from eight thousand to thirty thousand tusks yearly; thousands of slaves; and many hundreds of thousands of guns and bullets as well as gunpowder manufactured in Europe, North America, and India.24 The flood of weapons was breathtaking. Dhows plying the western Indian Ocean from Muscat down to Dar es Salaam were so overloaded with weapons that their gunwales scarcely peered above the water.
Some ended up on the bottom of the ocean. The flow of weapons into East Africa was “immense,” wrote Colonel Charles Eun-Smith, the British consul general, from his office in Stonetown, Zanzibar, in 1888. Smith, at least, was aware of a contradiction many Europeans were slow to realize: the spread of weapons directly contradicted imperial ambitions, even if it filled the pockets of some Western businessmen. “Unless some steps are taken” to slow the weapons trade, Smith warned, “the development and pacification of this great continent will have to be carried out in the face of an enormous population . . . armed with first-class breech-loading rifles.”25 In the end, however, Europeans had the Gatling gun (invented in the 1860s and used in Africa the following decade), and Africans didn’t.
The inundation of weapons yielded a catastrophe unique in East African history. Debt and weapons sowed violence, warlordism, political crisis, and ecological disaster. Zanzibar experienced wild cycles of credit and debt, profit and bankruptcy, that spread deep into the continent. Merchants might be cheerful one day and wailing the next, perpetually anxious as they advanced large sums to the men organizing the caravans to the tune of 5,000 Maria Theresa dollars (MT) or more, enough to purchase a large slave estate. By the 1870s, a single Indian firm was advancing upwards of MT$270,000 to Arabs based deep in Tanzania’s interior, a vast sum of money at the time, and over six thousand kilograms of silver (worth about $5.7 million today).26 Traders moved inland with goods but heavily encumbered by debt. They too were anxious, zealously guarding the document recording what they owed.
The most famous, or infamous, warlord to emerge from Zanzibar, and at the time one of the most violent men on the continent if not the world, was Hamad bin Muhammad al-Murjibi, or Tippu Tip (also spelled Tipp, ca.
1837–1905), whose name may have been taken from the sounds of his private army’s guns.
Like many warlords the world over, Tip began his career by taking on debt. He headed into the interior with “goods to the value of 30,000 dollars,” the “twenty creditors [he left] behind” in Zanzibar “oscillating between fear and hope” that he would repay them.27 With access to guns, merchandise, and credit, Tip forced communities to “pay heavy tribute” in people and ivory. At times his violence was so brutal that other Arab traders looked askance at his exploits if also jealously.
Commercial trips “degenerated into a plundering expedition.”28 By 1875, Tip was creating a predatory state with a capital at Kasongo in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Along with relatives, Tip controlled much of the area. He grew rich creating a personal army, extorting slaves and ivory, managing trade and organizing caravans, extending credit and enforcing debt, appointing clients, and spreading violence as far north as the Uélé forests and south into Luba country, nearly a thousand miles away.
Trade was scarcely distinguishable from plunder, something people recognized. They invented a term that summed up the age: “trade kwa ngavu,” meaning trade by force.29 Widely reviled by the British press and in abolitionist circles, Tip became the international face of violence and the East African slave trade. His notoriety, however, didn’t undermine his influence and military power. In 1887, the Belgians promoted him to governor of the eastern Congo, where extraordinary bloodshed continued well into the twentieth century and where to this day enormous suffering continues. After Tip fell out with the Belgians, he retired comfortably to his Zanzibar estate overlooking the shimmering Indian Ocean.
Tippu Tip was the most successful and well-known warlord to ascend to power on the backs of slaves and the corpses of elephants. By the time he created his predatory state, the number of Omanis in the interior had increased nearly tenfold in the space of just a few decades.30 Warlordism now proliferated across the entire expanse of East Africa and into Central Africa. Many, though certainly not all, were Omanis, such as Jum’a b.
Sâlim al-Bakri, also known as Jum’a Merikani for the American cloth he sold. Much of these men’s success depended on controlling the flow of weapons. Complicated relations of kin and clan (most if not all seem to have been Ibadi Muslims) connected these men to Zanzibar and its ruler and ultimately to the Sultanate of Muscat and to clans in Oman’s interior. MAP 5.1. East Africa in the nineteenth century Most of these men operated largely independently of the sultan. Some, of course, were itinerant traders; most began their careers heavily in debt to coastal financiers, financial shackles from which they never escaped. Some remained in the interior if only to avoid their creditors.31 Others firmly ensconced themselves throughout the interior, reinventing themselves as local warlords with substantial and heavily armed armies. From their capitals, they launched expeditions in search of slaves and commodities, especially ivory but also copper and malachite.
Indebtedness helped drive violence, especially as elephant populations began disappearing.
Livingstone wrote about how dependents refused “to escort Mohamad Bogharib, an Omani warlord; they know him to be in debt, and fear that he may be angry” enough to enslave some of them. But then most everyone had debts to pay. Livingstone described the ostentatious displays of wealth by a warlord who was absurdly in debt to an Arab trader yet couldn’t stop trying to acquire more, the chief trailing thirty feet of desired cloth behind him to the beat of drums but only willing, or able, to offer “about a twentieth part of the value of the goods in liquidation.”32 *
Tip bragged how with guns he slaughtered people “like birds.”33 Tip and other Omanis entered new areas “with their African client wangwana [Swahili for “gentlemen”] . . .
devastating it and then incorporating what was left of the population into their own following.”34 Omanis were not the only warlords in East Africa by any stretch of the imagination. Warlordism emerged whenever Africans gained access to weapons or control over trade goods, which they could use to assemble followings. As upwards of five hundred thousand people involved in the trade passed yearly on routes heading north to Uganda and from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia to the coast, political traditions going back more than a millennium began changing in ways no one could have anticipated.
In the western half of Tanzania, the Unyamwezis emerged as an ethnic group (today one of the country’s largest) and played a critical role in the ivory trade, at first by purchasing tusks from nearby sources. As local elephant populations rapidly dwindled, they started acquiring ivory to the west, at times as far as Katanga, where they used weapons to conquer people and extract tusks. For at least a thousand years, this region had been organized loosely around chiefs, none with much power, with the economy based on rich agricultural production. The military-commercial revolution, however, saw the rise of powerful warlord chiefs, batemi, who dictated the trade in ivory and, increasingly, people.35 Nyamwezi chiefs such as Mirambo and Nyungu-ya-Mawe sought to control trade along the central caravan route between Tabora and Ujiji, extorting (via the hongo, or bribe) and plundering caravans to acquire the weapons jealously guarded by the Omanis. With goods and guns, they assembled large private armies and conquered neighboring chiefdoms by either subjecting them to tribute or killing chiefs and replacing them with clients. At the height of his power, Mirambo had an army of some ten thousand ruga-ruga warriors, young men and professional soldiers using innovative military tactics combining surprise and audacious violence.36 “King Mirambo has made Central Unyamwesi a kind of empire,” one European wrote.37 Mirambo’s predations left “deserted villages[;] . . . the people are wiped out, either killed or carried away as slaves.”38 Mirambo himself would come to be known as “Corpses.” Warlord Nyungu-ya-Mawe (“pot of stone,” meaning a warrior who cannot be broken) headed various ruga-ruga armies with fearsome names such as “Wearer of Human Teeth” and “Spitter of Blood.” Europeans referred to Nyungu as “the ferocious highwayman,” the “robber chief,” and one of the most powerful men in East Africa.39 Especially from the late 1860s, the emergence of these African warlords placed them in direct competition with the Omanis.
While the Omanis might have had the most guns, they were often at each other’s throats as demand for ivory and slaves skyrocketed. The result was a dizzying set of conflicts, for a while between Mirambo and Tip, as well as shifting alliances that often collapsed into war.
The region around Tabora became “a vast area of desolation.” Internecine conflict emerged among warlords, most in debt and all scrambling to obtain the fast-disappearing sources of ivory and people. The result? “The whole country was soon devastated,” one contemporary observer soberly noted.40 As late as 1878 Mirambo, although in the twilight of his powers, was still organizing caravans. Ultimately, however, African traders lost out to the Arabs, who possessed more guns and controlled the flow of goods and credit from the coast. African men who had once organized caravans ended up as porters carrying goods to and from the coast. They had been reduced to a working class.
East African societies with strong hunting traditions easily turned their attention to the ivory and slave trades. In Kenya, the Kambas revered hunting; it played an important part of their migration into eastern Kenya in the late eighteenth century amid ecological distress. In the nineteenth century, Kamba hunters fanned out across parts of Kenya and Tanzania; they could be found pursuing elephants near Lake Turkana and as far south as Mount Kilimanjaro, over 450 miles away. At times, so many were away hunting that Kamba villages were largely devoid of adult men.
Some Kamba hunters became warlords, pursuing elephants, organizing caravans, ruling over substantial populations, and orchestrating the exchange of ivory for cattle, slave women, and cloth and other goods. These were munda munene, big men with powerful ritual knowledge whose authority was based less on kinship than on expertise and an ability to “bewitch” elephants. Kivoi Mwenda emerged as a legendary Kamba warlord, a man of extraordinary hunting prowess and commercial savvy who brought prosperity to the Kambas, propelling them, at least for a time, to stand “among the wealthiest tribes of Eastern Africa.”41 Born in the late eighteenth century, by the 1830s Mwenda was one of the most powerful individuals in the region from east of Mount Kenya to the coast.
Kamba hunters converted ivory into cattle and wives and expanded their agropastoral society across relatively arid areas down from the Kenya Highlands. Men amassed wealth, both in goods and in people, typically slave wives. They were able to bypass once customary obligations and, in doing so, concentrate wealth and power. Prosperity was fleeting, however, and Kamba society, like many others, began showing signs of growing instability and precarity. Crisis would come to the Kambas in the final years of the century, as it did to everyone across East Africa: the rinderpest epizootic, an infectious virus that killed upwards of 90 percent of people’s cattle; drought; famine; and the violence of European conquest.
Both the Unyamwezis and the Kambas had lived in societies traditionally organized around chiefs whose power scarcely extended beyond their villages. The military-commercial revolution changed this culture profoundly. It produced powerful warlords with large retinues and the ability to conquer neighboring chiefdoms. But the reign of big men who thought they might be kings proved as ephemeral as it was violent. Many ended their lives deeply in debt, with their once considerable powers daily slipping through their fingers and their ruga-ruga warriors deserting in droves for new opportunities.
The situation was different a thousand miles into the interior, especially in kingdoms such as Buganda and Bunyoro near Lake Nyanza (also known as Lake Victoria). Here were centralized kingdoms far removed from the fractious politics of the Arab coast. By the mid-1700s, Buganda had already begun expanding south toward the Kagera River, largely to control new trade routes that had begun crossing Lakes Tanganyika and Kivu and snaking around the western shores of Lake Nyanza. The kingdom continued expanding in the nineteenth century, with rising militarism and predation adding to an extended moral crisis within the fabled kingdom. Buganda’s army attacked its neighbors and captured people; Banyoro referred to Buganda as the “land of the wild dogs.”42 By the early 1850s, the Arabs had established a presence in Buganda; increasingly, politics were shaped by events in the east as well as in the north, as the military-commercial revolution reached Lake Nyanza’s shores.
In the early 1880s, the Bugandan kabaka (king) Mutesa considered expanding southward in alliance with Arabs based in Tabora. Areas in the south emerged as a zone of violence tied to coastal demand, with “generally large armies . . . devastating whole regions of their inhabitants,” as The Times of London put it in 1889.43 A good bit of this violence was tied to the trade in slaves and ivory.
Commercial expansion typically ended with the enslavement of people for export as well as an enlargement of slavery locally, usually utilizing their labor to grow and harvest food.
Bugandan political innovations at first seemed tied to the challenge of incorporating captives into the territory; here, slavery became an avenue for state expansion, and only later were enslaved people sold into regional and international markets. Take, for instance, the eighteenth-century creation of ekitongole chiefship. Ekitongole chiefs were appointed by the kabaka and given small lands over which they ruled, in effect creating a new system of chiefly authority, one directly tied to the king and untethered from an earlier pattern that privileged clan politics. But this pattern changed in the nineteenth century as large quantities of guns and gunpowder began moving into the region. Armed ekitongole chiefs assumed more power, becoming autocratic, and instead of serving as an extension of royal power, they became warlords who weakened the central authority of the kabaka. Warlordism and political fragmentation formed part of a broader process by which Buganda became a place of exceptional violence, cruelty, and instability. By the end of the nineteenth century, ekitongole chiefs and even the kabaka Mwanga, Mutesa’s successor, had begun selling their own people.
Guns played an important part in the military innovations emerging in East Africa during this period, especially in Bunyoro where mukama (king) Kabarega (ca. 1853–1923) created an armed regiment, the barusura, a guerrilla force that included Egyptian deserters, “runaway slaves, and riotous youths from the bordering states.” This “military party became preponderant,” with the men who belonged to it seen as “unrestrained pillagers.” They were long “remembered with a great deal of bitterness by ordinary Banyoro because of their reputation for uncontrolled plundering, violence and abduction.”44 The ivory and slave trades also extended deep into southern Africa. Vast communities of elephants once lived throughout the southern region, especially the savanna and savanna-woodland areas west of Lake Malawi.
When Livingstone ventured near a marshy area in the Shire River Valley in the late 1850s, he encountered one community of roughly eight hundred animals. Nearby he saw herds of elephants “two miles long.”45 In some areas, elephants outnumbered people. Not for long, however: these communities disappeared with astonishing speed.
Tusks as well as slaves moved from a wide area between Lake Malawi to the headwaters of the Congo River on routes heading to Zanzibar. Others were conveyed southward to the Mozambique coast, where Portuguese colonists, or prazeros, turned to warlordism, using guns and trade goods to extort slaves and ivory from African communities and employing their own slaves as hunters. Warlord estates, or prazos, extended up the Zambezi River to Tete, which became a central hub in the greater region. A century earlier, a trickle of gold had made its way to Tete and down to the coast, along with slaves. Chattel continued to be an important commodity, but by the mid-nineteenth century it was ivory that largely drove the economy. As one observer put it, “What is the use of cultivating the land when one can send natives to hunt ivory?”46 This strategy worked for a while. Hunters, however, might break free from their masters. Such was the case with the Chikundas, enslaved warriors of the Portuguese who after the 1858 Portuguese abolition decree enjoyed far more mobility to pursue elephant hunting at precisely the same time that ivory prices were rising on the world market.
The Chikundas had pioneered elephant hunting in the areas around Sena and Tete not far from Portuguese prazos.
47 They were too successful at it: quickly, herds began disappearing, and by the 1850s the “ivory-trade had declined very materially” in the area.48 Chikunda hunters found themselves venturing inland up into the Shire River and toward the Luangwa River, areas then densely populated with elephants. This was dangerous, lonely work, often in heavily forested areas.
They carried guns and food and sought ritual protection from wild animals. By the 1870s or 1880s they had created a series of warlord polities in the interior, from which they traveled still farther afield, pursuing elephants and slaves. In some areas they might use pits armed with poisoned spikes or spears and guns to pursue the animals. Audaciously, some hunters would get close enough to the animal to sever its tendon. The use of guns, however, was the key factor that radically increased the deaths of elephants. “No large numbers of elephants were killed,” the explorer and later colonial administrator Sir Harry Johnston would write, “until guns were introduced, and then the steady diminution of the elephants commenced.”49 The Chikunda spreads violence across Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and northern Zimbabwe. Elephant communities were hunted down, as were human communities. By the 1860s, elephant populations in the area around the Kafue River were quickly disappearing amid spectacular violence involving the Chikundas and other groups, particularly the Ngonis, an ethnic group that emerged in southern Africa out of the convulsions unleashed by the rise of the Zulu kingdom. Amid such precarity, villagers did their best to defend themselves by acquiring weapons, stockading settlements, and forging alliances. “Whole regions,” one Western observer reported, were “devastated as if an impetuous tornado had struck,” with people “killed or sold . . . and settlements . . . burnt.”50 *
In the barbarous nineteenth century wrought by the military-commercial revolution that sustained industrial communities such as the now bucolic Ivoryton, large areas of East Africa experienced dramatic demographic declines, with estimates suggesting that the region may have been robbed of nearly “half of its potential population of 100 million.”51 The upwards of four million people enslaved and shunted to Egypt, coastal plantations, or beyond Africa’s shores entailed the deaths of another seven million to eleven million. In other words, between eleven million and fifteen million people disappeared, most within just a few decades.
It is hard to fathom the depths of this devastation. Travelers making their way through these regions described them as increasingly desolate. Locals abandoned their farms for safer areas, sometimes seeking refuge in caves, continuously afraid of those who ruled over them, many of these overlords in debt and armed with guns. The issue was not just warlordism, not just the powerful preying on the weak. The very life of the earth seemed at stake.
African traditions tied rule to protection and to the rains that brought fertility to the land. Now, it appeared, rule stemmed from avarice and naked conquest by private armies, from trade with the coast and the wealth and destruction it brought. No wonder the land seemed cursed by drought and disease.
Many sought a modicum of safety behind fortified settlements. Every “single family,” according to one eyewitness report, had a “small fortress.”52 As drums sounded the alarm of approaching attacks, people fled, leaving their animals behind. Violence severely disrupted the food supply. “Starvation exists to a terrible extent,” a European residing near Kazembe noted, “and all those able to move at all have gone off into the bush to raise native villages and thus get food.” They “are as thin as the pictures we used to see . . . of the famine in India.”53 Humans weren’t the only ones living in fear. Elephants retreated to safer areas, especially swamplands, dense forests, and other remote areas. As the century of killing wore on, elephants appeared more reticent to show themselves, more “bashful.” They knew they were being hunted. Well into the 1920s, elephants knew that roads were dangerous and best avoided.54 They had witnessed how hunters separated an animal from its community, watching as one of their kind, “overpowered by pain and loss of blood trickling from a hundred gashes, bites the dust,” as Livingstone had seen looking out across the grasslands.55 They had watched with distress as a mother came to the rescue of her child, securing the young “between her fore legs for protection.” When the hunter’s gunshots killed her, the “young one escaped with the herd,” in shock but—at least for the moment— protected by its community.
56 * The hunting of people and animals and the enormous displacements this violence produced has had enduring consequences for East Africa, indeed for the entire continent. The origins of Africa’s recurrent debt crises lay in the expanding military-commercial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is also the case today in the West due to the dependence of rulers on weapons manufactured in the West and also in Brazil, China, and Russia.
There have also been long-term natural consequences. Beyond questions of desertification and disease, however, Africa often recedes from discussions of the ecological catastrophes of our age of global warming, disasters that include both the entanglements of the West’s industrial and fossil fuel revolutions and the tragedies that befell Africa. The continent virtually vanishes from many world histories, as if its past were inconsequential to more important developments. When we do read about Africa’s ecological situation, clichés abound: we hear of the continent’s tropical exuberance, its primordial and deadly disease environment, and, above all, its poverty and suffering amid abundant natural resources that end up in our cars and computers.
The changes that unfolded across Africa’s natural environment during the military-commercial revolution, changes ultimately tied to an industrializing West, might seem subtle, but they are not inconsequential.
Travel just about anywhere south of the Sahara, and you’ll see people farming corn (maize) and cassava (manioc). Both crops originate in the Americas; they made their way to Africa in the seventeenth century, spreading rapidly along with violence and enslavement. At the time, adopting them offered advantages and expanded people’s food repertoires.
Maize has a shorter growing period than many indigenous cereals, can be eaten while still unripe, and provides large amounts of carbohydrates, while the husk helps protect kernels from birds and other pests. Cassava, especially ubiquitous across West-Central Africa, also is rich in carbohydrates. It has the additional benefit of being able to remain in the ground until needed.
But there is a darker side to this agricultural revolution that emerged in the age of warlord terror as people sought to secure food in a world of rising insecurity. Cassava is not especially nutritious, nor is maize, particularly in comparison with many indigenous food crops. If not stored properly, maize can be contaminated by aflatoxins that can cause serious illness, even death.
Cassava contains the poison cyanide; to rid the plant of the poison requires large amounts of labor, typically performed by women.
What most people did not know at the time is that both crops helped spread malaria. (The disease continues today, killing more than six hundred thousand people in 2020, the vast majority in Africa.) Imagine women working with cassava near pools of stagnant water as they struggle to provide food amid terrible violence and the tens of millions of indentations created by their footsteps, into which a single Anopheles mosquito deposits upwards of two hundred eggs. Cultivating and processing cassava expanded the malarial vector, exposing women and children, in particular, to infection and death. People produced more food even as they watched their kith and kin fall ill and perish.57 Now imagine farmers tending their maize as they looked to the horizon daily expecting the appearance of men with guns. As the plant nears maturity, its tassels begin releasing their pollen. Given its weight, much of the pollen falls nearby; a light wind might spread the pollen grains one hundred feet or more.
Some settle upon pools of water, many so small they are scarcely noticeable. Look more closely, and one can see mosquito larvae thriving on the yellow pollen. In a few days, the larvae emerge as mature insects and spread the malaria parasite to villagers, continuing the scourge.58 Africa’s Mortecene was born in an age of hunting and enslavement made possible by commerce and the massive spread of guns, likely well over 100–125 million pounds of gunpowder over the course of 150 years and more than enough to kill every single person on the continent. These weapons played an important part in the West’s industrial revolution that was beginning to alter the planet’s climate. Slavery was inextricably tied to Western prosperity and the turn to burning fossil fuels. But other profound environmental changes took place during this age as well, shifts that do not receive as much attention: those linked to population displacement and the decline of elephant herds. In the Sudan, the destruction of people and animals at the hands of Egyptian warlords and their accomplices allowed for the regrowth of bush and forests that led to a dramatic expansion of the tsetse fly. With it came the spread of sleeping sickness, caused by a parasite that destroys the central nervous system and leaves people lethargic and hallucinatory before they fall into a coma, often perishing. Tens of thousands of people died as a result, along with their livestock.59 (The recent conflict in South Sudan has been accompanied by an increase in the disease once more.) In the rest of East Africa, environmental changes were accelerated by cattle epizootics, colonial conquest, and the onset of an especially dry period and an era of climatic instability at the dawn of our age of global warming. Predation and drought rendered agricultural communities vulnerable. Famine struck parts of Kenya in the early to mid-1880s; the Kikuyu people lost more than half their population. The rinderpest epidemic that took off from 1887 proved to be especially deadly across the wider region. In some places, communities lost upwards of 95 percent of their cattle. Bush and undergrowth, traditionally kept at bay by hungry livestock and elephants, now spread in many areas, and with it came sickness. Millions died. The Mortecene in Africa was apocalyptic, with effects that continue to this day.
PART THREE PIRATES, INDIANS & GENTLEMEN WARLORDS
6 Asian Waters THE ARRANGEMENTS HAD BEEN MADE. The year was 1827, sometime between November and April during the dry season, although these rendezvouses had been going on for more than a decade. The Americans living on the Philippine islands of Palawan and Mindoro (today famous for their white sand beaches, reefs, and waters so clear you can see nearly a hundred feet down) would use one of their locally made boats to meet the US ship, “taking from them their cargoes of warlike stores.” They would move the deadly freight to beach warehouses specifically designed for weapons and explosives. Like some mysterious deepwater monster curling its tentacles around the islands, the weapons would then make their way by transport to larger markets across the archipelago, finally reaching thousands of sailing boats known as prahus. Driven by economic demand, the weapons then traveled along currents that brought warm Pacific waters into the Indian Ocean, moving with the help of winds that switched direction with the seasons. Some of these weapons might be sold.
Others would be used to attack and pillage seafaring vessels. Often, they went to capturing people.1 Centuries earlier, prahus had traversed these waters mostly unarmed. The arrival of Europeans beginning in the sixteenth century brought an end to that, at first slowly and then seemingly inexorably. The Portuguese and the Spanish helped pioneer the melding of ships with cannons powerful enough to destroy vessels and penetrate battlements. (A hundred years earlier, Ming dynasty ships had moved across the region with arms and soldiers, although these were not nearly as destructive as the guns Europe introduced.)2 From the middle of the eighteenth century and with the dawn of the militarycommercial revolution, swivel guns began arming prahus. Each boat could hold a minimum five barrels of gunpowder, and many could hold two or three times that amount, along with muskets, flints, and shot. The entire Indian Ocean world and beyond, extending well into the Pacific, was becoming a vast weapons emporium.
*
Humans hunting their own kind was not a unique occurrence. People have been capturing one another for as long as they have been able. Slavery is at least ten thousand years old and likely much older, perhaps going back to the earliest days of human violence, greed, and war more than one hundred thousand years ago.
Since the third millennium BCE, the capture and trade of people comprised an especially important feature of tributary systems. Actors lower down the proverbial rung sent slaves and other products (“tribute”) to the ruler above them, ending with the king or emperor.
Aristocrats and warlords generated tribute by engaging in violence and “a little extortion” and by exploiting “the labour of their slaves, who are numerous.” Generally, the farther one resided from the capital, the more these revenue streams might become “precarious and uncertain,” and to outsiders at times they must have appeared almost “voluntary.”3 Guns made the work of capturing people much easier as long as the intended victim didn’t have one too. Barriers to entry in the trade were few; all one really needed was a gun. Europeans played a role; after all, they were responsible for manufacturing and selling weapons globally. But across Asia, many actors were responsible for the massive spread of enslavement that, combined, was even larger than the nightmare unfolding across the Atlantic that persisted well into the era of American abolition.
We typically think of indentured laborers from South Asia transported to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America; Chinese workers brought to the western United States and Hawaii to work on railroads and pineapple farms; and the lascars who manned so many of the ships plying the Indian Ocean.
What disappears from our imagination is the transport of enslaved people from Madagascar, Sri Lanka, the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, and Indonesia to South Africa, where they labored on wine and wheat farms or were sent to Cape Town. Slavery at Africa’s southernmost tip depended on a network of enslavement unfolding across the entire expanse of the Indian Ocean, including the Asian continent itself. South African masters insisted that slavery was far milder here than in the Caribbean, indeed that slaves all but enjoyed their bondage picking grapes and harvesting wheat under the Cape’s warm sun and cool breezes. The truth was far from it.
The slave trade to South Africa increased rapidly from the second half of the eighteenth century as the Dutch East India Company exported large numbers of muskets and many tens of thousands of tons of gunpowder wheedled their way into societies in Africa and across Indonesia and India.
For a century, the Dutch had dominated the European playing field across the Indian Ocean; theirs was a seaborne empire in which they used armed ships to muscle others out of trade networks, not just the Portuguese but also Asian maritime traders, including the Chinese.
The Dutch were at the forefront of the weapons revolution. In many respects, these early capitalists pioneered the military-commercial revolution, only to have the English steal their inventions and combine weapons with heavy industry in the British rise to global dominance.
The Dutch East India Company soon had to contend with the French and in particular the aggressive British East India Company (BEIC). From the second half of the seventeenth century into the late eighteenth century, intense rivalries led to periodic wars between the Dutch, the French, and especially the English. These were as many naval conflicts among European actors as battles fought on the ground involving local polities.
And one result of European interstate rivalry was the spread of weapons and violence across Asia’s tributary regimes, an intrusion that, in the end, brought most of them tumbling down.
MAP 6.1. The Indian Ocean world The Dutch sold muskets, shot, and powder across much of the Indian Ocean, along with large quantities of American silver. Everyone wanted— and seemingly needed—a gun; cannons were also in demand. Often, these weapons went to arming various kingdoms as the Dutch and others played one group off another and sought greater control of trade. One 1753 agreement between the Dutch and Martanda Varma, the ruler of Travancore (located at the tip of the Indian subcontinent), involved 2.5 million pounds of pepper for fifteen thousand guilders’ worth of weapons, the equivalent of about 330 pounds of silver. This was the same area that provided slaves for South African farms.4 Rampant militarization continued as other Western states expanded into Asia, including the United States. Asian states and empires became more dependent on Western arms even as European powers occasionally tried to limit the spread of weapons or at least keep the best ones for themselves.
The Mughal Empire (1526–1857) had risen on gunpowder and assorted military innovations, expanding from the north to include much of India by the dawn of the eighteenth century.
The Mughals pioneered India’s gunpowder revolution, including an extensive and dynamic manufacturing sector. Rulers didn’t hesitate to appropriate various technologies, although their matchlocks were inferior to the new flintlock. Mughal rulers established workshops for producing European-style arms, sometimes employing Westerners. In the end, they imported more and more of their weapons, which meant not only that the Indian arms industry suffered but also that Mughal rulers were beholden to outsiders. Much the same happened with the Maratha Empire (also known as the Maratha Confederacy) that gained power in the eighteenth century as Mughal strength diminished, and similar trends appeared in the subcontinent’s other kingdoms.5 More portentously, neither Mughal emperors nor other rulers could control the dizzying proliferation of weapons across the subcontinent or stay ahead of the latest European weapons and tactics.6 Often, guns landed in the hands of rivals, pirates, bandits, and mercenaries, a dramatic privatization of violence. Corrupt leaders also tried to solve their indebtedness to Westerners by attacking others. The result in India was a century of political fragmentation, warlordism, and the deaths of millions.
These developments—the use of guns in indigenous state formation only to be followed by political fragmentation and dependence on Western arms and the rise of BEIC warlordism—led to a huge expansion of enslavement across much of India. A constant movement of enslaved people was under way within and beyond the subcontinent, reaching as far away as South Africa and Sumatra. Taking slaves was a widespread practice in the Mughal Empire and within the Deccan sultanates absorbed into the empire in the seventeenth century as well as in the Maratha Empire of the eighteenth century before it succumbed to the BEIC.
What prompted this widespread embrace of such a dehumanizing practice? Enslavement formed one part of conquest, a common pattern the world over and one that had been going on since the earliest states in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. But things were different now. From the second half of the eighteenth century, deeply indebted and enfeebled rulers expanded their predation to help generate the resources they needed to service their debt obligations to extortionist Westerners. Slavery wasn’t just a practice of war; it was now a financial necessity and in some areas a mode of production. Warlords thrived on the increasing incapacity of oncepowerful states and the emergence of violent frontiers. Some may have technically owed their allegiance to a king or an emperor, but with their private armies they pretty much did as they pleased, terrorizing peasants and capturing people.
Kidnapping was another mode of enslavement and was increasingly common from the middle of the eighteenth century. It had “long prevailed” across the Bengal and Madras Presidencies, a huge expanse of territory stretching nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from Bangladesh to the subcontinent’s southern tip. Snatching people has “greatly increased since the establishment of [the] English Government [BEIC],” one commentator soberly noted.7 Company officials began worrying that some areas might become depopulated as they watched riverboats filled with terrified enslaved children heading down the Hooghly River to Kolkata in Bengal and from there into the greater Indian Ocean region.8 This spectrum of enslavement shared a reliance on imported guns and, increasingly, the experience of famine that would come to accompany a warming climate.
In the Mughal Empire, many slaves were used inside the household for domestic work as well as concubinage. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, slavery did not loom as large within the Mughal military, although enslaved people did comprise an important part of the armed forces within the Deccan sultanates in south-central India and in the Maratha state in the west. Only with the hollowing out of an entire subcontinent by the BEIC does one begin seeing slaves deployed to produce export crops. In 1808, one observer noted, “the greatest part of the cultivators and labourers” in central Indian areas under BEIC control “are slaves.”9 In the south, upwards of five million slaves would end up farming rice. By midcentury, there were twice as many slaves in India than in the United States or Brazil on the eve of emancipation and perhaps many more. India may have had one of the largest—if not the largest—number of slaves globally. In fact, India still has the greatest number of slaves anywhere in the world today.
10 We are only just beginning to understand these histories, although it is clear that enslavement and trafficking took place wherever those with the means to enslave others ventured. Our own cultural prejudices, together with the American penchant for seeing the rest of the world through the lens of chattel slavery, have often blinded us from understanding the enslavement of peoples across the rest of the world. Following the formal abolition of slavery by Western governments, there was the related insidious tendency of Europeans to declare that slavery no longer existed, only to use different words to describe the exact practices.
This denial was the imperial equivalent of closing one’s eyes and ears and wishing an evil into nonexistence while bathing oneself in the virtuousness of ending slavery someplace else. Although everyone knew that slavery had become pervasive across the subcontinent, Parliament excluded India from the 1833 British Abolition Act. Ten years later, slavery was abolished in territories under the BEIC through a declaration that the peculiar institution no longer existed. Courts were prohibited from recognizing slavery, which meant that it simply “disappeared.” Not only were slaveholders never held to account, but the institution itself didn’t go away either. In fact, it continued expanding.11 This nineteenth-century British smoke and mirrors, repeated elsewhere across its empire, partly explains why a continuing history of enslavement and slavery fell out of broader global view. India was presented as being determined by its caste system, so ancient and ingrained it scarcely had a history: India and caste became synonymous. So too drought and famine were used as common descriptors, as if all three were immutable features of India, including its many calamities. In point of fact, however, India’s first modern famine—in Bengal in 1770—emerged directly out of the BEIC’s violence in the region, including the widening enslavement of human beings.
Enslavement and ecological disaster unfolded together, as they do today where global warming is connected to rising levels of human trafficking. As famine increased people’s vulnerability, some sold themselves into slavery to avoid starvation. This practice formed part of a broader process of impoverishment that included a worsening of debt peonage. (Debt bondage would be abolished only in 1976, although in fact it continues today.) The distinction between slavery and debt bondage could be and often was more seeming than real. Across the subcontinent, people’s bodies became collateral; they had nothing and owed more than they were worth. They were little more than slaves, “owned” by their creditor, who might sell them to pay taxes or to resolve his own arrears. Or they remained in debt for life, and that debt was passed on to family members after death.
India was not unique here. Slavery has an ancient history in Southeast Asia, along with debt bondage. People became slaves through a variety of entry points, from warfare, banditry, and kidnapping to the sale of oneself or other people in an attempt to resolve indebtedness or escape starvation during famines. All tributary regimes had slaving frontiers. Debt bondage was and remains pervasive. In some areas, half the population might be “trapped in debt bondage,” where extensive systems of credit often came with interest rates of 100 percent yearly.
12 Escaping bondage was more ideology than practice, more dream than reality, for oneself or the family members one had been forced to sell.13 *
Western Europe exported large amounts of weaponry to Asia, as did the United States. But the British were by far the world’s leader. In the eighteenth century, official exports totaled nearly four million pounds. In the 1800s, British exports amounted to many millions of guns and pounds of gunpowder; tens of thousands of tons of lead and shot; and many tens of millions of flints. The BEIC was also spreading weapons eastward, including from its factories based on the subcontinent, across Asia and increasingly to China. Enslavement using modern weapons widened across Burma, Thailand (Siam), and Malaysia as well as to the island archipelagos of Southeast Asia and into the Pacific. The Kingdom of Siam had sought to acquire Western weapons since the beginning of trade in the sixteenth century, part of a deeper history of acquiring military technologies across the broader region, a history that included China and extended west all the way to the Ottoman Empire. Especially in the late eighteenth century and accelerating in the 1800s, Siam began importing European weaponry. Like other Asian polities, these practices aimed to strengthen the Siamese state in the face of growing Western aggression and, more immediately, Burmese attacks led by the Konbaung dynasty. The Burmese came armed with large numbers of weapons purchased from the BEIC in exchange for lumber and other products. Burmese teak forests were soon denuded, with dramatic implications for the region’s biodiversity. In many areas, local populations of animals such as the Burmese tiger and the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses disappeared. Much the same happened in Siam.
Complicating matters was the Thai king, who insisted on controlling the flow of weapons into the region. For a time this strategy worked, especially around the capital, Bangkok. Soon, however, British and other merchants sought to weaken the kingdom, increase their profit margins, and gain a surer foothold in a region rich with teak, tin, and opium. The very structure of the Siam/Thai kingdom lent itself to an ever wider dissemination of weapons.
The king might have harbored imperial ambitions, but as in most tributary systems his control was at best tentative and, at the periphery, weak and resented. Local rulers with their pretensions to greater power and strongmen paying lip service to the capital were eager to acquire as many weapons as they could, even if it meant preying on others in the process.14 Western merchants were happy to oblige them. These traders sold weapons indiscriminately, typically under the cover of “free trade,” also taking advantage of rising criticisms of Oriental despotism. By the early nineteenth century, the entire region had begun to function as something of an arms bazaar. The Terengganu area, now part of Malaysia and at the time paying tribute to the Kingdom of Siam, emerged as a “haven for munitions smuggling,”15 according to one recent study. So also did Singapore, Penang, and Phuket.
Weapons flooded the entire Malaysian Peninsula and from there north to Thailand and south across the Strait of Malacca.
Siam (Thailand) survived the destructive force of these weapons, remaining an independent kingdom but at a cost: it lost many areas that had once paid tribute. Here too, political fragmentation, warlordism, and indebtedness to Westerners went hand in hand with enslavement. The hunting of human beings surged throughout the kingdom, continuing into the early part of the twentieth century. Particularly vulnerable were those who lived in borderlands as hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn agriculturalists. In a typical raid, the men would be slaughtered, and the women and children would be taken. In some areas, “military campaigns” were “little more than slaving raids.” Kidnapping became common; hundreds of thousands were captured. In parts of Thailand, half the population might be considered chattel. This was also the case in Burma, where as late as the 1920s upwards of 30–40 percent of the population in some areas had endured a history of enslavement. Most had been taken in the second half of the nineteenth century.
16 Westerners played their role and then some in these machinations. Many Western traders amounted to little more than extortionists and gun dealers in Siam and elsewhere; these men, a British diplomat based in China complained to Foreign Secretary Lord Russell, wanted “their fortunes in the least time possible,” eager to depart for home, dreaming of a comfortable life where they could pen their memoirs and regale others of their adventures in the Orient over a glass of Glenlivet Scotch whiskey or a vintage port.17 Quite a few didn’t make it home as fast as they had planned: some traders became warlords, establishing entrepôts, negotiating agreements with rulers, and becoming petty potentates. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Francis Light (ca. 1740–1794) ensconced himself in what is today the tony resort area of Phuket—think cabanas and expensive catamarans bobbing in azure waters—where he traded large numbers of weapons to the Siam king and then to whoever paid handsomely. Light spread mayhem across the region before moving on to become the ruler and first governor of Penang, a thug with an unsavory past now cloaking himself in the regalia of empire. As Light himself put it, he was rescuing the locals “from the cruel oppression of Siam,”18 referring to the same ruler he had earlier plied with muskets and cannons.
Nearly a century later, the British North Borneo Company laid claim to a large part of the island. The company’s local head, the frequently inebriated William Clark Cowie (1849–1910), ran guns to the Sulus in exchange for trading rights in mother-of-pearl and Borneo’s forest products.19 Cowie became “an absolute ruler . . . with rights of life and death over his subjects.” Much as Light had done, Cowie the gunrunner and warlord reinvented himself into a wealthy entrepreneur and a supposedly benevolent civilizer.
20 This was the age of men such as Light and Cowie who played vital roles in the Southeast Asian gun trade. But it was also the age of the countless others who spread weapons and violence, even if most have disappeared into obscurity. The deluge of weapons, “the free and unchecked flow of arms out of the British colonies,” led to “rampant piracy and slave trading” across the region.21 The arrival of American ships, whose captains “understood their business well” and were becoming “the greatest carriers of these contraband articles,”22 according to a British observer in the 1830s, made a bad situation worse. Human beings, one anthropologist has written, now amounted to “the most important ‘cash crop,’” and it seemed that “virtually every large trader was, simultaneously, a slave-raider or a buyer,”23 in other words, a warlord.
How far did their influence reach? Constant hunting and trading in human beings took place across much of Asia and the Indian Ocean world, from Madagascar to Kolkata and Papua New Guinea. Colonial port cities such as Bencoolen, Makassar, and Batavia all had large slave populations, with Batavia (beginning in the seventeenth century) serving as the Dutch capital of the extremely lucrative East Asian empire, a role that for a time made the Netherlands Europe’s wealthiest country. Anywhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand slaves ended up in Batavia, most brought from other islands in the greater archipelago, especially Bali and Sulawesi but also as far away as Madagascar.
24 From the 1750s, Batavia imported “several thousands” of slaves annually; most were taken in war or by kidnapping and piracy.
25 The city itself was the most important official slave market in all of maritime Southeast Asia, and at any given time perhaps as much as half the population was enslaved.26 Other cities also played key roles in the trade. The BEIC town of Bencoolen, on the coast of Sumatra, had a high demand for slaves. Its slave population came from Southeast Asia but also from Mozambique, Madagascar, and India.27 And Singapore was not to be left out of the fray: in the first half of the 1800s, in addition to being a weapons emporium, Singapore had an active market for Filipino captives, with heavily armed traders commanding “droves of slaves” through the city’s streets.28 Just about every city and town that had a thriving commercial center also had a market in human beings. Coupled with the unevenness of available research, the vastness and diversity of the Indian Ocean and Asian worlds mean that we can hazard only the crudest guess at the numbers of people enslaved there. The records are at best incomplete. Maritime trade in Asia was far less regulated than in the Atlantic; no sultan kept export records. Tribute was what they were after. There were not the large slave ships for which the Atlantic slave trade is infamous. These were faster, smaller endeavors. For centuries, “contraband” trade has been a central feature of oceanic commerce across the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific: foods, drugs, weapons, and people.
(In 2014, the black market value of trade in just the South China Sea was more than $400 billion.)29 Couple these more surreptitious trading efforts with the European penchant for making slavery disappear by declaring that it “was no longer recognized,” and you have the basis for the ongoing narrative—fictional, I hasten to add—that slavery was but a minor feature of Asian history.
Yet we do know that between 1500 and 1850, Europeans transported anywhere between 431,301 and 546,794 slaves across the Indian Ocean, the vast majority in the century and a half from 1700 to 1850; these estimates will increase with future research. We also know that European shipping represented just a tiny percentage of the total number of vessels plying the greater Indian Ocean from East Africa to New Guinea and into the western Pacific.
It is safe to say that in the period from 1750 to 1850 across India and Southeast Asia, many millions of people were enslaved at a scale that approximated—and at times may have exceeded—the worst decades of the Atlantic slave trade.
*
The capture and sale of people comprised one part of a broader and remarkable growth in trade, taking off in the 1700s and accelerating in the 1800s amid ever-increasing violence. Spices, teas, silk, and increasingly silver flowed to Europe and North America (in the case of silver, Asia had imported the metal since the sixteenth century). Weapons moved the other way, along with other Western goods. A bewildering flow of people and things moved within Asia itself and across the Pacific: Bengali cottons, Chinese porcelain and silk, sandalwood, camphor, wax, increasing amounts of opium, pearls, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, birds’ nests, horns, ivory, wild animals, and phenomenal quantities of sea cucumber, consumed by men anxious about their virility. From the shallow waters around the Celebes Islands in the middle years of the century, ships might have carried three hundred tons of this “ginseng of the sea,” the dry weight of a million or more animals.30 Europe had long desired Asian products, raw materials, and luxury goods.31 From the Spice Islands of Banda and Maluku came nutmeg, mace, and clove, the latter later outproduced by African slaves in the nineteenth century on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. From the Maldives came the cowries used in the African slave trade. From Java and Sumatra came pepper, cinnamon, tin, gold, copper, coffee, sugar, and indigo. Islands yielded ambergris, pearls, tortoiseshell, ivory, rattan, cotton, and silk as well as the saltpeter used in the manufacture of gunpowder by Europeans in Indonesia. Chinese demand for seal skins led to those animals’ decimation and near extermination in some areas. In later years, the general region provided rubber and timber, especially teak but also ebony.
This extraordinary maritime Asian emporium, so coveted by Westerners, would not have been possible apart from the spread of weapons and the dramatic expansion of enslavement. Guns allowed for simultaneous growth in commerce and violence; the two went together. Wherever a market appeared for weapons, there was also one for slaves.
Captives ended up in diverse occupations: oarsmen, soldiers, concubines, fishermen, miners, small-scale farmers, spice plantation workers, forest cutters, domestic servants, and, on Borneo, sacrificial victims. On the Dutch-controlled Banda Islands east of Sulawesi, the cultivation of nutmeg and mace that went into European cakes and cookies resembled New World slavery in the business’s brutality and permanence. Mines on the islands east of southern Sumatra similarly utilized slaves. The Sulu Sultanate, with its base on the island of Jolo in the north Celebes Sea and at its height controlling parts of Borneo and extending across the islands north to Mindanao, used slaves to help produce commodities for the China trade. Other captives might be traded for weapons and opium to communities spread across the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra, who then resold them in port cities such as Batavia and Makassar or were brought to Borneo and Malaysia.
“The Sooloos have in their families many” slaves, one Western visitor wrote. “Talking of the value of things here, and at Sooloo, they say, such a house or prow, &c. is worth so many slaves.”32 And wherever slavery and unfree labor abounded, so did environmental destruction. Sea cucumber populations collapsed in coastal waters. Bird populations plummeted. The rapid destruction of teak, camphor, and sandalwood forests led to soil erosion and declining biodiversity. These losses presaged more fundamental developments, particularly the expansion of colonial rubber, coffee and tea plantations, and, today, the extraordinary damage wrought by the expansion of palm oil production that is tied to slavery and forced labor. Deforestation in just the first decade of the 2000s may have amounted to more than 2.5 billion tons of emitted CO2 , the same as burning more than two trillion pounds of coal.33 Neither slavery nor violence nor environmental degradation was new, nor, for that matter, were guns. The Chinese had been trading them for many decades, in some areas for centuries, although they were inferior to Western makes. What was new was the emergence of more and better guns. From the mid-eighteenth century, Western guns militarized trading networks and reshaped productive systems across Southeast Asia. Arms became so conspicuous—and so important—that in some areas people went about their daily lives with three or more weapons in hand or slung across their shoulders. Everywhere, guns sowed vulnerability. In a world dominated by warlords, people sought safety by moving to more remote areas. And as we saw in African communities, here too people created art and invented rituals to protect them from the bullets that led to their subjugation or death, reciting chants that might render the new weapons harmless. On Borneo, one old cannon was a totem.
Throughout Indonesia, seafaring vessels were armed, typically mounted with swivel guns.
Bugis from the southern Celebes Islands as well as raiders setting out from the Sulu Sultanate terrorized large portions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, taking soon-to-be slaves from coastal fishing communities. Frantic people fled inland or erected defensive towers to protect themselves from the maritime raiders. Bugis and others brought many captives to Singapore and sold them to “Chinese, Indian, and Malay” customers.34 Raiding and slave trading extended from the Philippines down to Java and across eastern Sumatra, throughout coastal Borneo, and as far away as New Guinea. Interior communities were not spared from enslavement either, as was the case for the Semai and Semang peoples of the Malay Peninsula, for example, and across much of Borneo.
Kidnapping became common. “A great number of slaves are annually taken from the island to Batavia by the Dutch; they are not always prisoners taken in war, or criminals, but persons who have been kidnapped,” an employee of the BEIC noted in the 1810s.35 Where did these developments lead? Political consolidation took place in some areas, but more generally, the region saw “degeneration and fragmentation,”36 heightened competition, and pervasive violence, Asia’s descent into the age of barbarism. “There are a great number of petty states,” wrote a British observer at the time, “who are constantly at war for the purpose of making slaves, for whom they always find a ready sale on the coast.”37 The Sulu Sultanate, for instance, rose—and fell—as a “trading, raiding and slaving state,”38 according to its preeminent historian. The sultanate dominated the parts of Borneo that provided important commodities taken from the forests and coastal waters. Local warlords acquired forest goods from inland peoples in exchange for weapons, cloth, iron, and protection. These in turn became tribute paid to the sultan.
Sultanates also demanded this annual tribute in slaves. Most subcontracted their predation to warlords who acted independently and tyrannized vast areas of the archipelago. Sulu warlords traveled from New Guinea to the Philippines and Malaysia and into the Bay of Bengal. Their heavily armed prahus might have one hundred slave rowers. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, approximately two hundred ships headed out yearly, some on voyages that might last three years, here combining predatory violence and extortion with trade in an assortment of precious commodities: slaves, weapons, opium, precious metals, bird nests, and the hotly desired sea cucumber.
It is difficult to know the demographic impact of this violence. The “extraction of large numbers of inhabitants from certain areas,” one historian has argued, “cannot have been without severe demographic effects, although we grope in the dark about their magnitude.”39 People in northern Sumatra lived in constant fear of Malaysian raiders, “who carry off their children, and sell them as slaves.”40 Moving inland or erecting towers sometimes helped, as did the acquisition of weapons. Nonetheless, from the late eighteenth century to 1880, warlord violence notably depopulated parts of eastern Sumatra, coastal Mindanao, and northeast Borneo.41 * Western politicians would start complaining about the same revolution they had helped foment, declaring that the inundation of weapons was sowing chaos amid their commercial efforts and their dreams of greater political control. Over time their calls grew louder, although these cries rarely spoke to the obvious contradictions of their own making: most of the weapons came from Europe and the United States, guns were not simply a trade item that yielded profit but also drove nearly the entire commercial system they had helped create, and allies one day could become enemies the next, enemies they had armed. The West had militarized the same people that it now wanted to pacify and bring under formal imperial control. These people included the so-called pirates for which Southeast Asia had become notorious; they too fired with Western guns.
The problem, or at least one problem, was that the Scramble for Asia involved various Western powers, some not always on speaking terms but all complicit in spreading weapons. Many coveted the same territory. The British, French, and Dutch had long enjoyed a footprint in the greater region, along with a vestigial Portuguese presence at Timor. Spain, the first of the European powers in Asia, its intrusion dating back to the sixteenth century, had the Philippines or at least claimed control over some of the Philippine islands. The Americans made claims too, and in a few areas, the Germans. (Even the Ottoman Empire boasted a lengthy presence in the region, part of a broader history tied to the spread of Islam.) The British, frustrated with the Americans, virtuously claimed that Britain was committed to free trade, peace, and the rule of law, but hypocrisy was a time-honored British imperial tradition. The Americans were more interested in lucre than land; they were willing to sell weapons to whoever offered the highest price. The Dutch complained about the British, especially those in Singapore who profited from selling arms throughout the region.
The Dutch were perturbed by weapons making their way across the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra, where the Dutch were attempting to extend their control up the island toward the Sultanate of Aceh. (The British also had their sights set on Sumatra.) These were crocodile tears; after all, the Dutch had been among the first to spread arms throughout Asia. At the time the Dutch voiced their complaint, Aceh was the world’s largest producer of pepper; it also cultivated large quantities of rice for export. Slavery was rapidly expanding as well, as the sultan purchased whatever arms he could get his hands on amid looming anarchy.
Nonetheless, a consensus slowly emerged among the European powers that something had to be done to reduce the arms trade. What this agreement really meant was that the Westerners now would attempt to disarm Eastern locals to better establish colonialism and imperialism in the region. (Other areas of agreement entailed anti-Chinese and anti-Muslim prejudices.) Getting from consensus to enforceable actions took decades; weapons and violence continued flowing, unabated by diplomatic negotiations and early treaties. This state of affairs particularly irked the Dutch, who were bloodily expanding their control over Java, where at least two hundred thousand people died in just five years.
Bans in the second half of the nineteenth century had more teeth, particularly on British guns heading to Sumatra. By that time, war had broken out between the Dutch and the Sultanate of Aceh. That brutal and costly conflict would launch in the 1870s and continue for three decades as the Dutch struggled to consolidate their control over Indonesia, killing another one hundred thousand people and devastating the environment with widespread deforestation, habitat destruction, soil erosion, and chemical pollution. Even at the time, some Dutch criticized the wanton violence.
Some called it volkerenmoord, or genocide. They were not exaggerating.42
7 “Going after the Flesh” “THERE IS NOTHING MORE DETESTABLE or more cruel then the tyranny which the Spaniards use toward the Indians for the getting of pearls” in the Caribbean’s aquamarine waters.1 So wrote the missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) in A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), his famous exposé of Spanish colonialism in the Americas and a foundational text in the history of humanitarianism. Many Indian slaves drowned. Sharks devoured some of the bodies. Others washed up with the surf.
Las Casas wanted to convert Indigenous peoples, not kill them like the pillaging conquistadors. Later writers turned away from the Black Legend he had helped create in his writings, a narrative that told of unrelenting Spanish violence (although they trotted it back out when it served the interests of European competitors such as the English and other antiCatholics). Over time a different account took root, one that has since become conventional wisdom for many: Indigenous peoples in the Americas perished not by violence but by sickness, the “virgin soil” epidemics that had followed Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. In this narrative, Indigenous peoples died as an unintended consequence of European discovery. Native inhabitants vanished, their lands repopulated by European settlers and African slaves.
Pathogens such as smallpox and influenza decimated Indigenous populations from Hudson Bay in Canada to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of Latin America. Up to 90 percent of the population might have perished, a tragic consequence of the Columbian Exchange, some would say.
2 The Indigenous population declined anywhere from 54 million to 61 million people in 1492 to as low as 6 million to 10 million around 1650, a decline so powerful it altered planetary CO2 levels as recorded in ice core samples.3 A different story to accompany these numbers is now emerging, although it has not yet reached very deep into the public consciousness across the West. We now know that the focus on disease conceals a messier and much more ferocious history of conquest, enslavement, and resistance. This history was epochally bloody, not as simple as the Black Legend and its stereotype of the Spanish invader as brutish and intolerant but nonetheless terribly violent. Colonial violence, moreover, rendered native communities more susceptible to disease as people abandoned fields and sought refuge.
“In the wake of the epidemics,” one historian has written, “slavers appeared on the horizon.”4 Also contrary to the conventional narrative, we now know that Indigenous populations rebounded. Communities from Chile to Canada responded to the European presence with extraordinary dynamism and creativity. More Indigenous peoples populated the Americas in 1800 than in 1650, not fewer.
In some areas, their populations doubled from early colonial lows. The “vanishing Indian” is a convenient, pernicious myth in the making and remaking of settler colonialism, as if the disappearance of one people was as inevitable as Europe’s westward march. The revival of these Indigenous communities would pose a serious challenge to settlers who coveted their land and labor. In many areas, the presence of these native peoples stalled or even reversed the colonial advance. Everywhere, they shaped the development and character of colonial societies.
A second great cataclysm came in the 1800s after a century of violence at the hands of settlers with guns. In later chapters, we will explore how killing underpinned settler economies and how it unfolded at the very same time as—and became a key part of—the founding and development of republics from Argentina to the United States. The liberal promise of citizenship—at least for some—unfolded amid horrific violence, dispossession, enslavement, and economic development. In Brazil and Mexico, Indigenous populations suffered punishing declines across the century, and in the case of Brazil the decline has continued to the present. In the United States, the nadir came in the 1890s, much of it in just a few decades at the height of the country’s Gilded Age and long after the Emancipation Proclamation ended Black slavery. Diseases again played their part, but so did enslavement and genocidal violence. On all sides and from all angles, then, the story is far more complicated than we think.
*
Casting a wider historical eye back to the age of Iberian expansion helps us understand better the distinctiveness of the modern age. Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) wanted to make money. Earning his fortune was his primary concern, whether that wealth came from metals, spices, or human beings. He returned from his second voyage (1493–1496) with no less than five hundred enslaved Indigenous people on board. Columbus coveted gold and other American treasures, but he also had a proposal for his employers: enslaving many thousands of Indigenous peoples could yield terrific profits, he argued. The Spanish Crown frowned on the explorer’s plans to enslave Indians and transport them back to Europe, and Western rulers generally curtailed the number of enslaved Indians that might be exported to the continent. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the export of Amerindian slaves into the Iberian Peninsula likely averaged around two thousand people yearly, sometimes more.
Portuguese rulers restricted their colonizers in Brazil to yearly exports of twenty-four slaves.5 The colonists weren’t happy with these policies; early on, they had discovered that capturing and selling people was an easy way to get rich quickly.
The enslavement of Indigenous people within the Americas was an altogether different matter. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain prohibited enslavement and then immediately made exceptions. By the early decades of the sixteenth century, just a few years after Columbus’s second voyage, slave raiding and trading had already become “very profitable.” Men wealthy enough to muster a ship headed to the Americas with the explicit intention of enslaving people and then using the profits to either expand their slaving missions or begin extracting gold and other resources, ranging from precious woods to make fine furniture to the cochineal beetles (technically not a beetle) that produced the rich red inks coveted in Europe.6 Across the Caribbean, the Spanish exploited Indian slaves to mine for gold and dive for pearls. Thousands died, their plight taken up by Las Casas. On Hispaniola, Spaniards launched slave raids throughout the Caribbean and as far north as the Florida coast, ventures led by men such as Juan Ponce de León (1474–1521), who became Puerto Rico’s first colonial governor. Many like to think of de León as a great explorer, but he was more of a warlord leading astoundingly vicious attacks and exploiting enslaved people on his estate. We do not know how many died in these raids, but the mortality rate on the slave ships was exceedingly high; upwards of half the enslaved Indigenous peoples likely perished, their bodies tossed into the Caribbean.
Scholars have long seen in Iberian expansion an extension of the violent, racist expulsion of Muslims—often termed the Reconquista—and other events such as the 1415 capture of Ceuta, which borders Morocco directly across the Strait of Gibraltar and is still a Spanish enclave today. Some of the men who crossed the Atlantic had participated in anti-Muslim violence, perhaps most famously Hernán Cortés (ca. 1485–1547), who defeated the Aztecs in the early 1520s. (In fact, Cortés played a minor role in the Iberian conflict.) But as soon as the riches of the Americas became known, violence in the region shifted on its axis, becoming nearly synonymous with economic expansion and the forced capture of human beings. These activities increasingly involved merchants and complex financial arrangements spreading across the Atlantic and large areas of Europe. Crown control was at best weak, in the earliest years largely based in Hispaniola. What the Spanish Crown did do was provide ideological cover for slave raiding, a development that saw people captured under the guise of “just war” or with the goal of bringing slaves into the realm of Christianity and civilization. Spaniards immediately began raiding and extorting communities from Florida to Peru, enslaving people, paying the Crown their royal fifth, and transporting captives across the broader region, some to the Iberian Peninsula. The Americas witnessed an almost immediate emergence of Spanish warlords, with their private militaries prosecuting wanton violence. Ecological destruction quickly ensued, including mining pollution and deforestation, and disease invariably followed, exacerbating violence and exploitation. Massive amounts of gold, silver, and other precious resources headed east.
Terrific inflation and indebtedness followed, from Spain to Peru, as well as conspicuous consumption: it seemed that everyone wanted something—or someone—from the Americas.
From this vantage point, the Iberians were the earliest pioneers of a kind of military-commercial revolution and played an important role in the initial transition from feudalism to capitalism. These warlords used novel weapons, especially metals and horses, to plunder vast areas of the Americas, including its people. Cortés lugged one thousand pounds of gunpowder and various guns as he marched inland toward the Aztec capital, along with horses, armor, and 118 crossbowmen. Indios had none of these weapons; the best they had were obsidian blades.
But important differences separate this early era from the Mortecene.
Horses and swords only got Europeans so far; these were revolutionary because they were so new to the Americas, much like illnesses such as smallpox. Crossbows were highly effective, tearing through the best Aztec shield. Spanish arquebuses (some weighing nearly twenty pounds), however, were loud and intimidating and also deadly when they hit their target, although they did have limitations. The Western military advantage was real, but it was horses and steel, not guns, that proved decisive.
Moreover, Indigenous peoples soon perfected ways of resisting, or at least mitigating, colonial depredations even as vast numbers of native peoples perished due to violence and disease.7 What is clear is that the Spanish colonizers were pioneers of violence in the New World. They used violence to extract scarce resources and control its flow eastward. They produced vast wealth, but relatively little of this wealth became capital invested in industry.
Most prioritized war making and conspicuous consumption, from bejeweled brocades to palaces, churches, art, and fancy meals lasting many hours. Yet they also lacked certain key factors that could have boosted their power. They didn’t have the institutional protections or some of the cultural ideas that might have helped them turn wealth into investable capital.
More profoundly, they had not experienced the technological revolutions that would so profoundly reshape the world a few generations later: the flintlock musket and especially the widespread use of coal.
It is also clear that the enslavement of Indians went together with conquest. By the middle of the sixteenth century, colonists had enslaved hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples.
The Spanish Crown issued the so-called New Laws of 1542 prohibiting enslavement and ending the encomienda system by which colonists had received the right to exploit Indian labor. (Colonists in Peru rebelled and murdered the viceroy in charge of enforcing the new rule.) After 1550, slaves had the legal right to petition for their freedom. Some managed to do so, and others used the New Laws to negotiate better terms with their masters. But vast numbers, especially those stationed at mines or laboring in areas far from the seats of imperial power, remained enslaved, their faces branded with the mark of their masters. Through the end of the seventeenth century, the enslavement of Indians persisted throughout large areas of the Spanish Empire, especially with the expansion of silver mining in Mexico and Peru, even as Indigenous populations were collapsing from exploitation and disease. Vast amounts of American silver flowed from the region to India, China, and Europe, where it transformed currency systems and, in some areas, unleashed rapid economic inflation. Tons of the precious metal ended up in vaults in Nanjing and Beijing, with large amounts looted by Taiping rebels and Westerners in the nineteenth century, stories we will explore later. The largest mine of all, Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, had a population of nearly 160,000 at its height in the seventeenth century. The mine “that ate men” ran on slave labor, enormous human wastage, and terrific environmental destruction as forests were cut down and mercury poisoned streams and soils. Three centuries later, the city still bears the scars of this earlier pollution.8 MAP 7.1. Latin America From the beginning of European colonialism, then, enslavement was exceedingly common across vast areas of the Americas. And the enslavement and forced migration of Indians continued long after the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. People enslaved in Chile ended up in Peru; Apache Indians from New Mexico, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, ended up as far south as Mexico City, where they joined slaves from the Philippines. The infamous bandeirantes of Brazil ventured deep into the interior, raiding Indian communities and marching captives toward the coast. Free Indians also played vitally important roles assisting European slavers, beginning in the early sixteenth century with Caribs and Arawaks in the greater Caribbean region. As late as the 1770s and in exchange for weapons and other goods, the Dutch were purchasing slaves from Caribs who had been attacking communities along the Orinoco and Essequibo Rivers in Venezuela and Guyana. In this part of the world, it was a wellknown fact that the Spanish had long kept Indians “in perpetual slaverie.”9 In 1679, King Charles II abolished Indigenous slavery in the Spanish Americas, nearly two centuries after Columbus had landed on the island of Hispaniola. Unfree labor endured, however, including slavery. Debt peonage became widespread in the Americas, although the practice could range from nominal debts to practices that differed little from slavery.
10 Like much of Asia, when a person owed more than he or she was worth, that person—or his or her family—soon found themselves in deep straits.
*
If they had had their way, criollos (as persons of European descent born in the Spanish Americas were known; crioulo in Portuguese and “creole” in English) from Mexico to Brazil would have continued enslaving Indigenous peoples. Only imperial intervention and especially native resistance slowed the settler determination to enslave. Settler populations were concentrated in core areas; surrounding these towns and encampments were Indigenous communities that remained largely independent, even if they nominally recognized the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns. In the New Laws of 1542 and with the Spanish ending of Indigenous slavery 150 years later, European powers were not acting out of any ethical objection to slavery.
After all, the Atlantic slave trade continued to grow steadily from the middle of the seventeenth century. Metropolitan concerns were more political and economic than humanitarian. Like all empires, Iberian rulers wanted some modicum of stability, preferably without having to spend much. And mostly, they wanted American silver with as few headaches as possible. Criollos could be a drain on the imperial coffers as well as being unruly. They provoked violence, started wars with Indigenous peoples they often could not complete, and sought greater autonomy except when they needed the Crown’s intervention. So, in turn, rulers hedged, at times making concessions to the settlers and at the same time creating laws that tried to reign in their worst behavior.
Settlers also didn’t have many guns with which to prosecute their enslavement of Indians, in part because of what one historian has called an “informal arms control regime” throughout the Americas. The ones they did have often weren’t very good. (North America was a different story.) Both Portugal and Spain had arms and gunpowder factories, and gun and powder making in the Americas did exist in a few local areas. Gunpowder, however, was a royal monopoly largely preserved for local government militias and to fend off the avaricious Dutch, French, and English who coveted Latin American silver. In 1700, gun ownership among a colonial population of, say, 2.5 million likely did not exceed 100,000 weapons. In absolute and relative terms, these settlers were not especially well armed.11 The weapons imports that began improving at the end of the 1700s—some from Europe, more and more from the United States, much of it clandestine —were interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars and, in the United States, the War of 1812. After 1815, however, the stream became a flood.
With the defeat of Napoleon, Europe and especially Britain found itself with a huge surplus of weapons as well as soldiers looking for employment. Even warships were available for purchase to the highest bidder. Official exports skyrocketed, in 1824 totaling 353,915 pounds (177 tons) of British powder.
Four decades later, they had risen to 1.7 million pounds (850 tons), an increase by a factor of five. Between 1815 and 1825—the crucial years for Latin American independence—official direct British exports alone totaled over 800,000 guns and 4,500 tons (9 million pounds) of powder, enough for anywhere between 144 million and 378 million musket shots, more than enough to shoot every single person in the Americas multiple times.12 Large quantities of British arms traveled circuitously and illegally via New Orleans, where tens of thousands of guns and tons of powder arrived yearly, with large quantities then transshipped across the Gulf of Mexico. The Americans had their own weapons surplus, partly as the result of peace with the British and largely from rising production; these ended up everywhere from Mexico to Venezuela. And because many arms were smuggled, these figures only hint at the rapid militarization of settler societies across Latin America. The massive increase in the clandestine weapons trade was an open secret, as ships left British and North American ports heavily laden with guns, shot, and powder. The Spanish monarchy objected, but the lure of profit in the name of free trade easily drowned out most diplomatic protests.13 Some of these weapons ended up in the hands of politicians, generals, and revolutionaries fighting for nascent and often contesting dreams of independence. These were men such as Simón Bolívar, who arose from what is Venezuela, and José San Martin from the Rio de la Plata, a vast region that includes Argentina and other countries. Together, their force of over ten thousand soldiers marched over the Andes, through Colombia’s jungles, and across much of South America, many with British and American muskets in their hands. Without these new supplies of weapons, royalist forces might have prevailed, and the Spanish Empire could have continued for many more years.
But many and in some areas most guns ended up not in national armies or with citizens (a distinctly North American pattern) but instead with warlords, also called caudillos (caudilhos in Portuguese), regional strongmen who controlled the local economy and politics.14 This would have devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples, as a new wave of enslavement swept across Latin America. The decades following independence were marked by extraordinarily high levels of violence, civil war, political fragmentation, and warlordism, which the surging import of weapons made possible. Between 1800 and the early 1820s, Mexico lost upwards of 10 percent of its population as civil conflict wracked the country. A million people died across the New Kingdom of Granada in the nineteenth century, a region stretching from Panama to Ecuador, Venezuela, and parts of Brazil. The conflicts that convulsed Brazil and the lands that would become Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay killed many hundreds of thousands.15 Weapons quickened independence but at a cost: fragmentation and violence became ever-present. Because central governments were generally weak and poorly armed, at least at first, guns and independence allowed strongmen to do pretty much whatever they wanted (including killing one another), especially the expropriation of land. Standing in their way were Indigenous peoples, who in some areas could challenge oligarchic warlords and criollo dominance. In 1810 on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Indians comprised perhaps as much as 60 percent of the population.
Elsewhere Indigenous communities were also growing, despite periodic epidemics. Almost every newly independent country had significant Indigenous populations.16 Few weapons made their way to these Indian communities. The Spanish had restricted local access to weapons, a practice that continued after independence and well into the late twentieth century. When Indians did obtain weapons, they mounted ferocious resistance against nearby strongmen. The result, often described as “Indian revolts,” took place across much of the nineteenth century: fierce struggles by Indigenous people to maintain a modicum of autonomy in the face of warlord predation.
The arming of Latin America resulted in a new wave of men hunting people, particularly in areas of economic growth where production demanded large inputs of labor. The warlords who helped found an independent Latin America turned enslavement into a business. State decrees abolishing peonage and slavery were null and void nearly as soon as they left the government printer; in most areas, they were laughably irrelevant. Mexico’s Jalisco state, located in the west, had seen high levels of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and today is renowned as the site of a horrific drug cartel war).
Rebellions continued on and off until the central state finally managed to intervene in the early 1870s; thousands of Indians were enslaved, some ending up in the Caribbean. Indians in the northern part of Mexico and parts of the American Southwest were enslaved and moved south, where they worked in the ultraexploitative silver mines partly funded by North American financiers and industrialists such as the Guggenheims and the Rockefellers.
TransAmerican trade routes extended over two thousand miles during this period.
According to one trader, “the California–New Mexico slave trade . . .
resulted in tremendous profits to its participants.” A boy might sell for $100, a girl for twice as much.17 Yucatán’s henequen industry, which produced the fiber that became rope and twine and took off dramatically in the latter part of the 1800s, was especially brutal and devastated the local environment. Many slaves in this Mexican peninsula were worked to death making rope for shipping and twine for American farmers. Large areas of the Yucatán became a slave society a half century after Mexico formally abolished slavery in the 1830s.
At the hands of heavily armed warlords, the so-called henequen kings, people were kept in pens and were beaten and starved. Upwards of twothirds of Yaqui (from Sonora, in northern Mexico) slaves might die within a year. “The Yaquis were coming in at the rate of 500 per month, yet I hardly thought the influx would be sufficient to equal the tide of lives that was going out by death,” the muckraking journalist and radical activist John Kenneth Turner wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century.
18 From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, enslavement and extermination became common practices. In 1824, for example, Spain recognized Argentina’s independence following nearly a decade of war. Arms had been flooding into the general region, in 1824 nearly 600,000 pounds of powder, 180,000 guns, and many tons of lead and shot.19 Argentina soon fell into civil conflict and warlordism even as a commodity boom was taking off. In a genocidal seven years starting in 1878, settlers hunted down Indigenous peoples across Pampa and Patagonia to make way for the dramatic expansion of commercial cattle and sheep farming.
“We have taken families from the savages,” an Argentine senator lamented to his colleagues in 1884.
“We have enslaved the men, prostituted the women, we have torn the children away from their mothers, we have sent old men to work as slaves anywhere. In a word, we have turned our backs and broken all the laws that govern the moral actions of men.”20 Brazil had a longer and deeper history of violence. Killing and bloodshed had been on the rise in the country since the second half of the 1700s, with acts ranging from organized official depredations to paramilitary attacks by bandeirantes, much of it lumped into reprisals for Indian raids. The distinction between officially sanctioned and privatized violence blurred, although to victims the difference was meaningless. In 1808 the Portuguese Crown declared outright war on Indian communities, initiating a “violent colonization of indigenous territory” and an entrenchment of chattel slavery as more arms entered Brazil than all the other areas of Latin America combined. Bandeirantes would set out “to kill a village,” matar uma aldeia, a phrase that became popular among settlers from the 1830s.21 Children who could work were enslaved; the rest were murdered. Indian resistance continued, however, and revolts were widespread.
There were, of course, complex political dynamics within and between Indian communities as well, including war and alliances with settlers. But colonial violence, loss of territory, displacement, and disease quickened the overarching trajectory, a catastrophic decline in the Indigenous population at the hands of armed settlers. In the early 1800s, there were around eight hundred thousand independent Indians in Brazil, the vast majority living in a broad stretch of territory from the Amazonian forests and down into provinces such as Minas Gerais. By 1900 that number had declined to less than two hundred thousand, a decline of 75 percent. By 1950, a mere one hundred thousand Indigenous people remained.22 Some of the worst violence would unfold in the very years that saw Brazil’s 1888 ending of African slavery and the extension of citizenship rights to former slaves, in theory if not in practice.23 These were the same years that saw similar devastations unfolding across many other areas of the world, as men with guns in their hands hunted Indigenous peoples nearly to extinction.
Loud demands were voiced for more land and labor, both needed to expand the lucrative coffee, cacao, sugar, cotton, and, most notoriously, rubber industries. The plantations that sprang up quickly wreaked ecological havoc across Amazonia. Between 36 million and 180 million trees were destroyed in the pursuit of latex, which became bicycle tires, car tires, and crucial components in industrial manufacturing. Warlords played an especially significant role in the rubber industry, ensuring the flow of weapons and maintaining connections to international corporations such as Firestone Tire and Rubber. Brazil’s commodity boom came at precisely the same time that Indians were being enslaved and murdered. With its astounding natural resources, the Amazon made a “most attractive field for slave raiding,”24 Sir Roger Casement wrote in one of his many exposés before the British hanged the Irish nationalist. For those hungry for power or profit, it was, as one company employee noted, simply a matter of putting together “expeditions with guns to hunt Indians, like hunting wild beasts.”25 *
Across the Americas, the establishment and spread of settler societies was impossible without weapons. Gun ownership dominated political struggles of all stripes in the region, including both contests against imperial rule and attempts to subdue Indigenous peoples. The ascendance of guns was never more evident than in what became the United States.
Millions of guns and over eighteen million pounds of British gunpowder headed to North America and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, along with more than forty-four thousand tons of lead and shot, twenty times more powder and forty times the amount of lead and shot that went to Latin America. Most headed to what would become the United States. The lead alone was enough for 1.4 billion musket balls; North America’s population in 1800— including Indigenous, slave, and settler—was not more than seven million.
North America, in short, would become armed to the teeth. And if in Central and South America enslavement and genocide went hand in hand with oligarchy, in the United States killing unfolded rather more “democratically”: capturing and killing Indigenous peoples and taking their lands seemed little more than a settler birthright. At the same time, whereas Indians in Latin America struggled to obtain the new weapons, Indians in North America suffered no such difficulty: they acquired them by the millions. The British had created colonial militias across North America beginning in the 1600s. A century later they were regretting this decision, faced with unruly and often well-armed colonists in the thirteen colonies. The 1774 decision to ban the import of guns and gunpowder, passed in response to rising settler unrest and incidents such as the infamous dumping of tea in Boston’s harbor, was widely seen by colonists as an outrage and quickened the march to war. The British enlistment of Indigenous allies against the American colonists didn’t help either, particularly since in many areas Indian power had been growing and directly threatened further settler expansion into their territories. One result of the British using Indian proxies was a particularly vicious part of America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence.
The revolutionaries complained about how the British had supported the “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Guns and the politics of gun ownership soon led to the Second Amendment and over two centuries of controversy over the right to bear arms as well as a vigorous arms industry. And just as in Latin and Central America, political independence accelerated predation. The British were no friends to the Indians—they killed Indians whenever they needed to and allied with them when necessary—but were better than the Americans would be.
The enslavement of Indigenous peoples had begun nearly as soon as the first permanent European settlement in the region. British colonists in New England plundered Indian communities, taking people and often shipping them to the West Indies, where the colonists had mercantile interests and relatives who owned plantations. Pequots and others from the Massachusetts and Connecticut area ended up in Barbados at roughly the same time as Indians from Guiana and slaves from Africa. Enslaved Indians also moved the other way, from the Caribbean and the Carolinas to New England, where unfree labor was an important foundation of the emerging colonial economy.
26 MAP 7.2. North America The enslavement of native peoples east of the Appalachian Mountains persisted for nearly two centuries, although officials in New England, like the Spanish authorities in Latin America, began enacting laws restricting and ultimately prohibiting Indian slavery. These were widely flouted. In 1675–1676, King Philip’s War, the first significant war between the colonists and Indigenous peoples in New England, resulted in the destruction of native communities and widespread enslavement; captured Indians ended up in Jamaica, the Azores, and Europe.27 The enslavement of Indians in the Southeast was far more pronounced and was integral to the rise of a slave-based agricultural system that wrought extraordinary ecological destruction. Captives found themselves in the West Indies, particularly Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua, all islands at the forefront of the rise of plantation agriculture. (The Caribbean sugar revolution began in Barbados in the 1640s; many early settlers in South Carolina came from the island.) The mid-seventeenth century saw “countless Indians . . . enslaved and a good number exported” from North American shores.28 From Virginia to Spanish Florida, much of the violence revolved around traders who exchanged weapons and other goods and occasionally attacked Indian communities, taking captives whom they later sold. The ability to plunder and trade with Indians became one of the issues behind the famous Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) in Virginia,29 long celebrated as a precursor to the American Revolution. That rebellion was as much against the colonial governor as it was a war against the Indians.
In just six decades between 1660 and 1720, as the foundations of colonial society were being laid, at least fifty thousand people were enslaved in the American Southeast. This number is about 12 percent of the total volume of British and American African slave trades between 1651 and 1725 and roughly the same amount as the number of African slaves imported into North America during this time. “Those we call Slaves, are a sort of Black People. . . . [T]heir Masters, or Owners, have . . . a Right and Title to them .
. . as a Man has here to a Horse or Ox,” wrote a colonist offering advice in 1712. “There is also another sort of People we buy for Slaves,” he continued, “call’d Indians . . . who are also Sold us by Merchants or Traders.” The latter might cost half the price of “a good Negro.”30 Indian slaves were far cheaper than African ones.
It might seem an exaggeration to say that warlords created the United States, but in many respects the colonies and then the country arose directly from the military-commercial revolution. Combining violence with commerce was ubiquitous, especially in areas where central control was weak. Violence was a key mechanism of capital accumulation. This was particularly the case in what became the South, where Indian enslavement helped consolidate colonial landholding and agriculture and where America’s plantation class had its formative beginnings in warlordism. As one historian has put it, “trade in Indian slaves” became “the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715” and “was inextricably connected to the growth of the plantations” that would significantly shape the American economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Settlers shuttled Indian slaves locally or regionally; they also sent them to the West Indies, where captives faced death within a few years.
Violence prosecuted against Indians in North Carolina during the 1710s yielded slaves deployed to Virginia tobacco plantations, building on the earlier Bacon’s Rebellion that had produced Powhatan slaves for the colony.
31 These patterns were especially pronounced in South Carolina, where in the eighteenth century more than 2.3 million pounds of powder and 3.9 million pounds of lead arrived as the area was becoming North America’s quintessential slave colony and, for a time, its wealthiest. Here the planter elites had their hands in both Caribbean slavery and predation extending across South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Warlords such as Jonathan Bryan traded with Indians, engaged in considerable violence, founded plantations around Charlestown, and speculated wildly in land that they had mostly swindled from native peoples. Bryan, his relations, and others in his circle traded extensively with the Yamasee people, who provided slaves to colonial traders even as the same colonists coveted their land. The “abuses,” complained a prominent South Carolina House of Assembly member at the turn of the eighteenth century, “done to the Yamasee Indians by them [colonists] that live among and trade with them” became widespread in these decades, leading to not only war in 1715 but also various attempts by officials to control settler predations, none especially successful.32 By the 1730s, the Bryan family stood among the most powerful plantation owners in South Carolina, exploiting hundreds of African slaves. They continued trading with and extorting Indians well into the 1770s, when Jonathan Bryan “leased” native lands from eastern Georgia to the Apalachicola River and down to the Gulf Coast. The family loomed large in southern politics: in later decades, many would join the Confederacy, and at least a few became members of the Ku Klux Klan.
*
Across America, Indigenous communities endured settler predation and also procured slaves for Europeans and for themselves. Slavery exploded within many Indian societies during this period, from the Iroquois to the Cherokees in the Southeast (in the 1830s forcibly removed to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears) to the Comanches in the Southwest and across Canada’s boreal forests; not surprisingly, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and others (what came to be known as the Civilized Tribes) sided with Confederate rebels in the American Civil War.
The enslavement of people predated European contact, just as slavery was common virtually everywhere else in the world. Taking people formed an important part of warfare.
Men usually suffered the most; they died, skinned alive or dismembered, often losing their scalps. Children and women were incorporated into the captor community; over time, any stain of enslavement disappeared. Taking captives formed an important part of conflict and the demonstration of masculine prowess and honor. Captives might be used in rituals, and their exchange often became part of the negotiations ending conflict. Beginning in the latter part of the 1600s and expanding rapidly in the 1700s with the military-commercial revolution, hunting people both intensified and became far more widespread. Slavery within Indian society also generally worsened. The reasons are complex. In the face of population loss from violence and disease, enslavement became a mode of demographic replenishment, as we see, for example, among the Iroquois beginning in the late seventeenth century. Their population had declined by half; other tribes might see two-thirds to three-quarters of their people die.
Newly acquired muskets were immediately turned to taking captives, or what the Iroquois referred to as “mourning wars.” Some captured people, usually men, were ritually executed.
The rest became slaves and dependent laborers.33 These practices had very old if not ancient roots. Muskets made the violence easier to prosecute as long as your victims were not equally well armed. But enslavement now formed part of a broader revitalization of Indian society. Hunting people became an increasingly important economic pursuit led by emergent Indigenous warlords.34 Captives were either sold or put to work preparing commodities key to cross-cultural trade: deer and other animal skins, especially beaver pelts. West of the Mississippi, slaves prepared pelts and bison hides as well as pemmican, a kind of energy bar made of bison meat, fat, and berries. Pemmican served as a crucial food source for long-distance traders whose routes reached north to French traders and east toward the United States. This was hard work. Cultural absorption continued, but slavery was becoming an entrenched and increasingly oppressive feature of Indigenous America.
By the early 1700s, according to one account, “all southeastern Indians were either slave raiders or their targets.”35 The Chickasaws, operating in what today we call Mississippi and Alabama, were especially known for their slaving; they preyed on various communities, including small-scale raiding and kidnapping of their Choctaw neighbors to the southwest.
“The Chicasaws live in an Excellent hunting country,” wrote Thomas Nairne as he traveled through the area, but with guns, “no imployment pleases the Chicasaws so well as slave Catching.” According to Nairne, “one slave brings a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet and a suit of Cloathes, which would not be procured without much tedious toil a hunting.”36 Capturing people proved easier and more profitable than pursuing deer for the fur trade.
“The Chickasaws,” wrote one Frenchman at the time, “have no commerce except that in slaves.” The resulting violence was cataclysmic for native communities: it took three dead Indians to produce a single captive.37 FIGURE 7.1. An Indian [Chickasaw] War Dance, with muskets hanging from the rafters.
Reproduced with permission of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen. NKS 565 kvart: Friedrich von Reck’s drawings (ca. 1734–1736).
This predation intensified so much that some native areas began resembling Africa and other parts of the world where guns had become available and people were considered a scarce commodity. Here too, one could now observe the violent capture of human beings, the reduction of lives to financial units, warlordism and the militarization of society, the intensification of exploitation, and a catastrophic explosion of debt. What was profoundly different was that North America also had a rapidly expanding and land-hungry settler society.
Indians sold whatever they could sell—deerskins, pelts, people, and ultimately their land—to access weapons. They knew well the advantage guns had over bows and arrows.38 Increasingly, debt incurred to obtain weapons and other goods helped drive predation and enslavement. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, New England Indians gave up their children to liquidate their debt. Throughout the Southeast, credit and debt insinuated itself across Indian society. English warlords raided communities that had fallen into debt; sometimes they also enslaved the family of indebted Indians. “If the Debtor prove too Negligent,” wrote Nairne in 1708, “the Creditor only goes to his house and take[s] the value of his Debet in what he can find.”39 In 1711, four hundred Yamasee men “owed more than 100,000 deerskins,” the equivalent of five hundred slaves. Hopelessly in debt, the Indians were taken as slaves by traders. A few years later the Yamasee War broke out, largely, it seems, because of Indian fears that they were all to be turned into slaves.40 In the 1760s as more and more guns flooded into North America and imperial crisis loomed, colonial officials attempted to regulate credit and debt in the Southeast, limiting credit to Indians to the value of no more than five pounds of gunpowder and twelve pounds of lead for each hunting seasons. These rules were widely disregarded.41 The trade in deerskins could scarcely pay off native debts. Slaves were far more valuable. Creek Indians in what is now Georgia and Alabama began raiding neighboring communities and, in some cases, went as far south as the Florida Keys looking for captives who might be sold to meet their debts.
Slaves held within communities might be sold as well to liquidate what they owed to settlers.
But Indians had more of value than just human bodies. They also had land that could be turned to private property, with forests cleared and plantations established. In the 1770s Cherokees and Creeks would lose 2.5 million acres of land, transactions made in large part to have their debts cancelled.
Across the South, the unfolding disasters of Indian and settler warlord raids, trading, debt, and land loss continued right up to the explosion of cotton production in the early years of the nineteenth century. In the space of a generation and in some instances less, violence and debt had resulted in widespread native dispossession. Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws all fell into intractable debt, owing over $160,000 to one powerful trading company, at the time a huge sum. The latter worked with the US government to have indigenous land ceded as a way of generating payment: this land cession would total over 6.5 million acres. In short, when they could no longer sell skins or people to settle their debts, North American Indians sold their land. These processes came to a traumatic end in the 1830s under various treaties culminating in the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, when the federal government forced the remaining Indians westward, across the Mississippi River. Settlers—whom the Cherokee had called “Intruders”—promptly turned their new land into cotton plantations, producing enormous and violent wealth, a vital engine of the Industrial Revolution and the Western turn to fossil fuels.42 * The capture and sale of natives by other Indigenous peoples and by American settlers never really stopped. It moved west, across the Mississippi River. Enslavement and coerced labor remained fixtures of the American West into the early years of the twentieth century.
Taking Indigenous peoples as slaves—indeed, the entire institution of slavery—was nothing new to settlers moving across the Mississippi: much of the American West was settled by southerners. Slavery’s westward spread would eventually push the country toward civil war, as southern politicians fantasized about a Confederacy extending to the Rockies or even to the Pacific Ocean.
But Indigenous revolutions stood in the way of this fantasy’s realization.
Native peoples north of the Rio Grande had adopted horses in the late seventeenth century.
The animals were well suited to the vast grasslands of the American West, some of the largest in the world, although winters could be punishing. By the 1730s, horses had transformed Indigenous communities, massively enhancing human mobility. Very quickly, horses were being traded throughout the American West and the North into Canada.
The trade in guns soon followed, just years after they had become widespread across the Southeast. “The great object of every Indian,” noted one trader, “was to obtain a gun.”43 European traders were as much gun dealers as anything else. Indigenous people’s demand for weapons—from muskets to metal hatchets, from scalping knives to iron that replaced stone arrowheads—was insatiable.
Combined, horses and guns, particularly flintlock muskets, created a nearly ideal mode of killing animals and pursuing people. From at least the 1630s into the 1800s, Indigenous slaves from the American Southwest were transported south, a response to labor demands within expanded silver mining in Mexico. Comanches as well as Utes regularly raided Apache and other communities, as had the Spanish before them. The missionaries might have objected to enslaving Indians, but others had different commitments.
Many native people died in the process of the few being captured.44 By around 1740, “Comanches brought in vast numbers of captives they had taken during long-distance slave expeditions” and sold these captives to Spanish traders, who brought them south into Mexico.45 Hunting people helped drive Comanche expansion into the southern Plains.
Santa Fe and Taos emerged as important slave markets. Apache, Paiute, and Shoshone slaves ended up working on silver mines or were exported as far away as Cuba. To this north-south movement of people came newer trade routes that connected New Mexico with regions to the east, what would become the Santa Fe Trail. Very quickly, large volumes of goods began moving east and west, including human beings.
Leading the way were the Comanches, who amassed thousands of weapons and many thousands of horses. Warlord chiefs headed the rancherías that comprised the Comanche empire: organizing and leading raiding for slaves, expanding bison hunting, and trading and negotiating with the Spanish and, increasingly, the Americans. In the 1780s, Indigenous strongmen such as “General” Ecueracapa (Contatanacapara) helped secure the Comanches as the dominant force throughout a large part of the Southwest. Much of their authority rested on the ability to secure and redistribute weapons in a society that was both fiercely competitive and highly consensual.46 In the 1800s, slave raiding was ubiquitous across the Southwest; one priest called the practice “going after the flesh.”47 Utes in the Great Basin regularly preyed on peoples who did not have access to horses, killing males and capturing women and those children who could be put to work.
When the Mormons arrived in the 1840s, Utes had been slave raiding for well over a century and a half. By this time, Comanche raids now extended deep into Mexico itself, returning with captives and especially with horses.
Female slaves were put to work preparing bison hides traded to Europeans in exchange for guns, gunpowder, and ammunition. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Comanchería had become a slave-based society.
48 Similar processes unfolded across the West, for example among the Sioux, where slavery expanded dramatically in the latter part of the eighteenth century with the rise of guns and commerce. One reason for capturing people was to replace those lost to disease: smallpox and other afflictions regularly swept away large numbers of people. The taking of captives formed a central part of warfare, with some captured people sacrificed and others absorbed into the society. “I will bring away Slaves,” Sioux warriors chanted, “I will eat Men.”49 But this bold claim only tells part of the story.
Female slaves were also needed to prepare beaver pelts and bison hides for international trade.
What unfolded within Comanche and Sioux society was increasingly tied to changes over which they had little control. Nor did they have a say in the spread of colonial settlement itself, especially Anglos from the fledgling United States. In the early 1800s, Mexico technically extended throughout California, the Southwest, and Texas, although in areas its control was weak and very often nonexistent. Around 1850, approximately one hundred thousand Mexicans (including Indigenous Mexican citizens) resided in these areas, mostly in Texas and what would become the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Many places were sparsely populated. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded these areas to the United States and established the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico. Texas, which had declared itself a republic in the mid-1830s, became part of the United States in 1845, although Mexico did not recognize it as such. That the 1848 treaty abolished the trade in captives suggests just how important the practice had become to the regional political economy.
But the capture and sale of people continued, despite the treaty’s promises to the contrary.
Indian enslavement wove its way into settler habits and society, even as white Americans increasingly sought—and prosecuted— the “extermination” of the Indian. The so-called Old Spanish Trail, which extended from the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico to Los Angeles, carried skins and guns but also slaves. Even the righteous Mormons of Utah began trafficking in people; some brought African slaves with them. Slavery became legal in Utah territory in 1852, just a few years after their arrival, although subsequent legislation softened the enslavement of Indian children by restricting their servitude until they reached the age of twenty.
50 Slavery remained a contentious issue in the politics of westward expansion, although perhaps this was more a problem in Washington, DC, than in places such as Arizona where settlers considered slavery their birthright. Many came from the American South. The vast majority who settled in arable western lands and sought an expansion of cotton assumed that their industry would be based on chattel slavery, and they entered areas where trafficking in people had long been standard practice. During the American Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, hoped that New Mexico would join the cause; with a little more help, he believed, the Confederacy might extend all the way to California.51 Whereas Indian slaves east of the Mississippi often ended up laboring within the plantation complex, in the arid West captives—invariably women and children—typically worked as domestics and menial servants. Others were reduced to sexual servitude. In the 1840s and 1850s, largely privatized groups of men raided native communities, killing adults and capturing the young. Often these raids were in response to livestock theft, although accusations of such theft could serve as a pretext for murder and enslavement. Ranchers such as the famous California pioneer John Sutter of Sacramento—one of the warlord founders of the state—thus became slave traders.52 Sutter had “600 or 800 Indians in a state of complete slavery,” according to one account. They were fed from “troughs like so many pigs.”53 The discovery of gold in California led to a massive increase in violence and enslavement. Along the American and Cosumnes Rivers and farther north along the Cottonwood and Salmon Rivers, Indian slaves were put to work doing the most arduous mine labor. By midcentury, just two years after the 1848 discovery, many thousands of Indians were working the mines, a far cry from the popular image of the bearded white miner panning for gold. And violence increased with immigration. New California settlers purchased fantastic numbers of weapons, soon forming private armies that preyed on Indian communities, what would become an all-out “war of extermination.”54 Around midcentury, enslavement shot upward rapidly, much of it by kidnapping. One could purchase an Indian slave for as little as $35.55 In 1852, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official described how settlers captured Indians “like cattle,” “making them work, and turning them out to starve and die when the work-season is over.”56 The patterns of predation and exploitation seemed set, and the deadly ending for the captured was inevitable. “Here was a mother fatally wounded hugging the mutilated carcass of her dying infant to her bosom; there a poor child of two years old, with its ear and scalp tore from the side of its little head. Here a father frantic with grief over the bloody corpses of his four little children and wife; there a brother and sister bitterly weeping, and trying to soothe with cold water, the pallid face of a dying relative.”57 The American Civil War ended slavery across the country but did nothing to reduce violence in the American West. The persecution of native peoples in fact worsened in the years during and after the war, one of America’s great contradictions.58 “In New Mexico, the Civil War led to the greatest Indian slavery boom in the territory’s recorded history.”59 California experienced what one historian has described as a genocide. The native population declined by about 80 percent in less than four decades, from around 150,000 to just over 16,000 people.60 As the military-commercial revolution took deeper root, across the American West enslavement turned into outright genocide and unparalleled ecological destruction. The US government gave settlers money in return for the scalps of Indians they had killed, yet another reminder that the violence in the American West during this period was extraordinary. But it was also commonplace. Similar nightmares showed up in every settler society: Australia, South Africa, Canada, and across Latin America.
Warlordism was at the foundations and development of these colonial societies, including their struggles for political independence from their imperial masters. In the United States, this part of the tale—this emerging Mortecene—began toward the end of the 1700s and continued into the nineteenth century. For many US settlers, independence meant the freedom to kill everything that opposed their pursuit of profit.
A century earlier, the rapidly expanding frontier in South Africa led to shockingly high levels of violence. Once they had decent guns and a plentiful supply of horses, South African settlers, led by local warlords, attacked native Khoisan communities, killing adults and capturing children to force them into indentured servitude. Enslaving Indigenous peoples was illegal in the colony, but this did little to stop the settlers. They had a name for the people they captured—slaafhottentoten (slave Hottentot). At the close of the eighteenth century, South African settlers abandoned enslavement and pursued murder. Much the same thing happened in Australia in the nineteenth century, where large numbers of weapons armed the settler population.61 Each case resulted in nothing short of a demographic and human rights catastrophe, not unlike what we have seen in the history of the American West. In Tasmania in the late nineteenth century as weapons landed in the hands of settlers, the Palawa people nearly went extinct. When enslavement ceased to be profitable or possible, extermination would present itself as a new option in the emergence of modernity.
PART FOUR THE AMERICAN WAYS OF KILLING
8 Deepwater Genocides THE TWENTY-YEAR-OLD arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, desperate for a better life. The trip had been arduous, even death-defying. He had traveled from Maryland’s Eastern Shore under the name of Johnson, reaching the port city in the late summer of 1838 just as the leaves were about to begin turning. In the afternoon, Johnson made his way to the wharves, where he “found” himself “surrounded with the strongest proofs of wealth.” Dozens of the finest ships swayed in the harbor, protected from the winds, while workers “noiselessly” moved vast amounts of merchandise in and out of large warehouses built of New England granite.1 Johnson found work hauling casks of whale oil and, for a short time, hammering caulking into the seams of ships for French and Howland, one of New England’s most powerful businesses. “I am among the Quakers,” Johnson later wrote, “and am safe” walking the streets as he marveled at the town’s modernity and wealth, safe enough to change his name to Frederick Douglass.2 Douglass was not alone. More than 1,200 escaped slaves and free Blacks resided in the town during this period. In almost every respect, New Bedford was remarkable, as cosmopolitan and politically progressive as it was affluent. William Lloyd Garrison, the journalist and social reformer, and the intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson walked to New Bedford’s imposing neo-Gothic First Unitarian Church, where they spoke against slavery, then reaching its monstrous height across the Cotton South.
Freedmen labored on the whaling and merchant vessels that sailed to the ends of the world, their ships’ holds filled with merchandise. It was decent work, and some did very well. Paul Cuffe, the son of a slave brought to America from Africa’s Gold Coast, became a wealthy merchant and a darling of the abolitionists; he helped found Sierra Leone. More than one freedman wrote to Cuffe of the yearning to return to Africa. “I am a black man and want to know what condition the Black[s] are to sail uppon and when the vessel is to sail. . . . [L]et me know so that I may get reddy,” Stephen Womsley wrote from Providence, Rhode Island, in August 1815.
Cuffe maintained a brisk trade in ivory and wood; in Africa, he hoped, the free inhabitants might cultivate sugar and rice to be sold in the burgeoning Atlantic market.3 The city where Frederick Douglass found his freedom boasted a storied history of abolitionism. Yet it also had other connections to slavery and an underbelly of virulent racism. The city shipped large quantities of whale oil and candles to the West Indies and the American South and as far away as Brazil. These were essential markets for the industry. Illuminants were especially important on sugar plantations, since the dangerous and exacting task of boiling cane juice did not stop when the sun set. New Bedford’s capitalists also imported cotton, rice, sugar, molasses, and tobacco, all grown and produced by slaves. Bales of cotton went to industrial towns, including to New Bedford’s Wamsutta Mill, established in the 1840s by the Howlands and soon using coal-burning steam engines. In 1860 on the cusp of the American Civil War, New England mills imported nearly 70 percent of the cotton produced by southern slaves, over 280 million pounds.
Douglass’s employer, the entrepreneurial Howland family, stood among those New Bedford business owners deeply connected to the slavery then rapidly expanding across the American South.4 Another soon-to-be famous American, Herman Melville, arrived within a year of Douglass. We have no record of the two men ever meeting, the brooding writer and the tall, confident former slave whose Narrative of the Life was a bestseller. Both were born in the late 1810s and lived long lives until the 1890s, during the height of America’s bloody Gilded Age. Melville hailed from New York City; his father was a merchant who had made some money in the fur trade. As a young man, Herman Melville made his way to New Bedford and next-door Fairhaven, where in the winter of 1841 he boarded the whaling ship Acushnet, bound for the Pacific in search of sperm whales. The vessel returned four years later, in the spring of 1845, although not with Melville on board. He had jumped ship and spent some months of rest in the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific.
Melville developed an extraordinary understanding of whales and whaling, especially Pacific sperm whale communities. In Moby Dick, he wrote of how sperm whales could be found “in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” In a remarkable passage, Melville described a group of pregnant and nursing mothers. “As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time[,] . . . so did the young of these whales seem to be looking up towards us,” he wrote.
Melville understood something of the deep social ties of sperm whales, of their love for one another. These are deeply social mammals with extraordinary linguistic skills, maintaining elaborate matrilineal systems and extensive clans. Basically matriarchal, sperm whales spend much of their lives in the community into which they are born. Clans in the Pacific are especially complex, probably the result of their developing defensive strategies against killer whales, the sperm whale’s only predator before the rise of human whaling. If left alone, these creatures live upwards of seventy years, much of it deep below the water’s surface in pursuit of giant squid (usually around one thousand to three thousand feet down, although as deep as seven thousand feet in some instances). Often, they hunt alone or in pairs, but during the day they might spend considerable time hanging out at the surface, talking to each other in their local dialect, showing physical affection, playing, and making sure the young are taken care of. These groups might be as large as ten females and their young, although in the past the pods were certainly far larger. (Males live with their mothers until about the age of ten.) Mothers share the task of feeding babies; they also help look after them when an adult is swimming especially deep. And they defend themselves as a group.5 FIGURE 8.1. Sperm whale mother struggling to save mortally wounded calf. Whaleman artist. Sperm Whaling—Cow and Calf, ca. 1830. Watercolor on paper, 9½ × 11¾ inches.
New Bedford Whaling Museum, Gift of Mr. Charles H. Taylor, 1938.79.3. Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Sperm whales were known to attack whaling ships, including small whaleboats that had been lowered into the sea. They broke these smaller vessels to pieces, or “stove” them, in the language of whalers, leaving the men on board with broken limbs, stranded and waiting to be rescued, occasionally caught in the whale’s formidable jaws. In some instances, sperm whales attacked a ship head-on.
Melville likely based Moby Dick on the stories of a large white male whale, Mocha Dick, and on the Essex, which set out from Nantucket in the late summer of 1819 headed for the South Pacific. Not far from the Galapagos Islands, the Essex sighted a community of sperm whales, and the men aboard went to work. One harpooned whale put a hole in a whaleboat.
The men cut the line and headed back to the ship, bailing furiously. Men in another whaleboat managed to harpoon a second whale. A third whale, “a very large spermaceti[,] . .
. spouted two or three times, and then disappeared.” The whale resurfaced “and made directly for us, at the rate of about three knots (about 3.5 miles per hour).” Weighing anywhere from thirty thousand to ninety thousand pounds, the whale struck the Essex in the bow, “an appalling and tremendous jar” so powerful that many sailors fell down on their “faces.” The whale disappeared, and the Essex sank to the bottom of the sea.6 *
When Douglass and Melville arrived in New Bedford in the 1830s, the town had become a global center for history’s largest human destruction of wild animals. A mere three or four centuries earlier, humans collectively barely outweighed the cetaceans that, over millennia, had developed enormously rich cultural and emotional lives. But the balance had dramatically shifted in just a few decades as many whale species edged closer to extinction.
Just as Douglass called attention to the nation’s great contradiction of liberty and slavery, so too Melville knew in his bones that America was founded on killing: the predations of early capitalism, the widespread environmental destruction, the entanglements of human and nonhuman lives, the casualties of capitalism’s inevitable booms and busts, and the violence and death at the heart of the country’s creation. He named the doomed ship in his novel after the indigenous Pequots of Connecticut, whom American colonists had massacred and enslaved, shipping many off to certain death in the Caribbean. Regarding the whale, Melville wondered how such a creature felt about the “thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts.” Would the whale, he wrote, “long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then evaporate in the final puff”? In the same passage, he then shifted to note the massacres of bison and the millions of acres of land sold to settlers, concluding that, indeed, “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”7 Whaling was America’s first industry. Tellingly, this first industry was also the nation’s initial foray into producing fuel in a world that seemed to have an insatiable appetite for energy. Whaling ships were killing machines and mobile factories, not for the animal lover or the faint of heart. “The barrelsfull of rich, dark blood . . . hurled into the air” by the dying mammals,8 the stripping away of flesh, “the black smoke from the burning scraps,”9 and the terrible stench of boiling blubber all served to transform living beings into fuel. This grisly work spawned enormous profits, as the secretary of the US Navy noted in 1836, a great “creation of wealth, by labor, from the ocean.”10 It is no surprise, then, that the US industrial revolution began at sea with killing. Epochal violence fueled the country’s meteoric rise as a dominant player on the stage of world history. But as one historian has written, well into the twentieth century, American “commerce still imagined that growth had no relationship to death.”11 The Mortecene’s formation was under way on the backs of whales and other animals, and very few people wanted to acknowledge it.
* The trick is to get the blade deep into the lungs or other vital organs. An effective stab takes a great deal of effort unless you have a bomb lance, basically a huge gun that sends an explosive device deep into the animal.
The harpoon is mostly for slowing the whale down, not ending its life.
Another strategy is to sever the tendons of the fluke with a sharp spade, similar to the hamstringing used to subdue elephants and bison. Either way, it’s dangerous work. The best thing is to exhaust the animal and then plunge the weapon as far in as you can. It’s the lance that does the killing, preferably one forged with the best steel. At some point a column of blood will erupt geyser-like from the whale’s blowhole. The first might spray many feet into the air, ten or even fifteen feet high, covering everyone on the boat in blood, and the next one is not as high; until only a trickle of red flows into the sea, and then you know the killing is done.
But the work’s just getting started. Next, you have to wrap chains around the whale and attach it to the ship, difficult to do in bad weather. Then comes the cutting-in. Narrow wooden stages, “cutting stages,” are lowered over the ship’s hull so that you and your men can make giant incisions into the whale. Someone else might be employed to fend off the sharks who have swum close, attracted by the volumes of blood turning the sea red.
You’ll take sharp spades to separate the blubber from the carcass, following a spiral pattern that depends on the type of whale. A large blubber hook will pierce the whale’s flesh, and a windlass will help pull the blubber from the body and bring it on the deck, peeling flesh from bone until nothing is left.
A given piece of flesh might be five feet wide and twenty-five feet long.
Once on deck, the flesh (including the tongue) will be lowered into the ship’s hull and cut into smaller pieces. These should be cut in a way that resembles pages in a book, or what whalers call “the Bible.” By this time, fires will have been lit on deck and try pots readied to boil out the flesh, transforming your ship from a hunting vessel into a mobile factory. The boiling process produces a horrible stench. A cloud of black smoke rises from the ship. Even here, your work is not finished. Once rendered, that oil needs to be cooled, decanted into casks, and stored belowdecks. If you’re hungry, you can eat the boiled blubber; other pieces will go to stoking or starting fires.
If your prey was a baleen whale, large iron hooks will go into the animal’s lips. Cuts are made so that the mouth can be hoisted aboard. This part of the animal, the organ the whale used to sieve water for food, might weigh as much as 2,000 thousand pounds. (The largest baleen whale, the blue whale, can weigh up to 330,000 pounds and is the world’s largest animal; right whales might weigh just a third of these behemoths.) On deck, the mouth will be cut up, and the baleen will be divided. All these body parts then must be cleaned, dried, and stored belowdecks.
Sperm whales merit different treatment. First, you must sever the large head and hoist it onto the deck. Chains should then be threaded through the animal in five different places.
Sometimes you have to twist the head off from the body. The ship will likely roll to one side, with the wooden hull groaning from the labors of the windlass, the main mast bending, and the deck nearly in the water. (Some whales are too large, so the work must be completed from the stage, with a man lowered into the head.) Once the carcass is on deck, you and your men will “bail . . . the case.” This activity yields the spermaceti, as much as fifteen barrels and the most valued part of the whale. The labor might seem disgusting, but sailors generally enjoy working in the head material. It’s warm, and you can be completely covered in soothing lotion. Spermaceti is yellowish when you first extract it, so someone must process it to produce the snow-white waxy material that winds up in exquisite candles. Don’t forget about the “junk” that needs to be cut up and cooked into oil as well, and oh yes, the teeth need removing.
Finally, have a look through the intestines: maybe you’ll find ambergris, the stuff that today still goes into Chanel No. 5 perfume, which retailed for $340 per ounce at Macy’s recently.
12 * New England Quakers are often remembered as abolitionists firmly committed to human equality, liberty, and peace. The truth is more complicated. Quakers pioneered the pelagic genocide, just as they played an important role in the emergence of the United States of America as a global arms supplier, including weapons for the whaling industry. We have already seen New England’s entanglements in the creation of a capitalist world economy: its commerce that called for the elephant tusks to be turned into piano keys in Ivoryton’s factories, and its enslavement of Indians who wound up perishing on the slave plantations of Antigua and Barbados.
Commercial and familial connections between New England and the West Indies dated back to the 1650s. The whaling industry arose from the profits the region’s merchants—many of them Quakers—had amassed trading with the American South and the Caribbean, including their sale of Indians. In effect, wealthy merchants reinvested the profits they had made from enslavement into a new market: the industrial slaughter of the great mammals. One mode of violence begat another.
13 The connections between slavery and whaling ran deep. Especially in the early years of the expanding New England whaling, most ships were refitted from earlier work as merchant vessels. The same ships that had carried African slaves and sugar and other products now served part-time as whalers. (During winter, these whalers could be turned back into merchant vessels and sent south to trade.) In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote of Boylston’s (a prominent Boston merchant and benefactor of Harvard University) plans to bring freight to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and molasses and then to deliver between one hundred and five hundred tons of “Spermaceti whale oil” to France.14 The Howlands, first arriving on the Mayflower, some later converting to Quakerism, made such fantastic sums of money trading in the West Indies that the family’s sailors started showing up in New Bedford wearing fancy silk stockings. Ever the canny businessman, Isaac Howland bought the stockings off men’s legs, had them washed, and then sold them to locals for a tidy profit.
Many a merchant involved in whaling had amassed capital from the West Indies trade. The Howlands, who had owned slaves in New England during the American Revolutionary War period, now reinvested their profits from the triangular trade in the burgeoning whaling business, forming the company Isaac Howland, Jr. & Co. Their connections to the Caribbean’s plantation sector did not end, however. In the winter of 1795, the New Bedford ship Goodintent, owned by the Howland family, set out for the West Indies with candles and whale oil in tow as well as wheat flour, rye flour, potatoes, bread, cheese, and “50 turkeys” gobbling anxiously in the hold.15 Whaling peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Beginning around 1860, the New Bedford industry went into decline with the disappearance of whale populations and the beginnings of America’s fossil fuel revolution, although extensive whaling persisted well into the twentieth century. The total value of US whaling products from 1750 to 1900 likely exceeded $12 billion in today’s currency. Around its height, in 1850, whaling accounted for something like 11 percent of GDP and was the country’s fifth-largest industry.
16 For most of this time, whale oil was the most important product, especially from sperm whales. Baleen was turned into corsets and other products such as umbrellas, but the moneymaker was illumination. Until petroleum came around, whale oil produced the best lighting. Sperm whale oil was by far the best in terms of the light it produced but was also the most expensive. Slick and stable at high temperatures, the oil also became a vitally important industrial lubricant, utilized in factories, arms, precision machinery including clocks, and much later (as late as 1970) in automatic transmission fluid and nuclear armaments. Whale oil also found its way into margarine and in the making of the explosive nitroglycerine.17 Whale oil helped create the modern world. Well into the eighteenth century, including in Europe and North America, most people worldwide lived in the dark. Hearth fires might seem romantic, but they cast little light.
Until the later part of the 1700s, hearth fires and tallow candles offered the only available source of nighttime light. Most people went to sleep soon after sunset. The dearth of good lighting affected everything from sleep to reading. When new lamps using whale oil began emerging toward the end of the century, they made a dramatic difference in people’s ability to see, illuminating far more than candles. The whale oil and later kerosene revolutions are one reason why reading expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century.
After all, darkness scared people, especially those who had something to lose. Darkness, elites believed, belonged to the rabble: the thieves, prostitutes, the unemployed, militant working classes, and American revolutionaries who snuck out in the night to dump British tea in Boston’s harbor. John Adams told English leader William Pitt that sperm whale oil “gives the clearest and most beautiful flame of any substance known in nature.” Living in darkness, by way of contrast, invited “robberies, burglaries, and murders.”18 Upper- and middle-class urbanites wanted their lighting, especially in a period of social unrest and political revolution.
Wealthy citizens ensured that their homes were well lit; indeed, they nearly glowed in the dark. Businessmen began insisting on streetlamps, hoping that they might reduce theft and dissuade workers from rioting. They were sadly mistaken; many of Britain’s most important labor protests began in the evening, including the great 1839 Chartist revolt in Birmingham, where thousands of laborers demanded workers’ rights and a universal franchise.
Notably, the protestors singled out the streetlamps for destruction.
In 1774, whale oil produced “just over one billion lumen-hours” in Britain, according to one scholar of energy and lighting.19 The number of lamps in London—at the time the globe’s great metropolis with a population of over one million people—rose from 4,800 in 1736 to 35,000 in 1809, a more than 700 percent increase. Across North America, urban leaders began installing streetlamps in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, especially in areas that they felt needed protecting. Lighting and policing went together, an early equivalent of CCTV.
Whale oil lighting also helped drive the sugar revolution in the Caribbean and in Brazil. Large quantities of oil as well as candles made it to plantations across the Americas. Turning cane juice into sugar demanded round-the-clock labor and precise discipline. Delays and incorrect processing, not to mention accidents, directly threatened planters’ profits.
As sugar production accelerated from the second half of the eighteenth century, sugar boiling houses—where slaves reduced juice and added chemicals to produce crystallization—increasingly used whale oil lamps or candles to provide illumination.20 A similar acceleration of the Industrial Revolution appeared in Europe and America, where the earliest factories had relied on natural lighting.
Dependence on sunlight meant shorter working days in winter than in summer, with the natural world cutting into the unnatural world of maximizing profits. People stopped working when the light faded—in the Manchester winters, they left by 3:00 p.m., less than eight hours after sunrise—and workers were far from docile. They often walked away when they had had enough, and in the disappearing light they had a nasty habit of destroying machinery. Steam engines were expensive, temperamental, and dangerous; the inventor James Watt wrote how the “mortality has . . . been such among the mechanics” as to recommend “the expediency of having duplicates of them.”21 Early factories were not especially profitable; the Industrial Revolution as we now think of it was far from inevitable. What it needed was long hours, low wages, and an obedient working class.
Lamps, then gas lighting, and finally electricity helped solve this so-called problem. (Human limits presented other obstacles, to be addressed by automation and human energy management.) British and American industrialists purchased tens of thousands of barrels of oil at roughly the same time that plantation owners also sought this product, the former frantically looking for whatever they could find to illuminate what opponents called their “dark satanic mills.” At the height of the Industrial Revolution, England was consuming at least fifty thousand barrels of whale oil yearly. By 1835, in the United States anywhere between a quarter and a third of all sperm whale oil ended up in cloth factories, either as an illuminant or a lubricant. The pelagic genocide went hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution.
New England whaling merchants were traders par excellence. They sold oil and other goods and, in return, purchased whatever made money: Chinese porcelain, West Indian sugar and molasses, Georgia cotton, Virginia tobacco, and Russian iron, which made some of the best harpoons and other weapons.22 But these merchants were also investors and manufacturers, America’s earliest industrialists and financial speculators.
The whaling ship was a movable oil rig. Whale oil had to be made at sea and refined onshore; spermaceti had to be processed before it could be turned into the alabaster white candles desired the world over. With its motto “I pour forth light,” New Bedford became a world leader in oil refining and candle manufacturing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the city was producing millions of gallons of oil and just as many candles.23 These were among the largest factories anywhere in the world.
Nearly from the beginning, families such as the Howlands who earlier had profited from slavery now used the capital they accumulated from annihilating whales to bankroll other pursuits. This process accelerated with the disappearance of the cetaceans. In the 1840s, prominent families began constructing textile mills that would use steam engines to turn slaveproduced cotton (especially from Mississippi) into cloth, their workers toiling beneath whale oil lights. Railroad construction soon followed, bringing massive amounts of coal to the port city. By this time, the Howlands and other families owned banks, an insurance company, extensive real estate, and large industrial cloth factories. They invested in railroads and Wall Street, and they helped pioneer the phosphate revolution that made modern industrial agriculture possible.
New Bedford would soon have the most steam engines in America, among the greatest concentration of engines in the world. These machines included a gargantuan Corliss engine used in the Wamsutta cotton mill, invented in 1849 and installed in the mill two decades later.
The Corliss engine stood forty-five feet high and could power upwards of eight hundred spinners.
Established by the Howlands, the Wamsutta Mill became the world’s largest factory devoted to the production of cloth.24 Simultaneously, New Bedford would become one of America’s most polluted cities.
FIGURE 8.2. Wamsutta Mills, New Bedford. Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo.
In these ways, the profits of whaling helped underwrite America’s industrial revolution and its spectacular rise to global economic dominance.
Illumination, however, posed a number of challenges. The demand for light was insatiable, whether in the household, on city streets, or on the factory floor. Nineteenth-century people considered illumination as much an entitlement or necessity as most of us today feel about our cellphones.
Without man-made light, industrial capitalism ran up against nature’s limits.
Modernity itself—or the very Enlightenment, a term gaining in popularity at precisely the same time that whales were being hunted to near extinction —depended on artificial light.
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century as whale populations plummeted and some species hovered on the edge of extinction, savvy whaling companies saw the writing on the wall. Their predation had become unsustainable, however much energy went into developing more effective ways of killing cetaceans. Whaling ships stayed at sea for longer and longer periods of time; increasingly, they returned to port with empty barrels.
In the 1840s just as New Bedford’s whaling industry was about to peak, scientists learned how to make lamp oil from hard coal, or what came to be known as kerosene, although the process proved to be too costly. The making of kerosene from liquid coal—that is, crude petroleum oil— emerged around midcentury as a far less expensive industrial technology.
The Howland family developed one of America’s first kerosene facilities and stood among the first to refine petroleum, taking advantage of the new discovery of oil in Pennsylvania.25 Kerosene may not have burned as beautifully as highly refined sperm whale oil, but it would suffice, especially once scientists learned how to pressurize the fuel. With their long history of producing illuminants, the Howlands embraced the new source of lighting: in 1855 the family formed the New Bedford Oil Company and Weston Oil. Soon, they were shipping kerosene as far away as California. Other fuel companies also emerged in the New Bedford area, such as Seneca Oil Works in Fairhaven, across the river. These companies gave birth to America’s fossil fuel industry. Not surprisingly, the Howlands played an important role in the 1870 formation of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, one of the world’s most powerful (and notorious) companies until its breakup in 1911.26 At its height, Standard Oil controlled nearly 90 percent of America’s petrochemical industry.
FIGURE 8.3. Hastings Factory, n.d. [ca. 1850s]. The Hastings Factory combined whale oil and coal distribution. From Zephaniah W. Pease and George A. Hough, New Bedford, Massachusetts: Its History, Industries, Institutions, and Attractions (New Bedford: Mercury, 1889), 186.
*
America’s industrial revolution and rapid economic ascent was born in killing and bathed in blood, including the turn to fossil fuels that by the 1830s had begun warming the planet. At times, this extraordinarily violent world sat uneasily with matters of faith and political persuasion, although beyond noting the disappearance of the whales, very few commentators had qualms about driving animals to extinction. Several Howlands and their extended family were prominent abolitionists, attending meetings with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, but this commitment seems to have had no impact on their commitment to having cotton bales hauled northward to their New Bedford works. Around midcentury, the wealthy whale oil supplier Samuel Rodman would worry about the starving Irish and complain of the evils of slavery, but he offered nary a mention of the fact that raw cotton was being produced by slaves and manufactured by exploited girls and young women in his textile factory.
27 It is easy to condemn this hypocrisy from the safe distance of 150 years between us and them. But many of our electronic devices today are implicated in modern slavery; at the very least, they involve tremendously exploited labor and cause extraordinary ecological damage.
Back in the nineteenth century, Quakers would not have thought of their actions as morally questionable either. They were at the forefront of the anti–slave trade movement as well as what we might call consumer boycotts.
Philadelphia Quakers were leaders, including in the formation of the American Free Produce Association, calling for Americans to use products untainted by slavery, such as maple sugar and South Asian cotton. This was easier in Philadelphia than in New Bedford and for that matter in Lowell, Massachusetts, another important site in America’s industrial revolution. In 1860, New England mills imported over 280 million pounds of the white stuff.
The records of the great whaling families bring these contradictory entanglements into closer relief, including the paradox that the humanitarian condemnation of slavery arose at the same time that Westerners and others were killing just about anyone and anything for profit.
Families such as the Howlands kept exquisitely detailed records, including how much other family members owed them. Whatever we might think about these New England supertraders, they were outstanding businessmen.
Take the legendary (and virulently anti–slave trade) Rotch family. In the 1770s, William Rotch Sr. was in Barbados arranging for sugar shipments to Quebec. In the 1790s he was in England where, he said, he and his family were much affected by a pamphlet published and circulating in Great Britain “on the propriety of Abstaining from the use of Wt. Indn. Sugar and Rumn.” Without sugar, Rotch admitted, one’s “Coffee, Tea, apple pies and puddings” won’t go down “quite so easy.” He briefly considered East Indian sugar as a substitute, but this possibility did not pan out. Clearly antislavery, he was nonetheless appalled by the violent slave revolt in SaintDomingue, where the “Iron rod now in many instances [was] executed by the oppressed over the oppressor.” The revolt also dramatically raised the prices of sugar and molasses, a fact that surely had no effect on Rotch’s reaction, however.
28 At the same time that they were finding their familial conscience, the Rotch clan was keen to make money from selling ships for the sugar trade.
The family remained deeply invested in the world of plantation slavery: ships to the West Indies, Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and Rio de Janeiro; purchases of sugar, molasses, cotton, rice, and tobacco; sales of wood; barrels of menhaden, cod, beef, pork, butter; barrels and barrel hoops, bread, flour, rope, coffee, tallow, turpentine, and tar; and barrels and barrels of whale oil, together with boxes upon boxes of spermaceti candles.
The Rotch family was coppering its ships, developing better pumps, and seeking more efficient ways to kill whales and extract their oil. Family members were adapting ships to steam, even trying to design better fly traps. They then moved into the stock and bond market and, by the end of the eighteenth century, into iron manufacturing and cloth production. New Bedford workers could spin cotton just “as easily . . . as in England,” they reasoned, beginning with the manufacture of towlines and cod lines.
By this time, Rotch family interests were truly global, with business interests stretching from Germany and Russia to Sumatra, from Indonesian pepper shipped to Europe to Falkland Island seal skins brought to Canton.
Their commitment to ending the slave trade was as powerful as their reliance on plantation slavery. A letter from William Rotch Jr. bemoaning the cruelty of the slave trade is followed by one about shipping eight hundred barrels of whale oil to Charleston, then the most important port in the US slave trade and, after New York, the second wealthiest city in North America. The Rotches familial conscience would reject human killing but would look the other way when it came to myriad other types of bloodshed and exploitation.
And so, thousands of ships (at least 3,572 from New Bedford alone between 1790 and 1870) set out in relentless search of cetaceans, armed to the hilt with harpoons, spades to immobilize the whales’ flukes, exploding bomb lances, and blades to reach deep into an animal’s lungs. They came equipped with ropes and spades, hooks and winches, prepared to tear flesh from bone, with fires kindled and blubber rendered and stored belowdecks.
The whale ship was an industrial killing machine trailing a thick black smoke and an unrelenting foul odor. The industry supported a vast set of other enterprises as well, from building ships to manufacturing barrels, from forging hooks to elaborate financing, including bonds and insurance.
This returns us to the act of killing for capital. Wounded, a harpoon stuck in its side, a whale will either dive, hoping to “rid himself of the smarting iron,”29 or will swim in circles or attack the whaleboat. The whaler readies his lance. “The smart of the iron, the panic of fright and his efforts to escape cause the whale to seek safety,” until, with the great creature exhausted, the boat pulling alongside, the lance “is shoved into the whale’s vitals.” The dying whale struggles again, “lashing the waves into a maelstrom of churning froth and foam, spouting blood and crimsoning the sea, lifting his mighty flukes and smashing them down with the power of a hundred steamhammers, rearing his stupendous head” and then, finally, dying.30 “Whales has feelin’s as well as anybody,” reflected one hunter. Whalers knew this, most famously Melville, and a fact we now recognize but scarcely understand. “They don’t like to be stuck in the gizzards, an’ hauled alongside an’ cut in, an’ tried out in these here boilers no more’n I do!” And as we have seen, sperm whales occasionally fought back.
Whaling was hard, murderous work, leaving the shipmen “completely covered with fresh, hot blood.” The hunt made one’s “blood tingle” and “nerve[s] thrill,” if also bringing a “grim ugliness.” In The Gam, Charles Henry Robbins writes of military battle, its “human bereavement, human cruelty.” But in whaling, he observes, the killer has “impoverished no one. Instead, he has added to the world’s wealth.” Aboard the Clara Bell, Robbins hunted a particularly large sperm whale off Madagascar. Wounded with two harpoons, the whale stove two boats. After the men aboard them were rescued, the crew set out again: “The mate went to leeward of him and fired a bomb-lance into him, but missed his vitals.
Instantly the wounded creature turned about, heaved his head way out of water, opened his cavernous mouth, and made a frightful lunge for the mate’s boat. I was just in time. I stood in the bow of my boat, hardly able to wait long enough to choose the right spot for the stab. I was mad with excitement. I plunged the long lance deep into the whale’s vitals, and the blood came belching out of his spout-hole rich and red and warm.” Processed onboard the ship, the sperm whale “made a hundred and thirty barrels of oil,”31 enough fuel to keep a factory lit for a year. And a nation illuminated by blood was born.
9 Extinguishing Nature IN 1783 AS SAILORS SPECULATED about the cause of the strange frigid weather that year, a young man of modest means slowly made his way west across the Atlantic. The ship beat its way uncertainly against unusually strong winds, with its pine hull, buried deep in the water, carrying an assortment of goods to America. The treacherous conditions forced the boat to land at Baltimore rather than its intended destination of New York, although dangerous ice packs made even the Chesapeake difficult to navigate.
The traveler, born in the Duchy of Baden near Germany’s Black Forest, ended up spending four freezing months on this voyage from London to America, nearly four times the usual length of an oceanic crossing. He hoped to join his brother in New York City, the country’s commercial center and for a time its capital, through which large volumes of weapons entered yearly. The traveler’s cabin was filled with musical instruments manufactured by another brother who had settled in London. The young man now voyaging west had lived for four years with him, observing firsthand the juggernaut of commerce linking North America to England’s Industrial Revolution. Selling a few instruments in Baltimore made him enough money to continue north to New York, where he finally arrived in the spring of 1784, just months after the Treaty of Paris and Great Britain’s recognition of an independent United States of America.
Within months of his arrival, the twenty-one-year-old Johann or, as he was now calling himself, John Jacob Astor, was working in the fur trade, taking a wooden paddle to the pelts to beat away moths and arranging the goods into stacks for shipment to London. On his way to North America, he had convinced himself that in the fur trade he would “make my fortune.”1 With proper management of the business, the young Astor knew he could make profits as high as 1,000 percent, a fantastic rate of return and a sure path to great wealth. In just a few decades, the immigrant had become America’s richest man by extinguishing nature.
Astor was soon traveling up the Hudson River Valley, trading guns and other goods for pelts and bringing them down to Albany, an important town in the trade. From there, the pelts were transported to New York City, where they were loaded onto ships headed across the Atlantic. Just a few years earlier, a whirlwind of revolutionary violence had torn through this region, the worst it had seen in centuries if not millennia. Astor passed the ruins of colonial homes that had once seemed like forts and the charred remains of Indian villages and cornfields where the scattered bones of men, women, and children had begun disappearing into the earth. Land speculators had rushed in, along with former soldiers and others busily turning conquered territory into settler farms. Astor would soon join this charge, using money he had acquired from the fur trade to purchase twenty thousand acres of what had been Mohawk land.2 Astor was traveling through history’s wreckage into the future of America.
In the early American republic, genocide, ecocide, and nationalism were becoming inseparable, and Astor would become an avatar of all three, a pioneer of commerce and destruction. Everywhere there was the steady drumbeat of violence, which frequently broke out into war as settler aggression became little more than ethnic cleansing. In New York, across Pennsylvania, and into Kentucky and Ohio, native peoples were losing tens of millions of acres in various treaties, part of Thomas Jefferson’s plan for displacing native peoples and spreading white settlement westward. For the founding father and the warlords who created a new country, yeoman democracy would unfold on the backs of dispossessed Indigenous Americans and slaughtered animals.
*
The North American fur trade was more than two centuries old by the time Astor slogged his way north looking for peltries. Along the Atlantic seaboard, many areas had already been depleted of wildlife, their populations a fraction of what they once were. Astor swiftly learned of the extraordinarily rapid devastation of the natural world as colonists took over native lands and extirpated human and animal populations. He also noted the unquenchable native demand for Western goods, particularly guns, and realized that he might turn the mechanisms of credit and debt to his advantage. Some of the earliest pelts Astor acquired came from considerable distances, sometimes from a thousand miles west, and their price rose with each change of hands as they made their way to his store in New York City. Three years after his arrival in America he traveled nearly four hundred miles to Montreal, where he acquired pelts from the North West Company, the great competitor of the pioneering Hudson’s Bay Company. Soon after, he ventured west to the area around Michilimackinac where Lakes Huron and Michigan meet: this was the historic source of North America’s pelts and an area into which massive numbers of weapons were flowing. Just beyond Michilimackinac, in what settlers saw as the wilderness, lay enormous supplies of beaver and other mammals.
Within a remarkably short time Astor had traveled thousands of miles, selling guns and other articles and obtaining every kind of pelt he could get his hands on. Warm clothes were at a premium in Astor’s world. For the most part, Indigenous Americans managed to keep warm and nourished during the frigid winters with their animal hides and stored foodstuffs, even when temperatures plummeted to −50°F (−45°C) and left the frozen earth as hard as stone.
Across the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, others were less fortunate. Hearths burning wood could only do so much, and many areas used so much firewood that a decline in forests followed. Coal was better although not yet widely available. Peasants would bring their animals into the home, sleeping snuggled up to cow, sheep, or horse, but every winter many thousands still succumbed to hypothermia and malnutrition. In the middle years of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the Little Ice Age temperatures plummeted, and the need to bundle up helped spread the fleas that brought the bubonic plague, which killed at least two hundred million people.3 Across Eurasia, the population of fur-bearing animals whose pelts might offer protection against the cold declined precipitously throughout the medieval period. In many areas they disappeared. Beaver once widely found from Scotland through Russia nearly went extinct. Beginning in the 1600s, Europe’s steady population growth created an even higher demand for peltries. The same was true in China, which saw political stability and economic growth with the rise of the Qing dynasty from the middle of the seventeenth century. Chinese demand for peltries far outstripped supply; at one point a sea otter was worth eighteen times more in Canton than on California’s coast.4 Indigenous America would come to the rescue. Europeans first arrived in North America looking for fish, where off the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts cod as long as six feet and weighing over one hundred pounds were so abundant that they could almost be scooped right out of the sea. The early European arrivals soon discovered the largest and densest population of furred animals anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Beaver became the single most desired pelt, sought after not for its skin (which could be turned into leather or boiled down into glue) but instead for the animal’s soft undercoat, or what manufacturers across Europe called beaver “wool.” This wool had to be separated from the coarser outer hairs before it could be felted, often with a mercury-containing solution that poisoned workers, thus bequeathing to us the phrase “mad as a hatter,” and helped pollute rivers across Europe.5 European governments lacked the power to organize the international trade that would bring pelts to their kingdoms from across the Atlantic.
Instead, they granted private companies the sole right to trade over vast expanses of land and thus secure North America’s natural resources. In return for these privileges, according to the policies of mercantilism, the animal skins must be reserved for exclusive use by industries in the home country. Using symbols and powers we typically associate with sovereign states—their own flags, currencies, and, if necessary, the power to wage war—these companies were soon trading alcohol, metals, woolen blankets, and especially guns for beaver and other pelts.6 Animals didn’t stand a chance.
As the French and the Dutch quickly learned, weapons yielded the greatest number of pelts.
Workshops in Paris and across the Netherlands were soon busily tailoring gun manufacturing to accommodate Indigenous demand.
North America emerged as a crucial market for these weapons, guns as much as five feet long that could fire balls half an inch in diameter, their side plates often adorned with fearsome-looking serpents fashioned in brass. Heavily armed Dutch West India Company ships lumbered up the Hudson River to Fort Orange (Albany), fighting the current of two to three knots and laden with weapons and other goods, including wampum shells from New England shores, used by Indigenous Americans as a currency and, crucially, to foster relationships. In the summer and fall, these same ships returned downstream, their holds now filled with beaver and other pelts supplied by Mohawk hunters, and entered the Atlantic Ocean near Manhattan on their long voyage home to Europe.7 Tens of thousands of guns manufactured in Paris, Tulle, Liège, and elsewhere, along with many tons of powder and lead, made their way up the St. Lawrence River from French Montreal into the Great Lakes and west toward the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Here there were various chartered companies, most famously the Company of One Hundred Associates, established in 1627.
French practice tended to be less orderly than that of the Dutch and later the British. The flow of guns and pelts depended on independent traders, coureurs de bois (meaning “woods runners”). This dispersal of men through the continent’s forested riparian worlds meant that European traders took native women as wives, and their offspring were métis, meaning “mixed.” Métis would play an important role in the fractious imperial politics of the region between France and Britain as trade spread violence and disease and as animal populations dwindled.8 In the 1660s, the British took over from the Dutch and renamed the territory New York. The following decade, the Crown granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Formed at the dawn of the militarycommercial revolution, the company pioneered the North American fur trade and laid claim to nearly a quarter of the North American continent and much of what would become Canada. Based in the city’s financial district, with which it had close ties, the company helped propel the country’s banking and industrial revolutions, including the provisioning of arms and various industries that depended on North American raw goods.
And if the Dutch and French led the way in trading weapons during the seventeenth century, it was the British who dominated the arming of North America in the eighteenth century, shipping millions of pounds of gunpowder and shot and lead into Canada and the thirteen colonies. Exports to the thirteen colonies collapsed during the American Revolutionary War but took off again after the 1783 Treaty of Paris formally ended hostilities with the British.
The War of 1812 severely disrupted the arms trade once again, but well into the nineteenth century North America persisted as an important market for the British arms industry even as US producers began flooding the continent with homegrown weapons, lead, and powder.
* For over a century leading up to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which ended twenty years before Astor arrived in America, Indians largely dictated the fur trade, especially in Canada with its minuscule European population and its Arctic weather that left Hudson’s Bay a desolate wasteland: imagine supplies of rum frozen solid and merchants dependent on Indians for their very survival.9 At first, hunting and trading followed the seasons. Beaver taken in winter and early spring produced the richest pelts.
Indigenous Americans historically did not set traps for beavers. Instead, they cut holes in the ice near a den, dipping a net made of leather straps into the still-flowing water and patiently hoping to catch an animal. Or they would simply wait for a beaver to appear and kill it with the deft throw of a spear.
But the demand for peltries and the spread of weapons and other goods began creating different rhythms for hunting, ones that subtly but irrevocably transformed Indigenous American life. Europeans advanced goods against promised pelts, often to native trade leaders or “captains.” The status of these early and heavily armed men stemmed from their ability to receive goods in advance and then redistribute them to their local communities.
Trade with Europeans thus reworked an ancient practice by which the triumphant hunter’s authority grew by sharing the fruits of his success. This time-honored code—that sharing brought honor and influence, just as hoarding invited derision—still worked against the accumulation of wealth, but now it also accelerated predation. Whatever Indigenous peoples acquired by exchanging furs for European goods, they were expected “to give to the populace.” No matter how deeply they participated in trade, chiefs and other leading men remained “generally the poorest among them.”10 The more one had, the more one gave away, which meant the more one had to kill.
Across the early decades of the fur trade, hunting and trading had not affected Indigenous people’s ability to secure food. Nor had trade disrupted customs such as marriage and mourning, exchanging wampum, and those calumet ceremonies where the sharing of a pipe encouraged peace and unity and the protection of guardian spirits. Men disappearing for months on end had been an expected feature of native North American life for centuries. In many areas within the broad region that supplied beaver to companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, the beaver population did not suffer irreparable declines initially. But this tenuous balance would soon change, at first slowly and then much faster, as European trade demands intensified and muskets became more widely available. And throughout, newly traded and acquired goods seemed to melt away like the spring snows. Guns broke. Cloth frayed. Alcohol disappeared into addiction. Over time, the value of everything that people had once treasured began dissolving. Soon, Indigenous people were destroying with abandon the very animals they had once believed were their brothers and sisters.
The advantages of the new weapons were undeniable. Sticks spewed fire and killed instantly. The iron that came across the great ocean turned arrows and hatchets into deadlier weapons. The twin means of destruction and commerce sent waves of violence crashing into the North American interior.
The region from Maine through the Great Lakes—known to the French as the Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country)—became engulfed in what seemed like endless war. For over a century, more weapons flowed into this area than in any other part of North America, at a rate comparable to the weapons import in West Africa at the catastrophic height of the slave trade.11 A region once exceptionally rich in beaver, muskrat, deer, elk, bear, and other furred animals was quickly denuded. Tens of millions of animal skins ended up on ships bound for the four corners of the world.
The violence spread west from Quebec to the western Great Lakes, a distance of 1,200 miles, much of it generated by the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Among the first Indigenous Americans to acquire large numbers of muskets, they pioneered the fur trade east of the Mississippi. The new world of killing and commerce suited Iroquois culture, with its emphasis on masculine prowess and aggression and gift giving as a way of creating ties of obligation and building manly authority. War chiefs and other leaders became warlords.
The Great League, the meeting of the five nations, had once sought consensus; in previous generations, the calumet and the distribution of beaded wampum belts had helped mend conflict and calm human passions.
Now this league dedicated itself to unrelenting war. Armed with guns, metal hatchets, and neatly curved scalping knives forged in European workshops, the Iroquois expanded their control with breathtaking speed and ferocity, shooting deer and attacking people, especially people carrying beaver pelts, and taking large numbers of slaves. The so-called Beaver Wars, unfolding over much of the seventeenth century, extended past Lake Erie to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, deep into Ohio, and south through Virginia’s Piedmont of gentle hills and blue mountains.12 FIGURE 9.1. Iroquois warrior (ca. 1797), armed with a musket and a European scalping knife. Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, engraving by L. F. Labroussecea. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Raids broke out into wars across a region of half a million square miles that initially abounded with beaver and other animals, from the western shores of Hudson’s Bay southwest to the Missouri River. The widening availability of guns constantly shifted the balance of power in these contests. One year a tribe with muskets and iron-tipped arrows might easily vanquish a less well-armed tribe, returning home with captive women, pelts, and a collection of human scalps. A few years later as weapons invariably made their way farther into the interior and previously isolated and vulnerable peoples emerged newly armed, retribution might come swift and deadly.
These extraordinary waves of violence in the middle of the continent rose up amid rapidly declining animal populations and disease outbreaks that decimated communities. Smallpox, measles, and influenza followed war and commerce, as if the goods people desired brought a terrible curse. The evil forces whipping through the forests that brought disfiguring disease and death seemed to hold sway, no matter what people did to try to assuage them, not even sacrifice. At times, so many native people died at once that it became impossible to provide a proper burial. Entire villages that once bustled with life fell silent. Muskets were turned to taking captives who became slaves and dependent laborers particularly from tribes to the west, needed to replace those who had been lost or ritually executed to halt a world gone awry.
The spread of weapons and other technological changes combined with international trade—the military-commercial revolution—tremendously accelerated the destruction of animals. People turned their imported iron hatchets and guns to destroying dens and killing every beaver they could find. Pursuing beaver and other animals became a year-round occupation, with hunters even shooting the animals during summer, when the quality of the coat was inferior and bullets would damage the pelt. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, metal traps began spreading across North America as a new killing mechanism.
The trap’s spring-loaded jaws proved highly effective. They instantly became an important trade good, in some areas as important as guns, soon followed by castoreum, or secretions from the beaver’s castor glands, used as trap bait. The combination radically accelerated the obliteration of remaining beaver populations. The Iroquois, for example, “with their Traps . . .
totally destroyed” the animal population across the regions they controlled. By midcentury, metal traps were being used throughout the Ohio River region; within three decades, they had made their way to the Pacific coast.13 While more and more animals were being killed and trade was accelerating, debt in the region was also skyrocketing. Indigenous people might return to their trading forts in “summer with barely as much rubbish of damaged beaver as pays their debt,” noted an Englishman writing from Hudson Bay. “The natives that gets debt seldom catches more furs than barely pays it.” Trade goods were becoming too expensive, some Iroquois complained, since “the Beavers must be fetched a great ways” away.
Weapons were now turned to stealing beaver pelts. Neither “rubbish” pelts nor theft did much, however, to extricate the indebted from their obligations. Across large expanses that had once teemed with animals, Indians increasingly suffered from “crushing debt to traders.” Heavily armed white settlers began venturing out, seeking “to collect” what they “were owed to them by the Indians,” including pursuing the widows of native men who had died owing them pelts. These newcomers also began confiscating native land.14 Settler numbers ballooned during this period, rising sixfold to 1.7 million between 1700 and 1770. In many areas, especially across New England, they now greatly outnumbered Indigenous peoples.
Traders and settlers were infiltrating the Ohio Valley and beyond, and everywhere they went, conflict and tragedy followed. Trade and violence had always been close cousins in North America, but in the eighteenth century they became more like conjoined twins. Becoming a warlord was a proven way to thrive and get rich quickly, especially in frontier areas where capital was scarce. To this end, settlers on the make sold guns and other goods, created relationships of credit and debt with Indians, engaged in often spectacular violence, and then used whatever money they accrued to acquire land.
Settler warlords earned a well-deserved reputation for viciousness and unscrupulous practices: rigging scales, selling defective goods, and spreading alcohol and weapons deep into the North American interior, not to mention indulging in outright theft and murder.
Their activities had a growing impact. Beginning in 1756 with the Seven Years’ War, a quarter century of brutal conflict broke out east of the Mississippi in precisely those areas where the military-commercial revolution was transforming the lives of people and animals.
This war was as much a conflict between the British and French as it was a crisis wrought by the spread of weapons, collapsing animal populations, ferocious competition, and the growth of white settlement, and it was fought as much by official militaries as by largely independent private militias and native proxies headed by warlords. To Indigenous America and especially to peoples such as the Iroquois trying to survive in an increasingly hostile world, what became called the Seven Years’ War represented little more than a continuation of conflicts that had been unfolding for a century.
What was new, however, was the pivotal role played by American colonists with their guns and record amounts of gunpowder entering the continent. Strongmen such as George Washington headed provincial militia forces of a thousand or more men, mostly poor or impoverished, who spread violence and plunder deep into Indian country.
15 The war offered an excuse for pillaging, conquering, and annihilating nature. Across the region and into Ohio, young backcountry men, many in their late teens and twenties, destroyed everything they could not carry away, leaving natives dead and their villages in smoldering ruins. The deaths of thousands of settlers in the war, including their scalping and mutilation, only encouraged more such brutalities, leading London officials to express growing concern about the further spread of violence and to wonder aloud about how best to control their unruly colonists.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris that expelled the French and secured British control did nothing to stem the tide of warfare in North America. The treaty turned a global conflict into a regional contest, one that would soon pit the English and their native proxies against increasingly rowdy settlers. The ink had barely dried on the treaty when Indian groups attacked the British and weakened their pretensions to hegemony across the Pays d’en Haut. The result was Pontiac’s War (1763–1764), a vicious conflict across the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. Shaped by prophetic Indian visions that promised the disappearance of settlers and a return of the animals upon which people depended, the war ended mostly in a “stalemate,” according to the politicians, with violence continuing much as before and raids and counterraids now engulfing large parts of the region east of the Mississippi.16 The costs of these conflicts to the British Crown were considerable. And they were rising. Settlers convinced themselves that the Indians had been vanquished and that they themselves would have free rein to expand their own hunting, trade, and settlement far into the interior; indeed, they believed, they had a God-given right to the kind of wanton pillaging that Washington had helped perfect during the Seven Years’ War. Arms shipments scarcely slowed with the end of Pontiac’s War. The settlers now had more weapons, not fewer. And they were eager to use them.
They would be bitterly disappointed, at least for a while: the British began instituting policies that left almost everyone unhappy. The 1763 Proclamation Line, aimed at stopping colonial expansion and the expropriation of Indian land, failed to accomplish anything except provoking the settlers’ ire. Colonial settlement pressed westward and with it land speculation, more violence, and renewed participation by colonists in the fur trade. The demand for fur continued rising and with it the importance of securing access to peltries amid rapidly disappearing animal populations.
Attempts to centralize control of the fur trade also failed miserably. The British decided to recognize Indigenous peoples as so many sovereign nations and then to manage trade by issuing licenses, insisting that exchanges only take place at specified Indian towns in the south and forts in the north, or what came to be known as “factories.” These sites would be staffed by bureaucrats who reported to a regional superintendent.
Commissaries would enforce prices according to tariffs that would be established in consultation with both the traders and their native customers and would prohibit the sale of “rum, or other spirituous liquors, [and] swan shot or rifled barralled Guns.” Commissaries were also empowered as justices of the peace, capable, at least in theory, of nullifying the debts of any Indian to whom traders extended credit beyond the sum of fifty shillings.
To London, these new policies seemed like a step in the right direction, substituting a set of uniform practices and firm “Authority from the Crown” for what had been a hodgepodge of colonial trading practices. But this was a fool’s gambit, an attempt to solve one set of problems by inadvertently inventing others. Settlers detested the new policies, which they lumped together with hated laws such as the 1765 Stamp Act that sought to raise revenue to pay off war debt and, later, the Coercive or Intolerable Acts. The latter shuttered Boston’s harbor and increased the power of the Massachusetts governor, appointed by King George III in response to growing settler unrest. Settlers demanded nothing less than free trade, which meant an unrestricted flow of weapons and the freedom to move wherever and acquire whatever they wanted. The colonists had no interest in recognizing the sovereignty of Indian tribes, a status they themselves did not enjoy and that implied at least a modicum of political equality between themselves and the Indians. To colonists, America was nature writ large and in need of civilizing, by which they meant conquest, dispossession, and annihilation. For many, independence would become a license to kill.
The colonists subverted British policies with abandon. Everywhere they went, conflict erupted. The British could not govern the increasingly irate, indeed out-of-control, settler population. In 1775 just before the outbreak of war, weapons imports came to a screeching halt. A year earlier, New England had imported over eighty thousand pounds of gunpowder; in 1775, not a single barrel arrived. It was as if rulers an ocean away believed they could somehow disarm the colonists by political fiat and stop the spread of violence. But the colonists saw something very different in the withholding of weapons: they saw an oppressor stripping away their birthright and exposing them to Indian attacks.
The same year as the Intolerable Acts and just two years before the Declaration of Independence, a new wave of violence broke out west of the Appalachian Mountains, where the fur trade was growing rapidly, followed by white settlement. Colonists had been flatly violating the accords by which British authorities had attempted to stabilize the western frontier.
Within this world arose mythic figures such as Daniel Boone (1734–1820).
Boone was no plebeian, however much he roughed it on America’s frontier. He was a warlord and soon to be a rich one. He thrived on the fur trade and land speculation, meting out violence against Indigenous peoples, especially the Shawnees, and he helped lead a wave of vicious white conquest across Appalachia. Boone knew that terrorizing native communities returned handsome profits, and his heading a militia offered a sure route to the acquisition of more land.17 As conflict and commerce escalated in the 1770s, some encroaching colonists were tortured and dismembered by Indigenous warriors, acts that —not surprisingly—alarmed many settlers and confirmed their belief that only genocide would bring them peace. Desperate to regain control but often unsure how, the British turned to enlisting and arming Indian allies against the colonists, a decision that added salt to the wounds of frustrated colonial expansion.
Some of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolution took place in the heart of the fur trade networks, precisely where the exchange of guns for pelts was strongest. Early victories by Loyalist-Haudenosaunee forces in 1777–1778 were followed by a brutal Patriot campaign that led to indiscriminate, indeed near-genocidal, violence and widespread plunder.
One key goal was to crush any British-Indian alliance. Another was to open up land to white hunting and settlement. Destroying Iroquois crops to cause human starvation was an early tactic. “It will be essential,” Washington wrote in May 1779, “to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent them planting more.” America’s future first president perfected what he had pioneered two decades earlier in the Seven Years’ War. The natives were to be “destroyed,” he explained, which also meant laying waste to the natives’ environment. The Indians would call Washington Conotocaurious, the Town Destroyer.
18 One historian has described the assault on the Iroquois during and after the American Revolution as “the most ruthless application of a scorchedearth policy in American history.”19 The Iroquois empire had collapsed, its numbers reduced to just six thousand, half of what it had been a century earlier. The violence continued right up to 1783, followed by a steady stream of white settlers who spread wanton land speculation. The whites took possession of lands that months earlier had been aflame, with the fields and homes of Iroquois turned to ashes. As freezing weather descended on Fort Stanwix in October 1784, near where the leaders of the initial five Iroquois nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) had met for centuries to renew their common identity, the Iroquois Confederacy (now six nations) signed away most of its lands in one of the first treaties of an independent United States of America. The “violently cold” winter that struck much of the Northern Hemisphere that year seemed, to the Iroquois, the inevitable result of a world crumbling before their eyes. No calumet could summon the guardian spirits now. Only the prophecies that had begun spreading from Indiana to New York and deep into the South offered any solace: the lands would stop “decaying,” the suffering the settlers had wrought would end, and one day the world would be reborn, with the animals that had been their kin at last returning.20 *
Traveling through the American Revolution’s recent devastations and a history of violence and trade reaching back nearly two centuries, Astor discovered that one secret to enormous wealth lay in the arms trade. Guns were in high demand, especially with the rapid westward expansion of settlers and rising borderland conflict. Selling weapons was the best way to obtain furs and produced the greatest profits, money he could use to both expand his mercantile empire to Asia and engage in land and financial speculation in his new home country. Astor’s trader employees were beginning to exert significant control over parts of the interior. Within a decade, Astor stood on the cusp of becoming North America’s leading merchant warlord. Through his hands flowed more weaponry than the US government owned: hundreds of tons of English gunpowder and shot, an assortment of cannons, and thousands of muskets, pistols, swords, and bayonets. This flood of weapons caught the attention of British officials, the American secretary of state, and President George Washington. Some questioned Astor’s patriotism; others alleged that he was part of a conspiracy involving French Canadians who wanted to reclaim their lost colony.
Astor’s interests were not so grand or lofty. He just wanted to make money, and lots of it.21 Despite his disinterest in political scheming, he found himself embroiled in more than one national or international controversy, especially the fractious and violent politics along the new border between Canada and the United States. While the 1783 Treaty of Paris formally concluded the war, in many ways that conflict never ended.
The violence merely shifted west, into Ohio and what would be called the Michigan Territory as well as along the Niagara River that formed the country’s new northern border: the greater Pays d’en Haut region, where conflict had been intensifying since the mid-eighteenth century and the same lands through which Astor now traveled.
Astor had begun his career feverishly moving between New York and Montreal and west into the Great Lakes, selling arms and purchasing furs.
Now, throughout the 1780s and 1790s, he bristled at the competition coming from Canada as a spigot of weapons flowed west up the St.
Lawrence. He was becoming increasingly wealthy, buying up land and investing in other businesses; monopolizing the fur trade was the easiest path to accumulating more capital.
The controversial 1794 Jay’s Treaty restored trade with the British and ceded certain trading posts in the “west” to the Americans, steps in the right direction, he believed. But to his bitter frustration, Canadian traders could still freely operate in American territories. And instead of offering greater protection, the US government retained only weak control over the frontier, and in many locales it was completely absent. British officials took advantage of the power vacuum, continuing to develop Indian alliances to undermine American expansion, part of their strategy to bring the bankrupt new country to its knees. As the region from Niagara to Detroit edged toward another war, Astor watched in frustration as companies based in Canada got in on the action, dominating trade across the Great Lakes and exchanging enormous quantities of weaponry, alcohol, and cloth in exchange for furs.22 A second and related issue concerned domestic politics, especially federal oversight of the Indian trade.
From the beginning, American officials had sought to control trade, one reason why a near-constant flow of policies came from the halls of power. One law would be passed, only to be repealed by another scarcely after the ink had dried on the first. Indian policy was a mess.23 Jefferson and other leaders supported settler expansion, but they feared the expenses of war, aware that their infant country hovered on the edge of financial collapse.
Much to Astor’s disappointment and to the exasperation of many American citizens, the new US government continued many of the British policies that had helped lead to the Revolutionary War. The 1786 Indian Ordinance, for instance, created a system of superintendents and required trading licenses, replicating British policy with an American nationalist patina. A decade later, the 1795 Treaty of Greenville brought temporary closure to the grisly war in Ohio, asserting American trading rights and surrendering the region to white settlement. The treaty represented Indigenous America as nations having fixed territories, that is, sovereign territories that could be expropriated if necessary or transformed into reservations.
The same year as the Treaty of Greenville, Congress created the Office of Indian Trade, organized around government trading forts, or the so-called factory system. The policies of this new office closely resembled British practices that had attempted—and failed—to control its unruly imperial frontiers. Tribes constituted so many independent polities to be managed by treaty. The new law attempted to exert government control over the Indian trade, going so far as to place it under the direct authority of the president, a far cry from the free trade Astor demanded. Trade was as much a part of diplomacy as of commerce, a way that the new state might insinuate itself into an economy that, until recently, had been dominated by British chartered companies. Under this law, private trade was explicitly banned, and in the mercantilist tradition, trade in general would be heavily regulated, from licenses to factories to an entire bureaucracy, however ineffectual. Or at least some in the capital hoped it would be regulated.
They soon faced disappointment on that front if not abject failure.
By the end of the 1790s Astor had become a phenomenally rich man, using his profits from weapons and furs to acquire tens of thousands of acres, including large parts of Manhattan, and building a business empire that would soon extend from Canton to Moscow. He had moved from his cramped apartment above a shop in New York City to a posh section of Broadway and then to a large estate off 85th Street, where he surveilled the commercial traffic moving up and down the Harlem and East Rivers. Dour and taciturn as well as litigious, the butcher’s son had finally become respectable, no longer trudging through the mud with his weapons and furs on his way to and from unruly Canada. Some might still find him uncouth, but few could deny his power or influence. At Masonic temple meetings, Astor schemed about how best to conquer America’s natural resources as he hobnobbed with the city’s political elites, men who had signed the Declaration of Independence and were helping govern the young country.
Soon, Astor was taking a carriage down to Philadelphia and then to the new seat of government in Washington, DC.
As the century ended, Astor had the ear of the country’s most powerful leaders (some of whom owed him money). These confidantes included Thomas Jefferson; Alexander Hamilton; Hamilton’s soon-to-be nemesis and killer, Vice President Aaron Burr; James Madison; and Albert Gallatin, who served as treasury secretary in the Jefferson and Madison administrations and played a prominent role in shaping the early republic’s domestic and international economic policies.24 Yet despite his connections and his wealth, Astor struggled to convince officials to address the threats that the British still presented along the northern border or to open the West to free trade. A year before the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson urged Congress to pass laws regulating trade generally and the exchange of alcohol in particular, a call that led to the 1802 “Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes, and to Preserve Peace on the Frontiers.” This law, which would be constantly updated, represented exactly what Astor did not want to see: it preserved the government regulation he sought to overturn. Instead of fostering free trade, the law continued the practice of requiring traders to be licensed (the policy was restricted to American citizens) and forbade the sale of liquor. The law also extended an earlier policy that tried to confine trade to established government “factories” or “trading houses.”25 Frustrated by federal policy and British competition, Astor began reaching out to fur traders in St. Louis, mostly French settlers who had been making their way up and down the Mississippi River and into the West for decades, selling guns and goods on credit and acquiring pelts from the Osage and other tribes before shipping these goods to New Orleans. That city was becoming a vital terminus in the fur and arms trade; in the early decades of the nineteenth century, more British weapons would arrive in New Orleans than in any other port in North America. A number of these men were becoming wealthy and establishing themselves as powerful warlords, and their influence extended from St. Louis many hundreds of miles up the Missouri River into areas controlled by the Arikara, Sioux, and other tribes.
The Chouteau family, whose members dominated early St. Louis’s politics and economy and would join forces with Astor years later, laid claim to large areas of this region, disseminating weapons, metal traps, and debt; muscling out competitors; and regularly heading raids in the interior.
26 With the Louisiana Purchase, a vast area rich with animals was now open to trade. In 1808 Astor formed the American Fur Company, setting his immediate sights on dominating the Pays d’en Haut but with the long-term goal of introducing the region west of the Mississippi to free trade, or at least his version of it, which meant forcing British interests out of American territory, squashing challengers, and turning just about any animal that had fur into a tradable commodity. His intention, Astor wrote to Jefferson, was “engaging in an extensive trade with the Indians” in the West. Astor was also eager to establish an American beachhead on the Pacific to counter British and Russian merchants. From there, he planned to ship pelts directly to Asia, where he was already “considerably engag’d in the China trade.”27 Retired from formal politics and now ensconced in his Monticello plantation, Jefferson lauded Astor for his vision for a “great, free & independent empire.” “Your name,” Jefferson wrote, “will be handed down with that of Columbus & Raleigh,” great discoverers of the Americas and founders of empires.28 Others remained skeptical. James Madison harbored deep suspicions that what Astor really wanted was to establish a monopoly, which Madison, a free trade ideologue, viewed as “contrary to constitutional principles” and the country’s founding.29 The violence across the country’s northern border that had continued largely uninterrupted since the 1750s exploded again in the War of 1812.
Contrary to what some of our old history books have suggested, that conflict was never just between the British and the Americans. Like the American Revolution, it was also fundamentally a war against native peoples on America’s frontier and a contest over who would profit from environmental destruction. Some of the worst carnage in 1812 unfolded across the same greater Ohio region where Astor had grown rich exchanging weapons for peltries. Astor worried that the war would disrupt trade and, worse, that the British might seize his assets. He also calculated that it might be possible to take advantage of the bloodshed. “All the traders or nearly so are more or less in debt to me,” he wrote to Ramsay Crooks, his righthand man on the frontier in Mackinac. The time was ripe “to take hold of the whole” trade. Astor kept up a brisk business, while Indians aligned with the British attacked American settlers and hammered stakes through their bodies and settler assaults left thousands of Indians dead and many more starving, their villages and towns destroyed and their property plundered. Amid all this human destruction, the animal population plummeted still further.
30 The 1814 Treaty of Ghent brought the War of 1812 to a close, with the British finally—and reluctantly—recognizing American sovereignty. By the end of the war, Astor had secured his position as the country’s most powerful private citizen and its richest man. Treasury Secretary Gallatin had approached Astor to help finance the war with the British. The country’s leading politicians were now beholden to the once gunrunner and fur trader and now the very rich New Yorker, in many cases quite literally.
31 Change came swiftly, sort of. The Jay’s Treaty of 1794 that had protected British traders did come to an end; two years later under intense lobbying by Astor, the 1816 Indian Intercourse Act formally restricted trade to American citizens. (How to determine citizenship in the western territories was unclear. Astor needed workers. He cleverly negotiated with the government to employ noncitizens, and during the war he therefore was able to keep up a trade with the British in Canada.) But the British continued selling large quantities of weapons and alcohol, despite American government and corporate protests, and raids and counterraids continued.
As late as 1819, the American Fur Company was still complaining that the Hudson’s Bay Company seemed absolutely “determined upon sending Goods + Liquor within the limits of the United States.”32 Worried that violence in the Michigan Territory might result in the area “again” coming “under the dominion of Britain,” Astor’s henchman Crooks headed to St.
Louis, where he was certain he could obtain beaver and deerskins.33 Although the northern border remained porous and contentious, Astor was beginning to profit from the consolidation of American control and the country’s enormous growth with the Louisiana Purchase. His business interests now ranged across the globe. He ordered weapons designed and made for the fur trade beyond the Mississippi River, many manufactured in Birmingham and London by one of the world’s largest gunmakers for the American market.
He also began acquiring weapons from workshops in Pennsylvania and especially in Connecticut and Massachusetts that were swiftly transforming the United States into a global arms producer.
As if he wasn’t powerful enough already, Astor also had a direct line to the president and his cabinet, including the secretary of war, who oversaw Indian policy, as well as influential members of Congress. Astor had helped bankroll the War of 1812, after all. In 1816 with the country deeply in debt and without a national bank for four years, Astor played a leading role in chartering the Second Bank of the United States, based in Philadelphia. He would head the all-important New York branch and would become one of the bank’s main investors, reinvesting his fur trade profits in the new world of modern finance.
Another major figure in the bank’s creation was South Carolina congressman (and later secretary of war, vice president, and South Carolina senator) John C. Calhoun, who would become one of the country’s most vocal defenders of slavery. Within months of its creation, the Second Bank of the United States, with its well-dressed warlord leaders, was providing credit across much of the American South, fueling land speculation and Indian dispossession and playing a crucial role in the rise of cotton production, including bankrolling the internal slave trade that brought millions of enslaved people into states such as Alabama and Mississippi. In just a few decades, the Cotton South would become one of the wealthiest places in the world and was essential to the rise of coal-based industries in England and the United States as factory workers spun millions of yards of cloth.34 A once frontier region now played a central part in the rise of a fossil fuel economy.
With these and other changes, the British Empire was finally giving way to a new one, the American empire. Securing commercial dominance of the territory was becoming inseparable from conquest and the emergence of a fully fledged settler empire. Everyone knew that the remaining supplies of furred animals lay in Indian country, west of the Mississippi. East of Lake Michigan, beaver populations had largely disappeared; the eastern region had become less a place to trade than to colonize, turning lands into farms intended to supply food for America’s burgeoning cities. Everyone also knew that trade had become inextricably tied to violence. And everyone knew that settlers—now American citizens—coveted Indian land.
FIGURE 9.2. Astor Place, New York City, 2023. Courtesy of Kenneth Mills.
Astor had long railed against monopolies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, even as he was busily building one himself, declaring to New York’s governor that he intended to control “the whole of the furr Trade” all the way to the Pacific Ocean.35 Astute observers realized that Astor wanted the American Fur Company to become “one vast engine of monopoly,”36 as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney put it. The end of the War of 1812 had answered the issue of British competition; the problem of Indian trade remained unresolved, a thorn in the New York strongman’s side. Astor and his associates launched an aggressive lobbying effort, pushing everyone from the president to members of Congress to end the government-controlled factory system and open the West to free trade.
Alcohol was a particular sore spot that went back to the colonial era, although attempts to regulate Indian access to alcohol rarely met with much success. It was cheap to produce, a ready by-product of the settler agricultural revolution, and was in great demand across the West. Precisely because it was consumed and disappeared (and was addictive), alcohol made an ideal trade product, just as it was also a key item in the Atlantic slave trade.
Unsurprisingly, the American Fur Company built its own distillery in North Dakota, shipping barrels of corn from St. Louis and converting it into liquor that was traded to the Sioux.37 Trade in guns also proved difficult to regulate. After all, Indians wanted them, so Astor argued. Political power and successful trade for settler and native alike now depended on having guns; losing access to them spelled disaster. Thanks to Astor and other traders, thousands of muskets made their way into Indian hands in exchange for pelts. From the beginning Astor had been involved in the trade of weapons, purchasing them from English manufacturers and, increasingly, from the burgeoning American weapons industry. Now in the early 1800s, he moved more guns west, not fewer.
They remained vital to his entire system.
But in the minds of most American settlers, arming native peoples didn’t sound like such a wise idea. The Indian had become, increasingly, the enemy and wasn’t going anywhere.
Although various efforts to prohibit the sale or even the repair of weapons had been put forth earlier, during the colonial period those measures had all failed.38 Now in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Indian populations east of the Mississippi were expanding, not shrinking, in some areas rising by more than half from their late eighteenth-century lows. In the West, epidemics regularly swept away large numbers of native peoples, but Indigenous populations weren’t vanishing, contrary to American mythmaking. In many areas, their power was growing. And everywhere, land and guns remained vital to their survival.39 Here was a fundamental paradox for American merchants: pursuing economic self-interest meant placing settler self-preservation at risk on the other end. The arms trade was extremely lucrative. Muskets, shot, and powder were the most valued items of exchange, yielding large numbers of pelts in return. Politically, however, the practice made no sense. The American Fur Company was arming the enemy.
Astor blithely denied that there was a problem. A champion of free trade under the banner of American patriotism, he presented trapping and trading as a democratic right. He claimed to want to free up trade west of the Mississippi, but what he really wanted was to freely create a monopoly, as if it was the logical outcome of free trade and the destruction of nature.
Standing in his way was the factory system of government trading forts, which had centralized and controlled trade under direct state supervision.
But as officials themselves had begun recognizing, this system was becoming unworkable given the “large number of American traders.” “Private trade,” officials realized, was becoming ever “more extensive.” The attempt to manage it centrally had “few, if any[,] advocates; and I presume will certainly and readily be abandoned.”40 Congress finally caved. In 1822, legislators abolished the factory system while still requiring the issuing of licenses and prohibiting trade in alcohol.
While this legislation did not completely satisfy Astor, it did secure his ability to cement control over the western fur trade. “Free commerce” had triumphed. Indians and traders no longer had to meet at government posts to exchange their wares; settlers were free to become trappers. The vast expanse of America was now open for business.41 *
With the ending of the factory system, the American Fur Company immediately began establishing outposts on the Missouri River. Within a few years, heavily armed and palisaded company trading forts rose up deep in the Dakotas and in territories controlled by the Sioux.
Trading forts also sprang up on the Kansas and Republican Rivers into Colorado, along the usually sluggish Platte River that ran through Nebraska and Wyoming prairies from its source in the Grand Tetons, and on many smaller rivers such as the Cheyenne. Barges, pirogues, and keelboats made their way upriver filled with weapons and other goods, returning stacked high with peltries as the men aboard jealously guarded their merchandise, fearful that the same guns the company traded might be turned against them. Steamboats, already used by the company on the Great Lakes, soon began appearing on the frontier too and with their arrival the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the American West.
Boats were as much warships as commercial vessels, many equipped with cannons and eight-pound swivel guns mounted on the bow and stern. The first steamboat to head up the Missouri was the Western Engineer in 1819, its paddles churning the muddy waters as it headed to the Yellowstone River a thousand miles from St. Louis. The boat flew a large flag depicting a white and an Indian shaking hands, a symbol of amity belied by the vessel’s three cannons and a bow in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon head, meant to intimidate the natives. Indians called steamboats “fire canoes.” They witnessed how the boat’s insatiable demands for fuel denuded riverbanks and dramatically accelerated soil erosion, with entire hillsides collapsing into the water after the trees were cut down.
Boat traffic and the beginning of free trade in the 1820s dramatically increased the spread of weapons. Within a decade, the West had become one of the world’s most heavily armed places and soon among the most violent. American Fur Company boats could carry a thousand muskets manufactured in England and the American Northeast, one hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder ground in Kentucky workshops, and two hundred thousand pounds of British and American lead. They also carried everything from steel traps to calicoes, brilliant red vermillion, beads, silver, knives, alcohol, and household goods.
Other fur trading companies soon appeared in the West, although none as remotely powerful as Astor’s American Fur Company. Founded on the extinguishment of nature, the country’s first thoroughly modern company and monopoly had perfected what amounted to ecocide and financial tyranny, imposing punitive treaties on Indian nations, driving up prices and eliminating rivals, pursuing debtors, and dictating commercial expansion that robbed large areas of the West of its animal populations. Soon the company was laying claim to territories and waging small-scale wars. With its New York headquarters, Astor’s company was now far more rigidly organized, divided into two regional departments, with Crooks the general manager and Pierre Chouteau heading its western department from St.
Louis, which was becoming one of America’s wealthiest cities. An army of clerks ensured the steady flow of weapons and other merchandise to the company’s permanent posts across the American West. These employees carefully recorded the goods traders received, many of whom were themselves salaried employees, as well as rates of profit, levels of indebtedness, quality of furs, packaging, and shipping. Management, including Astor himself, kept especially meticulous track of the extension of credit and the collection of interest on debts, all the while monitoring global demand, whether in Hamburg, London, or Canton.
“Backed as it was by any amount of capital, and with skilful agents to conduct its affairs at every point,” an 1831 report for the government made clear, the American Fur Company had “succeeded . . . in monopolizing the whole trade of the Indians on the Missouri, and has maintained that monopoly up to this time.”42 Nearly “all the trading posts on the Missouri River” and its tributaries belonged to the company, with their high palisades and cannons protecting thirty to a few hundred men and with stockpiles worth as much as $80,000, or nearly $2.5 million today. These trading posts provided the goods for a web of smaller company stores located deeper in the American interior, “one or more at each Indian Village within the range of their trade,” and the employees stored the goods with the chief and occasionally joined Indians on their hunts.43 White settlers entered the scramble to pursue the remaining animal populations. The company advanced the hundreds of white men now working west of the Mississippi their needed supplies—guns, metal traps, food, and other articles—against the promised pelts. Most of these men were heavily in debt to the company, and not many extricated themselves from their obligations. The American Fur Company was earning a reputation for callousness that veered on extortion. Nothing mattered except acquiring those pelts: the goal was nothing less than full extermination of the beaver population. “When a trapper comes upon such a pond,” The Trapper’s Guide instructed, and “he has reason to believe [it] is inhabited by a large number of Beavers, his object should be to take them all” before moving on to the next killing ground.44 In the spring and summer of 1823 and just a year after the opening of trade, Arikaras in South Dakota attacked trappers and the American Fur Company station of Fort Recovery on the Missouri River. The deaths of fourteen trappers at the hands of native fighters immediately led to demands for the US government to deliver “a decisive blow,” protecting settlers and commerce. Tensions were running high. Demand for furs remained high.
But trappers and traders had entered an area already “almost entirely trapt out by the Indians.” Weapons had been flooding into the region, along with successive and devastating waves of smallpox. Settlers were now competing with various Indigenous American groups to secure the few animals left to kill, including the Lakota Sioux, whose raids and hunts extended over an enormous territory, nearly from Denver to Fort Union in North Dakota.
Colonel Henry Leavenworth led the attack on the Arikaras, the first war waged by the US Army west of the Mississippi. Defeat was quick, although settlers were outraged that the military had not conducted a campaign of genocide to “heal the bleeding wounds of commerce,” as newspapers reported. But what the Americans left of the Arikaras, the Sioux soon subdued. Another bout of smallpox took the rest, sweeping away more than four-fifths of the remaining population.45 Raids and counterraids fast became a near-permanent feature of settlerIndian interactions. As the arms trade continued accelerating, Indigenous Americans armed with guns captured boats, launched assaults on trading posts, and attacked trappers. Settlers did much the same. Kit Carson, the trapper who rose to near mythic status in American history, might have spoken the truth in his congressional testimony when he admitted that most of the “difficulties” in the American West “arise from aggressions on the part of the whites,” but other settlers were far less forthright, conjuring a narrative of defenseless whites against merciless savages.46 Many began demanding not just retribution but also violence little short of genocide. The very company that had wanted to open trade with Indigenous Americans now called for their indiscriminate slaughter.
“Nothing but a War and . . .
extermination,” an American Fur Company official wrote in 1830, “will . . .
give security to the lives and property in this country.”47 The contradictions of North America’s military-commercial revolution were becoming ever clearer and hurtling the continent toward crisis. For native peoples, the consequences were catastrophic. In the earliest years, Indian leaders had dictated the location of American Fur Company trading posts. They had glimpsed opportunity in the company’s arrival, especially in its richly stocked boats. The trade in animal pelts provided access to critically important guns, part of the centuries-long process by which Indian societies in North America became thoroughly militarized, especially across the Great Plains. The spread of white settlement and the displacement of native peoples, culminating during the 1830s in the forced removals of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and others to reservations in what would become Oklahoma, dramatically increased the importance of modern weapons: Indigenous Americans farther west could see what the future portended. The guns flooding the West were crucial for hunting and resisting white encroachment but also political consolidation and expansion and ultimately their very survival.
Whatever the fur trade once promised, it now delivered misery and rapidly escalating violence. Indebtedness soared: “Without . . . credit the Indians would perish,” everyone from local traders to federal officials knew.
48 Markups of 100 percent or more were common. Prices were so high that private traders and company employees still turned a profit even if half of their advances remained unpaid.49 Indebtedness drove hunting, so much so that Indians “kill and destroy all before them” in an attempt to pay “their overloaded debts.”50 Traders seized Indian property to recoup what they were owed.
By 1829, the Winnebagoes, Sauks, and Foxes, native peoples who had supplied large number of pelts to Astor’s company and other traders in prior years, now owed the company at least $40,000. The Osages owed much more. They had once provided pelts and played an important role in the opening of the West, using their access to weapons to dominate the Missouri/Kansas region, but they quickly killed off the beaver in their territory. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark sat down to hear an origin story that told of how the Osages descended from a beaver, they noted the animal’s disappearance. “Of late years,” the explorers wrote, “since the trade with the whites has rendered beaver skins more valuable, the sanctity of these maternal relatives has [been] visibly reduced, and the poor animals have nearly lost all the privileges of kindred.”51 Deeply in debt to St. Louis warlord August P. Chouteau, in 1808 the Osages ceded fifty-two million acres to the federal government. By the 1820s, many were starving. Weakened by malnutrition, in 1837 and 1838 thousands perished from smallpox that raced its way across the West, following the American Fur Company’s steamboat, the St. Peter, as it voyaged upriver to Fort Union in North Dakota. By 1840, one of the most powerful tribes west of the Mississippi had been reduced to scarcely more than five hundred people.
Indebtedness was everywhere, including among the mighty Sioux. As Seneca chief Pollard stated, “We fear difficulties would arise in collecting these debts, according to your laws, and our lands would be taken to pay them.”52 Resolving debts would become a prominent feature of treaties between Indians in the West and the US government. The pattern was repeated across the country: Indians would be moved to a reservation and, in return, would receive a yearly annuity. They would forfeit vast amounts of land—the operative word was “cede”—which was then sold to settlers.
“The traders, knowing for years before that the whites will purchase the lands, sell the Indians goods on credit,” Isaac Heard, who had fought in the Sioux war, wrote. “The traders obtain the concurrence of the Indians by refusing to give them farther [sic] credit, and by representing to them that they will receive an immense amount of money if they sell their lands. . . .
After the treaty is agreed to, the amount of ready money is absorbed by the exorbitant demands of the traders and the expenses of the removal of the Indians to their reservation.”53 All manner of deceit was used, and in many cases traders were able to get their hands on a part of the annuities paid for by the US government.
Once these land “cessions” had taken place, the federal government basically settled the debts Indians owed to fur trading companies and others, as in the 1829 treaty with the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi people, who owed the American Fur Company and others over $11,000.
Similarly, the 1829 creation of the Winnebago reservation in Minnesota involved the sale of native land to pay for “their indebtedness,” with the funds going to the US Treasury. The territory went to American settlers, who turned the land into some of the country’s most productive farms.
Much the same happened nearby with the Potawatomis in the 1830s.
More examples can be found, too many in the story of how guns, finance, and killing made settler America: the Osages and the Kansases in 1825, the Sauks and Foxes in 1832, the Pawnees in 1833, and the Sioux, who owed traders about $500,000 by the middle of the nineteenth century and lost millions and millions of acres of land. Traders received upwards of $400,000 in 1851–1852 as part of the resolution of (Dakota) Sioux debt.54 The Sioux Treaty of 1858 explicitly addressed the sale of land “to satisfy their just debts and obligations.”55 The same straitjacket situation would lead to a spasm of violence in the early 1860s, when Sioux killed some seven hundred white settlers in Minnesota. That event would help unleash the catastrophic Indian Wars across the entire American West, in which white settlers increasingly demanded the extermination of Indigenous America.
In a mere fifteen years, Astor and his American Fur Company had succeeded in their commercial conquest of the American West. They achieved enormous profits, Secretary of State Lewis Cass wrote to President Andrew Jackson, from the “immense destruction of the animals.”56 To the president and to many others, this annihilation represented success, progress, and civilization, as did the killing and dispossession of Indians. In mere years, vast regions once rich with beaver and other animals were drained and depleted. In Nebraska, where beavers “formerly abounded” along the Missouri River, they were “now extirpated.”57 The fur trade along much of the river had “dwindled down to a mere nothing when compared with what it was ten years back.” All furred animals, a government Indian agent observed, had “almost entirely disappeared.”58 “That the furs are diminishing near our frontiers, there can be no doubt,” another observer wrote. There were still beaver populations farther in the interior, especially in areas where white trappers feared to venture, but even here they were fast collapsing. “The beaver may be considered as exterminated on this side of the Rocky mountains; for though a few beavers may be taken, yet they are not an object for any large investment.”59 “It is with difficulty,” one official wrote, “that the Indians who inhabit this tract of country, can by any exertion whatever procure by hunting sufficient food to subsist on. . . .
The day is close at hand when the Indians who inhabit this tract of Country must cultivate the Soil or perish by hunger.” Astor’s success in combining weapons, free trade, and high finance resulted in the most concentrated destruction of the natural world in human history.
In just a few years as his company conquered the West, many tens of millions of animals were slaughtered and their body parts shipped and carted around the world: beaver, muskrat, otter, fox, deer, elk, mink, racoon, martin, ermine, bear, lynx, cougar, and, increasingly, bison. Boats that had brought weapons into the interior returned to St. Louis piled high with skins, soon followed by trains snaking their way toward the Pacific Ocean.
The destruction of nature that settlers considered their birthright unfolded with the systematic slaughter of Indians. Settlers would come to see the combination of killing and commerce as their God-given right, indistinguishable from territorial expansion and annihilation. With the opening of the West, “extermination” entered the common vocabulary of business and settlement, seen everywhere from local newspapers to national publications such as Harper’s Weekly. Papers such as the Arizona Citizen would demand policies of “deadly aggression” and “total extermination.” For its readers, death and the obliteration of animals and people were the clearest evidence of civilization’s—or modernity’s—relentless march west.60 *
For many others, the land was already dying. Droughts would soon beset much of the West.
Indigenous Americans would connect the changing climate to human avariciousness and the relentless destruction that was sweeping across America. Trade and conquest had led to the disappearance of their animal brothers and sisters, a deeply contradictory betrayal of the world and humanity’s obligations to it.
By the close of the century, many hundreds of millions of animals had been shot or trapped.
A population of over four hundred million beavers had declined to just one million, their deaths central to the creation of the United States of America. Beaver dams had dotted much of North America, from Labrador to Oregon, their engineering work helping to ensure the flow of water in the depths of winter. The ponds these keystone animals created replenished aquifers deep beneath Earth’s surface and attracted a bewildering diversity of animals, from small amphibians to eagles and large mammals. Upwards of a dozen beavers might reside in a single den.
Juveniles remained with their parents for up to three years, the family working together to build and repair dens, depositing scents to mark territories, and exchanging greetings, the sounds of their tails slapping the water to warn of those who might do them harm. Beavers are most active in the spring and summer, traversing a larger area in search of food, giving birth to young and adult children setting out on their own, with everyone building and repairing dams that might have been damaged as waters quickened to the changing seasons.
Now beaver dams began breaking apart. The sticks and logs that had once housed the animals drifted downstream like modernity’s flotsam. Waters moved more quickly now that they flowed unimpeded by the animal’s ingenious creations. We might think of those rushing waters as foretelling the pace of the human-induced change to come. Over time, ponds disappeared. Silence descended as entire ecosystems began evaporating, marking the American West’s entry into a dry phase that continues today with global warming.61
10 Death on the Great Plains THEY STOPPED THE TRAVELERS in their tracks, animals “in such multitudes, that we cannot exaggerate in saying that at a single glance we saw three thousand of them before us.” Vast herds of grazing bison turned the land into a roiling sea of brown and chocolate, occasionally stopping to dip their muzzles into streams that teemed with fish, otters, beavers, and other animals.1 The continent’s natural riches astounded Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they trekked across boundless flatlands and mountains that appeared to have burst up from the American Plains. It was 1804, just a year after the Louisiana Purchase, when President Thomas Jefferson sent the men west to ascertain the length of the Missouri River and its potential for commerce. They were hunters as much as explorers and also a moving armory, traveling with hundreds of rifles, cases of pistols, trade guns, a swivel cannon, and a peculiar kind of air gun made in Europe that fired repeatedly and made a great racket. Their discoveries helped turn the West into American big business, including the destruction of the continent’s largest animal, the bison.
In early summer on the edge of the Great Plains in what is now Missouri, Lewis and Clark sat down to an Osage origin story that spoke to America’s bounteousness and, they already knew, to what the country portended. Sun, they were told, had turned a snail into Man. But Man being man, he soon became hungry. The Great Spirit gave him a bow and arrow with which to kill. Since he was once a snail, Man headed home to the river. There he met Beaver, whose daughter he married. Their children became the Wasbashas, the Osages, who thus traced their descent through women back to the young beaver from whom all were related. To kill a beaver was to kill one’s brother or sister.
The idea of animals as kin was common across North America. One had a personal relationship with Beaver, Bison, Bear, or Eagle, just as animals did with their cousins. Many animals lived as humans. They were not the soulless automata envisioned by philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).
Animals had their own societies, cultures, personalities, and even feelings.
All living things were related to one another in a single culture of boundless difference: in this worldview, we are them, and they us. Across the Great Plains, Indigenous men could understand themselves as mighty bison whose stampedes could be heard for miles, the rumble like a thunderstorm racing across the flatlands. In rituals that might last days, they became the great animals. They were not playacting or pretending. They were becoming, and in doing so they were reaffirming the ineluctable bonds that made and remade the world.2 *
It wasn’t always this way. These ideas emerged as part of a broader renaissance of Indigenous culture and society across North America, one of the most remarkably creative developments in human history, shaped by profound changes in the natural world. Before the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300, much of North America had experienced a dry era lasting about four hundred years. Scientists call this era the Medieval Warm Period (ca.
950–ca. 1250), part of a longer epoch of generally warmer climates going back nearly ten thousand years. Glaciers retreated, and streams dried up. Already arid regions turned to desert. Animal habitats that depended on water and grasslands contracted. Millions of animals perished. Elsewhere, farming peoples altered what they planted or moved to areas more hospitable to traditional agriculture.
There were exceptions to this pattern. Parts of the historically dry Southwest experienced unusually wet conditions around 1030. Other areas, especially in the Midwest near the Mississippi River, also enjoyed unusually fertile conditions. These supported large populations and intensive regional trade and the emergence of cities such as Cahokia in Illinois. Here the land became more hospitable, at least for a while. The cultivation of corn expanded as the plant continued its millennia-long northward spread up from the Amazon.
Droughts returned, however, especially during the thirteenth century, ravaging large areas of the West.
One megadrought lasted for up to five decades, shrinking the aquifers that run beneath the valleys, one of the worst to afflict the region until the 2000s, our most recent drought creating the driest conditions in nearly a thousand years. A drought around 1250 CE shut down Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser. Far to the east, Cahokia was abandoned.3 The colder conditions of the Little Ice Age changed all this, far too slowly for some to notice at first and then definitively, as if the world had always been this way. In some areas, shorter growing periods placed an emphasis on taking advantage of diverse food supplies so that people combined farming with hunting, fishing, and foraging. In other areas, especially in the West, places that are today mostly filled with scrub and cacti crisscrossed by thousands of miles of dry streambeds, or arroyos, became grasslands and streams teeming with life. By 1500, the newer climatic conditions were overseeing the rise of the largest and densest population of mammals anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, from the vast Canadian boreal forests stretching from Maine to Alaska down through seemingly endless grasslands to the American Southwest.
North America’s prairies were not unlike the grasslands elsewhere in the world, wetter areas transitioning to more arid domains and creating complex ecologies that supported a range of human and nonhuman communities. A striking feature of the North American prairies are the substantial riverine systems running through them. The Missouri River begins in Montana’s Rocky Mountains and flows east over two thousand miles before joining the Mississippi River near St. Louis, the longest river in the United States if not the largest. Other tributaries—the Yellowstone, Cheyenne, Niobrara, Platte, and Osage Rivers—create a febrile network across the prairies, separating this region from the far more arid southern grasslands and deserts of West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona as well as the area west of the Rocky Mountains. Thousands of streams feed these navigable rivers, many once populated by large communities of beaver; their dams significantly altered the flow of water, enriching the water table below and powerfully shaping local ecologies. Woodlands grew in these areas; even deep into the prairies, stands of cottonwoods, ash, boxelder, and other trees provided humans with materials to build homes, assemble weapons, and feed animals.
Across this greater region appeared an immense number of furred animals during the Little Ice Age, from mink and beaver to bear, moose, elk, deer, and bison as well as wolves, coyotes, and other predators. This development had its ups and downs. Human activity shaped flora and fauna and vice versa. A series of severe droughts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries proved especially punishing to animals such as bison that require large amounts of vegetation to survive.
A consistently wet period from around 1645 through the eighteenth century supported especially rich grasslands and riparian worlds. At their height, this region saw upwards of four hundred million beaver and perhaps as many as one hundred million bison, which grew up to seven feet tall and weighed over one thousand pounds. Across the prairies, the bison population doubled from what it had been prior to the onset of the Little Ice Age. Bison herds could be found in parts of Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, and Ohio and westward to Texas and wherever grasslands existed. Vast numbers roamed the prairies that began near the Rio Grande and stretched northward into Alberta and Saskatchewan. Their combined weight was about the same as that of one billion people, the world population in 1800.4 In the late eighteenth century when the United States was founded and John Jacob Astor was heading across the Atlantic to make his fortune in the fur trade, well over sixty million bison lived on the North American continent. Tens of millions had already been destroyed, and herds east of the Mississippi had largely disappeared, but things looked very different on the other side of the great river. In the late 1840s, four decades after Lewis and Clark stood dumbfounded by the animals they encountered, fur trappers in the Southwest near the Santa Fe Trail found buffalo “so numerous . . .
that we had to take some pains to avoid them.”5 In the 1860s, trains pressing westward to the Pacific and its golden riches slowed to a halt because of the large herds standing on the tracks. Around the same time, an assistant to General William Tecumseh Sherman (named after the last great Shawnee chief, Sherman was busily subjugating Native Americans following his successes defeating the slave South) described how the earth itself seemed to be “one great mass of buffalo[,] . . . as irresistible as an avalanche.”6 Bison were constantly on the move, especially where seasonal changes in temperature and vegetation were most pronounced. Herds in the Texas panhandle and farther south and to the west moved far less than herds in the northern Plains. In the North, where temperatures plummeted to 50 degrees below zero (or −45°C), leaving shattered ice ten or twenty feet high piled up along the tangled network of streams and rivers, the animals moved southward until the spring thaw. At that point, thin from the long winter, the herds returned north as winter’s browns and grays began greening and streams and rivers roared with meltwater. Led by the herd leader, a few animals would appear followed by others, until before long “the whole vast landscape appears a mass of buffalo,” wrote one early historian of the West.
Their journey was not easy. Hundreds might fall through thinning ice or become mired in mud; trails of the dead might stretch for miles, their flesh exuding a massive stench and offering food for wolves and birds.7 Everywhere the Little Ice Age led to crises, created challenges, and nurtured human ingenuity.
8 Across North America, this dynamic climatic period made possible an extraordinary burst of human creativity and experimentation that confounds the usual ways we have attempted to categorize human existence and development. Typically, we like to think about human history as progressing from hunting and gathering to agriculture; our history books expound on the supposedly obvious benefits of farming and suggest that over millennia we have become more cosmopolitan and more sophisticated.9 But in the thirteenth century as wetter conditions began supporting larger bison populations, communities in New Mexico’s Pecos Valley abandoned agriculture and permanent settlements and turned to a nomadic lifestyle, hunting bison and foraging, a complete reversal of the way we usually think about societal development.
People could have continued farming; indeed, they could have become even more resolute agriculturalists. Instead, they chose a life of pursuing the great animals.
What took place in the Pecos Valley occurred across the wider region as communities moved into grassland areas in greater numbers, often though not always forsaking agriculture entirely. People experimented with different ways to subdue bison, perfecting ancient techniques that dated back at least ten thousand years or sometimes inventing entirely new ways to pursue these animals. The adoption of the horse, iron, and the gun beginning in the seventeenth century would mark just the latest of a whole suite of innovations that the Little Ice Age helped catalyze.
Population movements into the Plains accelerated across the seventeenth century.
Substantial numbers of Shoshone-speaking peoples moved northward in response to climatic change and the explosion in the bison population, which they originally pursued on foot and only later on horseback.10 Later in the century Shoshones spread into the Yellowstone area, where they confronted other groups moving into the region. Around the headwaters of the Mississippi River in what is today Minnesota, agricultural peoples began moving westward no later than the 1680s, reorganizing their lives around hunting bison and, very soon, trading in beaver pelts that ended up in Europe. They spoke the Siouan language and would become known as the Sioux, developing a confederacy of tribes over an enormous expanse of grassland, the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires).11 Roughly at the same time as the Siouan migrations into the Dakotas and across the Missouri, in the southern grasslands the Comanches emerged as a powerful force a few decades after their adoption of horses in the late seventeenth century. Horses had entered from what is today Mexico, where the Spanish had begun importing the animals in the sixteenth century as part of their conquest of the region and had helped popularize the use of equines across the Plains. (North America once had equines; these went extinct about ten thousand years ago, perhaps as a result of climate change or human predation.) By the 1600s, horses had crossed the Rio Grande.
Their numbers spread even more rapidly after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt (also known as Po’pay’s Rebellion), an uprising triggered in part by the abuses of Spanish warlords and the enslavement of native people for the Mexican silver industry. Equines had also spread across the Missouri River by the early eighteenth century. The Sioux had them by the beginning of the 1700s, perhaps a bit earlier. By the end of the eighteenth century, horses had expanded farther north into the Canadian plains. Like bison, horses took advantage of the rich pasturelands made possible by the Little Ice Age, at times competing for the same grazing resources.
Horses solidified the importance of bison in the political economies of Plains societies. The Comanches became an entirely equestrian society, as did others. Like the Sioux, Comanche life revolved around the pursuit of bison in addition to raiding, slaving, and trading. At its height from the late eighteenth into the first half of the nineteenth century, the Comanchería covered 260,000 square miles (an area larger than France). Bison had become so central to the lives of hunters that they faced a unique form of malnutrition, even starvation, from overreliance on lean protein in the absence of fats and carbohydrates. Trading with as well as raiding neighboring agriculturalists became absolutely central to the survival of these hunting tribes. Their relations formed part of extensive networks extending across the continent, part of a broader movement of peoples, things, and ideas over vast areas. Valued items such as shells might be found thousands of miles away from their source. Particularly with the expansion of the fur trade, an entire economy emerged around the preparation of pemmican, that easily transportable food that sustained the fur trade. Together, these and other communities formed the most expansive interlinked group of hunting societies in human history, stretching from the Canadian grasslands to the Comanches in the Southwest, a distance of over one thousand miles north to south and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Even seemingly resolutely farming communities depended on the bison; men might spend as much as five months a year hunting the animals or might send out parties that would be away a week or two, with their dogs (and later their horses) dragging back meat and skins.12 Something similar unfolded east of the Mississippi, where Iroquois and others expanded both hunting and agriculture, developing unique dualeconomy societies where men spent extended periods away hunting and warring and women dominated village life, leading their own councils and playing an important role in choosing the men and women who would lead them. Across North America, people might live in large communities for part of the year, only to disperse at other times. Sioux, Comanches, Iroquois, and others might look like a state or even an empire at one moment and then something dramatically different a few months, even a few days, later. Dynamism and mobility were part of the survival mechanism here and the genius of historical developments across North America.
Political authority among Indigenous peoples changed with this ebbing and flowing of life, at once fiercely hierarchical and intensely egalitarian.
Into these worlds, into the sinews of power and authority and people’s relationship with animals, Native Americans incorporated guns and horses.
Weapons spoke to the ancient ideas of man as hunter, that most fundamental connection to one’s animal kin. The Lakotas would invent the Sun Dance around the rise of bison predation and their own newfound dominance, a recognition of both killing and the importance of restoring “balance in the universe.”13 Horses and guns would lead to an explosion of violence against animals and people and the rise of Indigenous warlords who sought both to expand their domains and maintain their access to the instruments of death.
Bison would become central to these processes, just as their disappearance, like that of beaver, would close a chapter on nearly half a millennium of human creativity.
*
Colonial trade involving bison likely began in the late 1600s, although in terms of international importance it paled in comparison to the all-important beaver and other skins, especially deer. As late as 1770, the British imported over 1.25 million animal skins from North America; not a single one was bison. The hide of a bison is thick and hard to work with, and large amounts of labor are needed to render it supple; other forms of leather used in saddles, shoes, boots, and clothes typically used deerskin or the hides of cows, sheep, and pigs. Tens of millions of North American deerskins ended up in Europe. Internationally, bison had very few uses beyond the occasional rug or blanket.
Much of the early trade revolved around the American Southwest. As horses and guns moved into the region, both the scope and intensity of predation against animals and people grew. In the second half of the 1700s, warlords such as the Comanche “General” Ecueracapa (Contatanacapara) combined the enslavement of people and the production of bison meat and hides, the latter transported largely south into Mexico in exchange for horses.14 Around the same time, the trickle of guns that began in the early 1700s became a veritable flood; an increasing number of weapons came not from Mexico but instead from the American East and Northeast, a major reason for Comanche expansion across the Arkansas River in the direction of St. Louis.
The Comanche revolution—the transformation of a hunting and foraging society into an expansive commercial empire dominated by warlords— emerged out of the combination of guns, horses, and trade. Comanche hegemony extended over a vast region. The area around present-day Taos formed a kind of terminus and emporium for the new empire, with routes leading south to Mexico and east toward the Mississippi. All manner of goods might be found in Taos coming from distances both proximate and very far away: weapons, horses, bison products, slaves, blankets, beads, metals, and agricultural produce.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Comanches and others had substantially reduced the southern Texas bison herds. Bison predation now generally concentrated on large herds located in the region around the Republican and Canadian Rivers. Slavery was also becoming a central feature of Comanche society, as it was across large swaths of North America. Preparing pemmican and bison robes was arduous work. In the early stages of the hide market, white traders were only interested in prepared hides, most often exquisitely worked by women. The animal had to be skinned, and the hide had to be pegged and prepared for suppleness using various plant and animal substances. This labor fell to native women; an increasing number of these were slaves, especially in the context of diseases such as smallpox that decimated the population. Crises in the 1770s through the early part of the next decade may have reduced the Comanche population by nearly two-thirds, and the result was an explosion of slavery within Comanche society. This development not only reorganized labor but also led to an expansion of polygyny and a bypassing of older kinship obligations. Comanches became not just a slaveholding society but also a society dominated by warlords, reworking cultural ideas that venerated violence against humans and nonhumans and where wealth now came to be represented by the possession of horses, captives, goods acquired in trade, and expansive families with multiple dependents. Hunting people and animals—both unsustainable—had already become prominent features of Indian society. But now they were increasingly entwined with and dependent on regional and international trade.15 Around the 1820s, bison hides, or “robes” as they were called, began becoming a more important commodity, although still not nearly as important as beaver and, to a lesser extent, muskrats, minks, otters, deer, and so on. Traders and trappers working for the North West Company in Canada, for example, might produce over 168,000 fur pelts but only just over 1,000 bison robes in a single year.
16 Bison meat was more of a draw; it was used commercially to produce pemmican, the food that fueled the broader fur trade throughout the West and across the boreal forests.
Between 1800 and 1808, North West Company employees consumed upwards of 21,250 pounds of pemmican. In Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company heavily depended on the calorie-rich food, much of it coming from the Red River Valley. Bison meat (especially tongues and the flesh under the hump) was also becoming important with the rising commercialization of the interior. Across Canada, traders were literally consuming over a million pounds of the meat yearly, requiring the hunting of thousands of animals.17 The dramatic increase in the fur trade thus accelerated bison hunting less for the animals’ skins than for their meat, which was needed—ironically— to feed the hunters. As beaver populations began collapsing, the Sioux turned their attention exclusively to pursuing bison, operating in the region we know as the Dakotas today. Transforming rapidly into an empire that, at its height, controlled much of the land between the Missouri and Platte Rivers, Sioux society now centered on hunting bison, increasingly with guns. And as with the Comanches, the labor demands entailed in the preparation of robes and pemmican, especially in the context of epidemic diseases that regularly swept across the region, led to a transformation of labor and gender relations and a broadening of slavery within Sioux society.
Soon, Sioux slave raids were extending into what is today Nebraska and right up to the Rocky Mountains, capturing people and taking vital food sources.
*
With the explosive population growth and urbanization east of the Mississippi in the early 1800s (the US population more than doubled in the first three decades of the century to nearly thirteen million, almost all of it white settlers), bison robes were put to new use. They became desirable as bedding and carriage rugs, especially helpful in the unusually cold winters.
By the mid-nineteenth century, many tens of thousands of bison robes were reaching New York each year; a single shipment from St. Louis in October 1853 contained over 153,000 skins, of which 70,000 were robes, but just 4,571 beaver: the ratio had reversed.18 Into the 1830s, Indians largely controlled the hunting and processing of bison, although in some areas European hunters were starting to make their presence felt. Pawnees and others in Nebraska, along with the Sioux, all of whom had provided large numbers of beaver and other pelts in the eighteenth century, increasingly traded in bison skins. The adoption of the horse revolutionized predation and accelerated the decline in bison populations. Pawnees began riding horses to chase bison beginning in the late 1700s.19 By the early part of the nineteenth century, the Pawnees were providing significant numbers of robes, but these numbers declined precipitously by the 1830s: they had succeeded too well. Soon, the “greatly diminished” trade in bison would “scarcely be worth attending to.”20 To the north, the deeply indebted Sioux responded creatively to the changing market and their new predicament, dramatically expanding raiding but also waiting for animals to grow out their fur before they killed them to increase their value and preventing whites and other Indians from taking animals from the herds.21 Similar scenes unfolded elsewhere. Crow peoples and others in Montana, who had earlier traded large numbers of beaver, turned to bison hunting when demand rose. Between the mid-1830s and the beginning of the next decade, bison robes from these groups rose from just a few thousand a year to about twenty thousand traded.22 The Cheyennes also provided robes to white traders, but as early as the 1840s herds had been depleted, and Indians had begun protesting the increasing number of whites hunting animals, according to one famous hunter and trader “threatening to kill all the young Buffalo” to prevent whites from taking them.23 In areas closer to St. Louis, bison populations declined dramatically. By around 1830, they had largely disappeared in what became Missouri, Arkansas, and the eastern half of Texas and, to the north, in large parts of Iowa and Minnesota, so much so that observers noted that peoples such as the Otoes and Omahas (as well as the Osages and others), who had played an important role in the early fur trade, could no longer subsist by hunting “by any exertion.” These native peoples, wrote an Indian agent, would either become farmers or “perish by hunger.”24 Unlike the beaver trade, however, when it came to bison hunting, supply still exceeded demand. Strikingly, around the late 1830s and early 1840s, the predation resulting in bison skins outpaced the demand for the same.
Well into the late 1850s, many of the markets for bison robes remained flooded. “Slaughter continued to outdistance the demand.”25 Indian predation was producing many more hides than the market could bear, and the killing of bison was no longer sustainable in large parts of eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.
Multiple reasons explain this situation, in particular the twin strangleholds of weapon acquisition and rising debt. Maintaining access to weapons remained critical to Indian power, central to not only intra-Indian relations but also, and increasingly, resisting the tide of whites moving into the interior. After trade opened in 1822 and colonists increasingly occupied so-called ceded lands, the power of Indian warlords depended almost entirely on weapons.
One result was spiraling indebtedness. Beavers were rapidly disappearing. Bison increasingly became the only thing these tribes had to offer. The American Fur Company had all but “enslaved the Indians,” one contemporary noted, having “taken from them year after year their pitiful earnings.”26 Just two decades after the opening of trade, Pawnee society was collapsing; others would soon follow. Indebtedness to whites and Sioux predation left the Pawnees gravely weakened. They had once lived by agriculture and hunting. Raiding disrupted farming, and then, by the 1840s, bison herds too were declining with breathtaking speed across Pawnee territory, with starvation following.27 Drought and disease helped as well.
Caught between Sioux raiding, the pressures of white settlement, and a collapsing economy, the Pawnee population plummeted. In the 1830s, Pawnees numbered around ten thousand people. Three decades later there were not more than four thousand Pawnees left.
*
The 1850s and 1860s marked a turning point in the American Mortecene, with the fledgling nation’s history of violence and the role of killing in its economic development now broadening to include the destruction of bison, which the visionary Herman Melville anticipated in his masterpiece Moby Dick. The pelagic genocide of whales was peaking in the same years, and the country was nearing the height of an industrial revolution grounded in fossil fuels. The same was true in England, which saw terrific industrial growth in textile production. Together, both England and its former colony established more factories in these two decades than ever before.
Americans have grown accustomed to a story of the demise of the bison that emphasizes conflict between Indians and the federal government, especially the so-called Indian Wars between the 1870s and 1890s. President Abraham Lincoln, the story goes, opened the West to white settlement, in part to thwart the Confederacy’s plans to extend slavery westward. The 1862 Homestead Act resulted in the sale of hundreds of millions of acres that had been confiscated from Indians.
The story continues with a mad westward rush involving settlers, speculators, and corporations immediately after the end of the American Civil War, much of it overseen by the deployment of federal forces. The 1860s would see the beginning of the final, devastating colonial conquest of the West: the Dakota Sioux War in 1862, which included the country’s largest mass execution of thirty-eight Indigenous people; the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne in 1864; and warfare from Montana to the Southwest during the latter part of the decade, followed by the great conflagrations of the 1870s. Just five years after the 1862 Homestead Act and as the South lay under military occupation, large numbers of federal troops led by Sherman and others began pursuing a scorched-earth campaign across the Plains. Simultaneously and as part of this campaign, the US government embarked on a vast and fundamental reworking of the political geography of the West that would mark the definitive consolidation of its federal authority.
28 And so, the American Civil War turned westward. The federal government would soon dispense with the treaty system that had as its premise a recognition of Indian sovereignty and instead would insist on Indians moving to reservations. (In yet another irony, what became known as the Peace Policy was informed by former abolitionists.) Quite a few officials would be troubled by the violence meted out against Indian communities, even some who commanded federal troops, including Sherman himself.29 But the conquests continued.
And the key to subduing the Indians, especially the Sioux, lay in destroying the bison. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” said Colonel Richard I. Dodge, who for a time served as Sherman’s aide-de-camp.
This story, one that emphasizes politics and the inevitability of Indian defeat, belies a more complex past, one that reaches back to the earliest years of European trade, when wild animals became sellable commodities in the global economy. It was this process—killing for capitalism, now specifically for industry—that ultimately spelled bison’s demise. White hunters joined the fray, taking over the hunt and doing precisely what Dodge had said, deliberately depriving the Indians of a vital food source.
Politics, including war itself, never strayed far from more earthly pursuits.
Profit and politics were always close cousins; in America especially, killing was their common ancestor.
*
The Industrial Revolution was a revolution in circular motion. From the earliest steam engines through the later designs of James Watt and other industrialists, inventers had struggled with how best to transfer energy, how to convert the up-and-down movement of a piston inside a cylinder into the round-and-round motion of crankshafts, gears, pulleys, and wheels. Early engines were mostly made of metal and wood. Iron gearing and shafting was expensive to manufacture and repair, not to mention heavy, noisy, dangerous and, most of all, inefficient. “Be quit of these smoky and expensive machines,” declared one important manufacturer. Into the 1830s, many concluded that steam engines were not worth the money and the trouble.30 There was nothing inevitable about the Industrial Revolution as we now know it.
And then inventers had an idea—leather could be used to create a belt.
Combining metal with industrial belts dramatically reduced energy consumption and improved efficiency. Most importantly, it allowed for a single engine to power multiple machines, an advance that made it possible to concentrate large numbers of workers into a factory mass-producing goods. Here was the secret of industrial capitalism: massing workers in a single, preferably adequately lit, building where they could be supervised and kept at work for an unnatural if not inhuman twelve or even sixteen or more hours a day. Without belts, the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible.
Belting took off especially from midcentury. From Cuban sugar plantations to gun manufactories to the large mills where a single engine powered one thousand looms, every single factory would come to depend on belting. Before the rise of reinforced rubber, industrial belts were invariably made of animal hide (the process is called currying), including Henry Ford’s Model T, and demand for the belts had far outstripped supply.
Preparing skins (or tanning) had been a laborious process for thousands of years, one involving households or small outfits that used local resources, especially bark. In the 1850s, however, German chemists discovered a new way of turning hide into leather using chromium salts, a highly poisonous chemical that would find other industrial uses. The new process revolutionized tanning, cutting the time to prepare leather by 90 percent or more.
Crucially, the process produced leather that was also lighter and stronger. The German innovation spread rapidly, especially to America, where a growing urban population needed shoes and other leather products and where industrial expansion was impossible without a steady supply of belts. Tanning soon moved from households and small businesses to become, well into the early 1900s, some of America’s largest (and most polluting) industries, with most tanning operations located in the Northeast and in burgeoning cities such as Detroit and Chicago as well as across industrializing Europe.
Industrialists discovered that bison hides made outstanding industrial belts. With the new tanning process, a hide that had once earned notoriety for its toughness suddenly became far easier to process. Bison hides would find themselves coveted across the industrializing United States and elsewhere, particularly in England, which imported hundreds of thousands if not millions of the hides in the second half of the nineteenth century.
They ended up in Manchester factories and also in New Bedford in the huge Wamsutta textile mill that had been founded on money from the killing of whales. That Wamsutta Mill now ran, at least in part, on the great slaughter of the American bison.31 FIGURE 10.1. Textile factory. From the series “Progress of Cotton.” Reproduced with permission of the Science Museum Group (UK), YA1972.0060.
A second technological development would also spur new levels of destruction for America’s bison. This development involved new techniques for processing bones, which contain significant amounts of phosphorus.
Farmers had long known that crushed bones could be used to help replenish soils (many avid gardeners still purchase bone meal from their local plant stores). In some of Europe’s wars, people carted away the bones of animals and soldiers to help maintain the productivity of their farms, and they did so for good reason. Across Europe and increasingly in parts of the United States, in the nineteenth century people faced depleted soils and diminishing crop yields. The demand for fertilizer was especially heightened in England, one reason why the British imported human remains from Europe, much to the alarm of people on the continent.
The discovery of guano off the coasts of Peru and Chile from the early 1800s would prove nothing short of revolutionary for global agriculture, but bones remained an important source of fertilizer throughout the 1800s and into the twentieth century. In the 1840s, scientists discovered that dissolving bones in sulfuric acid yielded superphosphate, and the first modern fertilizer was invented.32 Bison would be called upon to help provide the supply for growing America’s crops. Bones were discovered to have still other uses. Carbonized bone (bone char) made outstanding filters. Beginning in the nineteenth century, workers in the sugar industry used bone char extensively to turn the amber color of raw cane sugar into the white sucrose that more and more consumers desired. (Bone char also made its way into cigarette filters, the manufacturing of ink, and mascara.) Finally, toward the end of the eighteenth century, European porcelain makers, especially British industrial companies such as Wedgewood and Spode, began successfully competing with the Chinese to produce very high-quality china using bone and other additives. The result was a delicate yet strong porcelain, what we now know as fine bone china, as well as considerable CO2 emissions and water pollution.33 The remains of bison from the Great Plains may well have wound up in your great-great grandmother’s plates, cups, and saucers.
*
These industrial innovations unfolded precisely as the American West was opening to white settlement and free trade. Awash in capital, eastern banks had been eyeing the South and the West from the early decades of the nineteenth century, and so had banks on the other side of the Atlantic. By the early 1860s, the tentacles of finance had begun spreading west, especially in the construction of railroads and canals for states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; far to the south, finance helped propel plantation slavery into Texas.
Nothing compared to what unfolded in the next few decades as the country entered its corrupt and blood-stained Gilded Age. Banks essentially followed the westward spread of railroads, and Wall Street and international banks had largely financed the various railroad companies, shoring up the latter’s fantasies that profits would materialize once tracks had been laid.
Crises invariably followed, especially the Panic of 1873, which was tied to the overexpansion of railroads and rampant speculation. Railroad companies went bust, and Wall Street stumbled if only momentarily. But eastern money made its way westward nonetheless, where capital was scarce. The West was all about making money as quickly as possible, which meant that many settlers west of the Mississippi soon found themselves mired in intractable debt, including white hunters.
The result was an extraordinary increase in predation, or killing of truly historic proportions, not just of bison but also just about anything that moved. It was the “professional hunter,” reported Harper’s Weekly, “who makes the greatest ravages.”34 The industrial demand for belts especially drove violence. Innovations in weapons helped make the bloodshed faster and deadlier. The rifling of barrels (spiral grooves on the inside) dramatically improved range and accuracy. Subsequent developments in bullet design led to the modern cartridge and to guns such as the Sharps .45- caliber rifle. Manufactured out of Connecticut and widely distributed in the early 1870s, the Sharps rifle could be equipped with a telescopic sight.
With a bullet weighing upwards of 550 grams (1.26 ounces) and a range of a thousand yards, the gun was stunningly destructive. Other gun manufacturers based on the East Coast began massively exporting guns to the West. Before long, the region became among the most heavily armed places on the planet.
White hunters, or “business men with rifles,”35 were now the principal killers, and they set their sights on the substantial bison herds that dwelled in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, western Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. An entire industry emerged around the killing and processing of bison, at first almost entirely devoted to the hides that would be turned into shoes and the belts powering the Industrial Revolution. In the early 1870s, at least ten thousand people—and perhaps twice that number—moved onto the Plains, many of them veterans of the American Civil War. As one hunter wrote, “the whole Western country went buffalo-wild, like a gold rush.” The process was both complicated and destructively simple. Many took out bank loans of around $2,000 (about $45,000 today) to put together an outfit: guns, powder, bullets, knives, horses, and wagons. Groups might be as small as five or ten and occasionally as large as one hundred men. Whereas Indigenous Americans largely hunted from horseback, settlers using the advanced weapons shot from a stationary position. The trick was to begin shooting at a distance, steadying the gun using two sticks tied together. The goal was to first shoot the bison leader, ideally taking down the animal with a single blow. Doing this stupefied the herd. Instead of stampeding away, the remaining animals stood in the same spot wondering where to go. The hunter could then turn his gun on the other animals, killing twenty-five to sixty animals a day (anywhere from 22,000 to 54,000 pounds of biomass per killer), sometimes more than a hundred. The skinners followed behind them, often using horses to pull the skin from the carcass.
The hides were then stretched and dried. After a few days, these were folded up and baled onto wagons, brought to train stops or to towns such as Dodge City in Kansas, which for a time was known colloquially as “Buffalo City.” Wagons piled high with as many as two hundred hides lumbered forward, the combined weight ranging from 4,000 pounds to twice that amount. When the animals were carved up for meat, butchers mostly took only the choice cuts, especially tongues. In a single year in the early 1870s, one Dodge City company forwarded two hundred thousand hides east (weighing 4 million pounds or more) and 1.6 million pounds of meat (or roughly just eight pounds of meat per hide). Another entrepreneur shipped no less than $2.5 million in bison bones, worth about $53 million in today’s dollars.36 Millions of bison died in the 1860s, their hides helping power the Industrial Revolution. Predation escalated dramatically in the next decade, partly assisted by the US Army, which supplied hide hunters with free ammunition and powder.
37 In these years, upwards of five thousand animals might be slaughtered every day, or at least two million a year. By the middle of the 1870s, bison largely had disappeared from the southern Plains. The final slaughter of the southern herd came in late 1877 and early 1878, with more than one hundred thousand hides produced by an “army of hunters.” The remaining herds in Kansas were decimated in a few years in the mid-1870s.38 Settlers wasted no time arriving in their wake. They “came onto the range and selected their future homes.”39 In the 1870s, the once-large bison herds between the Cheyenne and North Platte Rivers (South Dakota through Nebraska) “had become practically extinct.” By this time, tens of thousands of white hunters had moved into the Plains; an entire industry developed. In Kansas, “where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses.
The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain,” explained a hunter turned land speculator and politician who helped found modern Chicago, “was [now] a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”40 In some areas, “the whole country was whitened with bleached and bleaching bones.”41 “The waste is enormous,” wrote Harper’s Weekly, one of the few to vocalize criticism. “Of the carcasses left to decay, one-tenth, it is said, would feed all the poor of the country.” Over a three-year period in the early 1870s, production levels reached more than 1.3 million hides, 6.7 million pounds of meat, and 32.3 million pounds of bone.42 Approximately 4.5 million bison died in three years, likely less than 10 percent of these killed by Indians. The slaughter by white hunters continued even as profit margins began declining.
By the mid to late 1870s, the southern herd and the herds that had once roamed Kansas and Nebraska had all but disappeared; tens of millions of animals were killed in a single decade. Some buffalo cities such as Fort Worth, Texas, might send hundreds of thousands of hides east in a couple of days. Wagons stacked high with hides might stretch a full city block.
Wyoming and Montana still had substantial numbers of bison in the 1870s, but these animals too were being targeted for slaughter, and the 1880s saw their destruction. By the middle of that decade, there were not more than about 350 bison in the entire United States.43 *
The transformation of bison into commodities was intimately connected with the political conquest of the American West and its breathtakingly rapid transformation into a full-fledged settler empire. “I wanted to no other occupation in life,” wrote Lieutenant General John Schofield, “than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian frontier in our beautiful country.”44 Many animals were shot and left to rot; the military also organized tourist expeditions to help in the slaughter, outings that allowed sightseers to fire upon bison from the comfort of their seats on a train. But even this political policy had an economic underbelly: the military had realized that the most effective way to annihilate the Indians’ food supply was to encourage and support private enterprise. In the 1870s, various formal and informal arrangements emerged between hide hunters and the US Army. Hunters wantonly violated the native treaties, which, behind closed doors, officials encouraged them to do. These violations invariably led to Indian protests and reprisals, which in turn escalated US Army involvement.
The business of killing bison for industrial development and the subjugation of Indians went hand in hand. “These men,” General Philip Sheridan allegedly said of the white hunters, “have done in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years.” “Send them powder and lead,” he continued, “let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.”45 Sheridan was half right. The bison hunters were not only insinuating themselves into Indian territories and depriving people of a vital food source but were also regularly turning their guns on Indigenous Americans. The Indian Wars were prosecuted by the US Army as well as by private citizens.
Railroads played their part. On paper, the railroad industry was overseen by private companies, with the US Army providing protection when necessary. In reality, it was scarcely possible to disentangle private and public. The army was integral to railroad development, which it considered vital to pursuing its Indian policy. The killing of animals and people along the various lines snaking their way westward was atrocious and frequent and made a name for people such as Buffalo Bill Cody, who helped produce bison meat for the railroad companies as well as the army’s Subsistence Department. Sherman was particularly convinced that supporting the Northern Pacific line through the Dakotas into Montana would expedite both the destruction of bison and the defeat of tribes such as the Sioux. He was correct. Once the trains arrived, it took just two years to eradicate the northern bison herds.
And as Chief Sitting Bull knew, the disappearance of the bison was “a death-wind” for his people.46 Killing was a bonanza for white settlers for a time. The government now had more than one billion acres of western land to allocate.47 With astounding rapidity never before seen in human history, farms and ranches began taking shape amid the killing fields. “The vast plains west of the Missouri River,” Harper’s Weekly reported, “are literally strewn with the carcasses and whitening skeletons of the buffaloes.” Settlers, many of them poor and often contending with mercenary railroad companies and equally disreputable land speculators, built houses literally surrounded by bones. There were so many bones that farmers had trouble tilling the soil. One settler noted that “when we got” to their homestead in central Nebraska near Loup City, just north of the Platte River, the bones were everywhere, “and we had to pick them up, and pile them up, and work around them.” The children had to pick the bones up too “so Father could plow some sod under for corn and for our house.”48 Ranchers had to contend with a different problem. When millions of bison were killed each year, wolves and coyotes had enjoyed a ready supply of food, billions of pounds of flesh free for the scavenging. In the decades that saw the near eradication of bison and the genocidal destructive of native peoples, the wolf and coyote populations skyrocketed. Now as prairie turned to ranchland and bison carcasses turned to bone, the carnivores, accustomed to easy meals, turned their attention to livestock. Settlers were soon directing their violence toward the now much-maligned wolf and coyote by either bounty hunting or poisoning their environment. Over the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, farmers and ranchers used poisons to eliminate nonhuman predators: thallium, cyanide, and especially strychnine. The latter had been used in North America for a century, but its use now exploded. The indiscriminate use of these poisons nearly eradicated wolves and coyotes, with both species marked for extinction by the federal government and local governments.
The poisoning also resulted in the destruction of millions if not tens of millions of other animals, from kit foxes to birds. The prairies and western rangelands, already becoming less hospitable to wildlife with global warming, were also now some of the most polluted areas in the country.
49 Bison bones, however, still served a purpose during the settler expansion, their collection an important moment in the creation of western agriculture and ranching. Hundreds of millions of pounds of bones were gathered and sold, packed into railway cars heading east to factories in Detroit and St.
Louis. Americans needed their fertilizer. Railroad companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones for shipping east.
“The more you can ship the better we will like it,” wrote the North-Western Fertilizing Company, based in Chicago, in 1888.50 In some areas, Indians who had once lived off the bison now collected their bones to sell to the merchants of this industry; the money they earned went to purchase food to stave off starvation. In other areas, particularly Nebraska and Kansas, poorly capitalized homesteaders gathered bones and used the proceeds to purchase seed, implements, and stock. In 1873, the Detroit Carbon Works was founded.
Spread over nearly one hundred acres near the Rouge River and nicknamed “Boneville,” the factory processed unimaginable quantities of bison bones, for years operating nonstop. Until Henry Ford’s automobile revolution, Boneville was Detroit’s largest factory and one of the largest industrial plants in the country.
51 FIGURE 10.2. Bison bones. A man stands on the top of an enormous pile of buffalo skulls; another man stands in front of the pile with his foot resting on a buffalo skull. A rustic cage is at the foot of the pile. Handwritten on back: “C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich.” Detroit Public Library, Digital Collections, DPA4901.
Bones into capital, hides into industry, death into money: a primitive transmutation if there ever was one. “Today,” wrote a settler in the early 1880s, “hundreds of thousands of cattle and horses cover this same country [where bison had been]. The Americans,” he applauded, “know how to make profit from everything.”52 Making money from killing animals and people seemed a part of the American settler soul, as natural as owning a gun.