Marcus Rediker (Owensboro, Kentucky, 1951) is one of the most renowned historians in the United States. His studies of the slave trade from Africa to the Americas to work on notorious plantations in the US South, the Caribbean and Brazil have won him prestigious recognitions such as the George Washington Book Prize. As the author and co-author of a dozen books – such as “Slave Ship: The Trafficking Across the Atlantic” (Captain Swing 2021) or the recent “Villains of All Nations” (Traffickers of Dreams, 2023) – Rediker is one of the betes noires by Who Endeavor to reinterpret the conquest of America to wash away the contemporary conscience of a cruel time. “All colonizing states like Spain invent false stories about their past,” says this Atlantic history professor, whose vibrant way of telling history “from below,” something he developed with his colleagues in the Midnight Notes Collective movement, Peter Linebaugh and Silvia, shares Federici has given him countless followers. As a brilliant essayist, in view of the approaching October 12th, he quickly throws overboard the theories that idealize the role of the Spanish conquistadors. “What freedom, peace and prosperity came to the millions of indigenous peoples who lost their lands and died by the millions from diseases to which they had no immunity?” he asks. The answer, Rediker adds, was already given by William Faulkner when he wrote: “The past is never dead. It is not even
British abolitionist William Wilberforce already told the hard truth about the enslaved people transported crammed into the holds of slave ships when he wrote: “So much misery in so small an area is more than human imagination could ever have imagined .” That was an extreme nightmare. On an average ship, 300 men, women and children were crammed into a small space below deck, where they were required to remain during an ocean crossing of nine to twelve weeks. They only went on the main deck for a few hours a day and only when the weather permitted it. Seasickness, stench, epidemics and mass extinctions characterized these ocean crossings. The captain of a slave ship tried to control the slaves using whips and other means of violence. Violence reigned on the slave ships and was in itself an instrument of terror. Many Africans did not survive. At the time of the slave trade, between 1500 and 1870, one in eight people, around two million in total, died on the move. Their bodies were thrown overboard to the sharks that followed ships crossing the Atlantic. Those who survived fought on the land and in the plantation system, demonstrating, as the great African American writer Ralph Ellison explained, that a people is “more than the sum of their brutality.”
—How could such disgrace be tolerated for so long?
“There are two main reasons why the slave trade, with all the horrors it brought, lasted so long. First, the slave trade was crucial to wealth creation. Many powerful people around the world benefited from it. They promoted and protected human trafficking. Second, because the majority of white Europeans and Americans believed that slavery was a “natural” system and racistly assumed that African peoples were adapted to it. Even after the rise of abolitionist movements at the end of the 18th century, the slave trade remained active for eighty years.
—Was slavery one of the greatest genocides in human history?
—The slave system caused millions of deaths. In this sense, like many others, it could be considered genocide. The difference, however, is that the goal of slavery was not to kill people, but to keep them alive so that they could work to provide benefits to the slave owners and their governments. Those who benefited directly from slavery believed that the millions of deaths it caused were perfectly acceptable “collateral damage” as long as the system remained intact, because it allowed them to continue to accumulate capital and power.
– How many millions of people could have been kidnapped in Africa and sold in Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Brazil?
—The current estimate of the total number of people transported to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade is approximately 12.5 million. Most of them were sent to Brazil or the Caribbean, which together accounted for more than 80 percent of arrivals.
—And the illegal slave trade?
—After Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and signed treaties with Portugal (1817) and Spain (1835) to end the slave trade, the trade continued illegally until around 1870 as demand was still high in Cuba and Brazil. It is estimated that Spain and Portugal illegally imported 1.3 million slaves.
—Many of the owners of these slave companies amassed enormous fortunes. Have they survived to this day?
– Yes, they persevered. Many of the wealthy families in Europe and the United States today have amassed a significant portion of their wealth in the slave trade or slavery. The same applies to companies, especially in the banking and insurance sectors. Lloyd’s of London, for example, insured tens of thousands of slave voyages and continues to prevent historians from researching its records.
– There are those who believe that the moments of maximum enrichment of the elites of an empire coincide with great atrocities. What do you think?
– This would undoubtedly describe the period in which Spanish imperial officials mined enormous amounts of gold and silver through the exploitation of Latin America’s native workers. In the slave trade and slave system it was more difficult because it lasted more than 400 years. Too much time. Most periods of extreme violence in human history have been rather short.
– The King of the Belgians apologized in 2020 for Leopold II’s colonial abuses in the Congo. The Netherlands did something similar, but few accepted their responsibility for slavery. Do you believe that the past is history or that so many centuries of oppression still have an impact today?
“We live with the ongoing effects of the slave trade and slavery every day of our lives.” That means the slave ships continue to sail. I argue that the influence of slavery and the slave trade persists in the United States through racial discrimination, generational poverty, deep structural inequality, racial incarceration, and premature death. The American writer William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead.” It is not even the past.
—Can you ask for forgiveness for four centuries of slavery?
– Asking for forgiveness is easy. Taking concrete steps to overcome the injustices that exist today due to the slave trade and slavery is much more difficult to achieve. Reparations are necessary to overcome the damage that this long period of time has caused worldwide. If you want to understand the diverse forms of reparations, I recommend reading William A. Darity’s book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. African Americans in the 21st Century.”
—In Spain, slavery is associated with the United States, Great Britain, and France, but little is said about the Spanish Empire. What role did it play in the slave trade?
– During the slave trade between 1500 and 1870, approximately 1.6 million enslaved people were imported from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. One million of them were transported on Spanish ships, the other 600,000 on Portuguese, French and British ships, thanks to a contract signed by the Spanish Crown with individuals called “asiento” to outsource human trafficking. Spain was one of the main players in the Atlantic slave trade.
—But there is still resistance here to taking responsibility for the atrocities committed during the colonization of the Americas. Conservative politics claim that “Hispanization” brought freedom, peace and prosperity to the American continent. What is your opinion as a specialist in Atlantic history?
– What freedom, peace and prosperity did the Spanish bring to the millions of indigenous people who lost their land and died by the millions from European diseases to which they had no immunity? Freedom, peace and prosperity for the millions of Africans who died in the Atlantic slave trade and for the millions more who worked to exhaustion to produce the sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton that made their slaves rich? Defenders of U.S. imperial expansion from the 19th century to the present say the same thing. All colonizers create false stories about their past. Their self-serving views have been challenged by “history from below” approaches that examine the lives of ordinary workers in the bloody construction of global capitalism.
– A few months ago the British government chartered the Bibby Stockholm, a floating prison for immigrants. Do you find any similarities in the humanitarian treatment with the slave ships 400 years ago? Do you think there are still slave traders in the service of power in today’s world?
“I have seen pictures of the floating prison and find them absolutely horrifying.” There is a direct continuity between the infamous Brooks slave ship diagram from the late 18th century and this latest figment of the ruling class imagination aimed at transporting human labor and commercialize. I should add that sociologist Kevin Bales has calculated that there are currently about 28 million people working as slaves worldwide, more than at the height of the Atlantic slave system, although in a much smaller percentage compared to the world population. These are people who are subjected to terrible working conditions under the threat or reality of violence. Slavery is still part of the world we live in. Over the past two decades, new abolitionist groups have emerged to combat the resurgence of slavery. We still have much work to do to achieve a world without slavery.
Adopted from ctxt
Cover photo: Historian Marcus Rediker during the presentation of his book “Villains of All Nations” in Madrid. / Dream Trader