The rise of nations is deeply connected to the Doctrine of Discovery. Under theological and legal doctrines invented during and after the Latin Church’s Crusades between the 11th and 15th centuries, non-Christians were considered enemies of the Catholic faith and as such, less than human. In the papal bull of 1452, Pope Nicholas directed King Alfonso to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the… enemies of Christ,†to “put them into perpetual slavery,†and “to take all their possessions and property.†Before the 15th century, most common people did not consider themselves part of nations. As European feudalism and the power of the Church declined, monarchs stepped in to fill the power vacuum. With the political concept of “nation†came global competition for control of international trade.
Early accounts of Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese in the Americas during the 16th to 18th centuries reflect their conditions as subjects of European nations competing for control of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Filipinos were forced onto Spanish ships via trade routes between the Philippines and Mexico, both colonized by Spain. Indians arrived in Europe as servants of British elites, who were competing with the Portuguese and Dutch to establish trade in India. Shortly after independence, the United States started its own trade with China, joining in the contest for profits in Asia. The United States rose to global dominance through state, military, and financial capacities acquired through genocide, land theft, slavery, and the manipulation of formerly impoverished European settlers.
In the early- to mid-17th century in Virginia, the racial categories of black and white did not exist. Europeans and Africans in servitude rebelled and ran away together. People’s identities primarily were defined by their religion or class status (noble, aristocrat, artisan, servant). Indentured Europeans lacked the kinds of privileges that they would gain after the slave status of black people became codified as both racial and hereditary.
In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led what became known as Bacon’s Rebellion against the British governor of the Virginia colony, William Berkeley. The rebellion was sparked by Bacon’s desire to retaliate against the Doeg Tribe’s challenges to the colony’s borders. Though the rebellion was rooted in settler colonialism and anti-Indian sentiment, indentured European servants and enslaved Africans, united by their bond-servitude, allied with Bacon against Berkeley and the ruling class. This would lead to the establishment of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, designed to impede such future alliances.
The slave codes replaced bond servitude with a hereditary system of race slavery. As slave owners across the colonies felt equally threatened by the potential for rebellions such as Bacon’s, the laws spread. The racial concepts and legal categories of black (“Negro†or “mulattoâ€) and white were created to guard against class uprisings against oligarchy. Codifying a hereditary basis for the slave status of black people ensured a permanent and self-reproducing source of free labor. The Virginia Slave Code stated: “All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion… shall be held to be real estate.†However, colonists never succeeded in enslaving large numbers of Native Americans due to rebellion and high disease-based mortality rates.
While slave codes cemented race-based slavery in colonial America, political theorist Cedric Robinson dates the history of European racial thinking and politics to the feudal era in which Irish, Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc., experienced dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in Europe. It is from this history, he argues, that racial capitalism emerged as a world order. The usefulness of labor (the proletariat) to capital was not as an abstraction, but as differentiated and competing racial subjects. Because of the usefulness of racialized labor, even after enslaved Africans formally won their freedom from slavery, they and their descendants would be subjugated by the state for centuries, repeatedly forced to demand their full inclusion socially, politically, and economically.
In contrast to enslaved Africans, indentured Europeans were given freedom and privileges such as land and guns at the end of their contracts. The shift from indentured servants to chattel slavery was both cheaper and a way to control labor unrest. Historian Barbara J. Fields points out:
“Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods. Only those who could force large numbers of people to work tobacco for them stood to get rich during the tobacco boom. Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation. The only degradation they were spared was perpetual enslavement along with their issue in perpetuity, the fate that eventually befell the descendants of Africans.â€
The impact of this ruling-class strategy on the consciousness of white American settlers – being both subjugated and higher in status than black people – can be seen over time. We can see this in the intimate communication among Whites, whose newly minted racial status was a huge leap upward from the conditions of feudalism, yet still subservient to the ruling class. In a 1782 letter, an American farmer writes:
“The instant I enter on my own land, the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence exalt my mind. Precious soil… What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? It feeds, it clothes us, from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink, the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot. No wonder we should thus cherish its possession, no wonder that so many Europeans who have never been able to say that such portion of land was theirs, cross the Atlantic to realise that happiness. This formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens...â€
Learn more about resistance in this time period.