Empire (22 page)

ity and charity would be bringing the Amerindians under the control

and tutelage ofthe true religion and its culture. The natives are

undeveloped potential Europeans. In this sense Las Casas belongs

to a discourse that extends well into the twentieth century on the

perfectibility of savages. For the Amerindians, just as for the Jews

of sixteenth-century Spain, the path to freedom from persecution

must pass first through Christian conversion. Las Casas is really not

so far from the Inquisition. He recognizes that humankind is one,

but cannot see that it is also simultaneously many.

More than two centuries after Las Casas, in the late eighteenth

century, when Europe’s domination over the Americas had changed

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form from conquest, massacre, and pillage to the more stable colonial

structure oflarge-scale slave production and trade exclusives, a

black slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture led the first successful

independence struggle against modern slavery in the French colony

ofSaint Domingue (now Haiti). Toussaint L’Ouverture breathed

in the rhetoric ofthe French Revolution emanating from Paris in

its pure form. If the French revolutionaries opposing the ancien

re´gime proclaimed the universal human right to ‘‘liberte´, egalite´,

et fraternite´,’’ Toussaint assumed that the blacks, mulattoes, and

whites ofthe colony were also included under the broad umbrella

ofthe rights ofcitizens. He took the victory over the feudal aristoc-

racy and the exaltation ofuniversal values in Europe to imply also

the victory over the ‘‘race aristocracy’’ and the abolition ofslavery.

All will now be free citizens, equal brothers in the new French

republic. The letters ofToussaint to French military and govern-

mental leaders pursue the rhetoric ofthe revolution faultlessly to

its logical conclusion and thereby reveal its hypocrisy. Perhaps na-

ively or perhaps as a conscious political tactic, Toussaint demon-

strates how the leaders ofthe revolution betray the principles they

claim to hold most dear. In a report to the Directoire on 14 Brumaire

an VI (November 5, 1797), Toussaint warned the French leaders

that any return to slavery, any compromise ofprinciples, would

be impossible. A declaration offreedom is irreversible: ‘‘Do you

think that men who have enjoyed the blessing ofliberty will calmly

see it snatched away? . . . But no, the same hand that has bro-

ken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke

her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her

benefits.’’3

The proclamations ofuniversal rights launched so confidently

in Paris come back from Saint Domingue only to strike horror in

the hearts ofthe French. In the voyage across the Atlantic, the

universality ofthe ideals became more real and were put into

practice. As AimeĆeśaire puts it, Toussaint L’Ouverture pushed

the project forward across the terrain ‘‘that separates the
only thought
from concrete reality; right from its actualization; reason from its

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proper truth.’’4 Toussaint takes the Declaration ofthe Rights of

Man to the letter and insists on its full translation into practice. The

revolution under Toussaint does not seek liberation from European

domination only to return to a lost African world or reestablish in

isolation traditional forms of rule; Toussaint looks forward to the

forms of liberty and equality newly made available in the increasingly

interconnected world.5

At times, however, Toussaint writes as ifthe very idea of

freedom had been created by the French, and as if he and his

insurgent companions were free only by the grace of Paris. This

may be merely a rhetorical strategy ofToussaint’s, an example of

his ironic obsequiousness toward the French rulers; but certainly

one should not think freedom to be a European idea. The slaves

ofSaint Domingue had revolted against their masters ever since

their capture and forced immigration from Africa. They were not

granted freedom but won it through bloody and tireless battle.

Neither the desire for freedom nor its conquest originated in France,

and the blacks ofSaint Domingue did not need the Parisians to

teach them to fight for it. What Toussaint does receive and make

good use ofis the specific rhetoric ofthe French revolutionaries

that gives legitimate form to his quest for liberation.

In the nineteenth century Karl Marx, like Las Casas and Tous-

saint L’Ouverture before him, recognized the utopian potential of

the ever-increasing processes ofglobal interaction and communica-

tion. Like Las Casas, Marx was horrified by the brutality ofEuropean

conquest and exploitation. Capitalism was born in Europe through

the blood and sweat ofconquered and colonized non-European

peoples: ‘‘The veiled slavery ofthe wage-labourers in Europe needed

the unqualified slavery ofthe New World as its pedestal.’’6 Like

Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marx recognized human freedom as a uni-

versal project to be realized through practice and from which no

population should be excluded.

This global utopian vein in Marx is nonetheless ambiguous,

perhaps even more so than in the other two cases, as we can see

clearly from the series of articles he wrote for the
New York Daily

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119

Tribune
in 1853 on British rule in India. Marx’s primary goal in

these articles was to explain the debate going on at the time in the

British Parliament over the status ofthe East India Company and

situate the debate in the history ofBritish colonial rule. Marx is of

course quick to note the brutality ofthe introduction ofBritish

‘‘civilization’’ into India and the havoc and suffering wrought by

the rapacious greed ofBritish capital and the British government.

He immediately warns, however, in terms that bring us right back

to the revolutionary face of the Renaissance, against simply reacting

to the barbarity ofthe British by supporting blindly the status quo

ofIndian society. The village system that Marx understood to

preexist the British colonial intrusion was nothing to be champi-

oned: ‘‘Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness’’ the

destruction and suffering caused by the British, ‘‘we must not forget

that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may

appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,

that they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible

compass, making it the unresisting tool ofsuperstition, enslaving it

beneath the traditional rules depriving it ofall grandeur and historical

energies.’’7 Neither does the ruling structure ofIndian princes de-

serve support, even in reaction to the British: ‘‘It is not a strange

thing that the same men who denounce ‘the barbarous splendors

ofthe Crown and Aristocracy ofEngland’ are shedding tears at the

downfall of Indian Nabobs, Rujahs, and Jagidars, the great majority

ofwhom possess not even the prestige ofantiquity, being generally

usurpers ofvery recent date, set up by English intrigue.’’8

The colonial situation falls too easily into a choice between

two bad alternatives: either submission to British capital and British

rule or return to traditional Indian social structures and submission

to Indian princes; either foreign domination or local domination.

For Marx there must be another path that refuses both of these

alternatives, a path ofinsubordination and freedom. In this sense,

in creating the conditions ofpossibility for a new society, ‘‘whatever

may have been the crimes ofEngland, she was the unconscious

tool ofhistory in bringing about that revolution.’’9 Capital can, in

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certain circumstances, be a force of enlightenment. Like Toussaint,

then, Marx saw no use in overthrowing foreign domination simply

to restore some isolated and traditional form of oppression. The

alternative must look forward to a new form of freedom, connected

to the expansive networks ofglobal exchange.

The only ‘‘alternative’’ path Marx can imagine, however, is

that same path that European society has already traveled. Marx

has no conception of the difference of Indian society, the different

potentials it contains. He can thus see the Indian past only as vacant

and static: ‘‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known

history. What we call its history is but the history ofthe successive

intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that

unresisting and unchanging society.’’10 The claim that Indian society

has no history means not that nothing has happened in India but

that the course ofevents has been determined exclusively by exter-

nal forces, while Indian society has remained passive, ‘‘unresisting

and unchanging.’’ Certainly Marx was limited by his scant knowl-

edge ofIndia’s present and past.11 His lack ofinformation, how-

ever, is not the point. The central issue is that Marx can con-

ceive ofhistory outside ofEurope only as moving strictly along

the path already traveled by Europe itself. ‘‘England has to fulfill a

double mission in India,’’ he wrote, ‘‘one destructive, the other

regenerating—the annihilation ofold Asiatic Society, and the laying

ofthe material foundations ofWestern society in Asia.’’12 India can

progress only by being transformed into a Western society. All the

world can move forward only by following the footsteps of Europe.

Marx’s Eurocentrism is in the end not so different from that of

Las Casas.

TheCrisis of Colonial Slavery

Although the utopian vein has continually surfaced in the historical

process ofthe interconnection and intercommunication ofthe world

in the modern period, it has nonetheless continually been suppressed

militarily and ideologically by the forces of European domination.

The primary result has been massacres on a scale never before

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imagined and the establishment ofracial, political, and economic

structures ofEuropean rule over the non-European world. The

rise ofEuropean supremacy was driven in large part by the develop-

ment and spread ofcapitalism, which fed Europe’s seemingly insatia-

ble thirst for wealth. The global expansion of capitalism, however,

was neither a uniform nor a univocal process. In various regions

and among different populations capitalism developed unevenly: it

lurched forward, hesitated, and retreated according to a variety of

diverse paths. One such circuitous path is traced by the history of

large-scale colonial slave production in the Americas between the

late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, a history that is

not precapitalist but rather
within
the complex and contradictory

developments ofcapital.

Large-scale plantation production with slave labor was initiated

in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century by English and

French planters who imported African slaves to fill the void left by

the native peoples killed by European weapons and disease. By the

end ofthe eighteenth century, the products ofslave labor in the

Americas constituted one third ofthe value ofEuropean com-

merce.13 European capitalism stood in a very ambiguous relation

to this slave production in the Americas. One might reason logically,

as many have, that since capitalism is based ideologically and materi-

ally on free labor, or really on the worker’s ownership of his or

her own labor power, capitalism must be antithetical to slave labor.

From this perspective, colonial slavery would be seen as a preexisting

form of production analogous to feudalism that capital succeeds

gradually in overcoming. The capitalist ideology offreedom would

in this case be an unalloyed force of enlightenment.

Capital’s relationship to colonial slavery, however, is in fact

much more intimate and complex. First ofall, even though capital-

ism’s ideology is indeed antithetical to slavery, in practice capital

nonetheless not only subsumed and reinforced existing slave produc-

tion systems throughout the world but also
created new systems of

slavery
on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the Americas.14

One might interpret capital’s creation ofslave systems as a kind of

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apprenticeship to capitalism, in which slavery would function as a

transitional stage between the natural (that is, self-sufficient and

isolated) economies that preexisted European intrusion and capital-

ism proper. Indeed, the scale and organization ofthe eighteenth-

century Caribbean plantations did foreshadow in certain respects

the nineteenth-century European industrial plant.15 The slave pro-

duction in the Americas and the African slave trade, however, were