Of the seafaring explorers who circled and mapped the globe, the name that most readily comes to every schoolboy’s mind is that of Christopher Columbus. Some few may think of Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama or James Cook. A very few may name Ibn Majid, Erik the Red, or Amerigo Vespucci. And no name from South or East Asia will occur to anyone. But Columbus will spring readily to mind. And this is rightly so, because of the historical processes that began to manifest themselves shortly after his famous voyage.
1492 was a momentous year. It was the year when King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Queen Isabella of Castile drove the defeated King Boabdil (Mohammad XII) out of his stronghold in Granada and completed what is called the Reconquista of Spain. One of those present on the melancholy occasion – when the humiliated Boabdil was forced to bow before the two Christian monarchs and kiss their rings – was an ambitious businessman from Genoa (now in Italy).
The British Empire from an 1886 cartographic depiction
Christophorus (his non-Anglicised name) Columbus had come to Spain to seek the sponsorship of the Queen of Castile for a risky voyage westward across the Atlantic. His plan was to seek a western sea passage, leading eventually to India, hoping thereby to earn great profit from the lucrative spice trade. Queen Isabella liked the idea. Columbus got his funding and set off across the Atlantic.
After two-and-a-half months at sea, Columbus got lost, followed a flock of birds, and wound up on some islands. While he thought he had reached India, his landing place was actually an island in the Bahamas, known to its then inhabitants as Guanahani. Columbus subsequently sailed to the islands now known as Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is now Haiti. He returned to Castile in early 1493, bringing a number of captured natives with him. Word of his voyages soon spread throughout Europe.
One of those present on the melancholy occasion – when the humiliated Boabdil was forced to bow before the two Christian monarchs and kiss their rings – was an ambitious businessman from Genoa (now in Italy). Christophorus Columbus had come to Spain to seek the sponsorship of the Queen
Columbus was not the first person to ‘discover’ America. There were numerous native inhabitants in the Americas, who had founded flourishing native civilisations, such as the Mayas, Incas, Aztecs, etc. He was not even the first European – that distinction belonging to the 10th-century Norse explorer Erik the Red and, later, his son Leif Erikssen. We know that the Norsemen had established a number of settlements in what is now Newfoundland in Canada.
Andre Gunder Frank
But it is Columbus’s voyage that is of prime historical importance for, with him, the hot hands of European capitalism reached out to grasp the New World. It was here that the Age of Empires had its gestation.
The Spaniards followed Columbus into this New World, plundering the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru – taking their gold and making Spain the richest power in Europe. The British and the French seized the lands of the natives of North America and established highly productive colonies and plantations there.
Christopher Columbus
The Europeans used their superior naval and military technology to conquer and colonise most of the world to extract its resources and thus wealth. In some regions, extraction took the simple form of mining precious metals or resources. For example, the Portuguese and Spaniards extracted huge volumes of gold and silver from colonies in South America, and later on, as the industrial revolution took off in Europe, Belgium profited enormously from extracting rubber from its colony in the Congo, and the United Kingdom profited from oil reserves in what is now Saudi Arabia.
According to the German sociologist Andre Gunder Frank, this world capitalist system is organised as an interlocking chain: at one end are the wealthy ‘metropolis’ or ‘core’ nations, and at the other are the undeveloped ‘satellite’ or ‘periphery’ nations
In other parts of the world (where there were no raw materials to be mined), the European colonial powers established plantations on their colonies, with each colony producing different agricultural products for export back to the mother country. As colonialism evolved, different colonies came to specialise in the production of different raw materials – bananas and sugar cane from the Caribbean, cocoa (and, of course, human slaves) from West Africa, coffee from East Africa, tea and opium from India, and spices from Indonesia. By taking over Diwani rights in India, the likes of Clive, Hastings and Cornwallis sucked away the wealth of what was then the richest country in the world.
The wealth which flowed from Latin America, Asia, and Africa into the European countries provided the funds to kickstart their industrial revolution, which enabled European countries to start producing higher-value manufactured goods for export. This further accelerated the wealth-generating capacity of the colonial powers, and led to increasing inequality between Europe and the rest of the world.
Of course, there have always been empires, of one kind or another. But – and this is the point – these modern Empires were a new breed. Their exploring, conquering, dominating thrust was driven by the vitality of an explosively expanding capitalism.
Thus, a world capitalist system began to emerge as early as the 16th century, which progressively locked Latin America, Asia and Africa into an unequal and exploitative relationship with the more powerful European nations.
Over the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century, the Age of Empires reached towards its apogee. Spain ruled in South America, alongside Portugal, which also ruled in parts of Africa. North America was the hunting grounds of the British and, later, their US successors, as well as the French. The French also ruled in North Africa, West Africa and Indo-China. The Belgians ruled in Africa, as did the Dutch, alongside their control of the immense Indonesian Archipelago. Even the Swedes and Italians had bits of Africa. With the collapse of the Ottomans, the Middle East was carved up between Britain and France. Emerging powers like Germany and Japan rose to try and establish Empires of their own. And Britain dominated more than half the world.
The sunset of the Age of Empires commenced on the 14th of August, 1947. And by the 1960s, most colonies had achieved their independence. But there was now a new kind of Imperialism – an economic and not political imperialism. The ‘core’ nations continued to see developing countries as sources of cheap raw materials and labour, or as military satrapies. Exploitation continued, without de jure political control. The late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto described this state in his book The Myth of Independence.
According to the German sociologist Andre Gunder Frank, this world capitalist system is organised as an interlocking chain: at one end are the wealthy ‘metropolis’ or ‘core’ nations, and at the other are the undeveloped ‘satellite’ or ‘periphery’ nations. Developing nations have failed to develop, not only because of ‘internal barriers to development,’ as modernization theorists argue, but more importantly because the developed countries have in fact systematically underdeveloped them. They remain in a state of dependence in a world where wealth tends inevitably to flow from the nations of the periphery, which grow more dependent, with each IMF ‘adjustment’ or big arms deal, on the rich nations of the ‘core’.
And that is where we stand today. The power of capitalist enterprise, fuelled by devouring the colonial wealth, has driven incredible developments in science and technology and a worldwide educational, intellectual and cultural florescence – which have in turn generated still further, previously unimaginable, levels of wealth.
It has also caused wars, genocide, massive levels of inequality, degradation of our planetary environment and perpetuation of the curse of underdevelopment.
All this is the legacy of that moment in 1492 when the Genoan merchant Christopher Columbus approached Queen Isabella of Castile, who was perhaps still euphoric from receiving the surrender of the humbled Saracen King Boabdil, to seek funding for his historic voyage.
