Show 68 - BLITZ Human Resources

0:00it's hardcore history the blitz edition these shows that we do are improvised there's no script i'll usually come in the studio remember where we were the day before write down some thoughts that might have occurred to me in just sort of maybe bullet point form or whatever and then we improvise and if we don't like it we throw it away if we do like it strings together with the stuff we did previously but the reason that

0:30matters is i don't have a real roadmap or idea of how what we're about to start here is going to go we take this journey together and then you look at what you have and say well what is that there's no chance to you know go over the script later double check things decide if this works or that doesn't you know time it out none of that is available to us and i think that's partially why it sounds kind of different than a lot of the similar productions but but this is part of how

1:03we've always done it right so i don't know how this is going to go the people that have advised me that i've divulged what i'm going to talk about today the people that i've i've talked to have told me it is not going to go well it doesn't matter how what i do it's not going to go well um they said you should not touch this topic it is a no-win situation just go to you know go do one of the crowd pleaser topics there's so many you know the people will love and i wrote down a quote uh that sort of summed up the problem and the reason that those people are saying that uh it's attributed i

1:35always say that now because every quote is somehow debunked nobody ever said anything they're quoted as saying in history apparently but the ohio state uh university historian robert c davis is quoted as saying that history is often is not our present politics projected onto the past and you can see that easily i mean that is an obvious statement when you go and look at for example the brand new books that are coming out on certain historical things and and how they'll they'll tend to they'll tie it in it's it's something that the editors want right tie it into the current events i mean it's

2:08encouraged but the problem is is that that means a lot of the material that you might use to discuss this topic that everyone tells me not to discuss today um is going to be woven into the political you know anger of our current times right the zeitgeist and if there's one thing we've seen in our current times is a big part of the problem is that no one accepts the sources of the other side and that the first thing you say in any discussion is who are your sources and the minute you don't like them it's discussion over but this is one of those subjects that everyone should have as part of their

2:45sort of foundational knowledge as my mother always used to say she would say intelligent people know these things right so a certain bedrock of a knowledge base and you might not get any higher than that from me because that's another reason that maybe you want to steer clear of the show like this is because it's monumentally huge and a person like yours truly is completely inadequate to dealing with it i always hope that i can be one little tile in the giant mosaic that is the picture here and that that tile has something to offer that's unique so one of the things i thought

3:17anticipating the criticism here and wanting people if they don't already because many of you are going to know all of this stuff um wanting people to have this knowledge base is that i was going to steer clear of any of the controversial sources now you you miss out when you do that you lose a lot of the cutting edge ideas you lose a lot of the pushing the envelope stuff some very interesting things at one point i thought maybe i'll do a compare and contrast sort of deal well that quickly became something that was a too high of an intellectual level for years truly also so i thought i'm going

3:49to approach this like a blitz show topic where we sort of dive in and dive out and i highlight things that i think are interesting or important it's not chronological it's not a history of but it's something that when i look at my archive seems like a glaring omission it's the discussion of the atlantic slave trade and um that period in history and some of the ideas that are out there and some of the thoughts that matter and some questions that i think are well i want to say that

4:21they're interesting but some of them i would i would say are almost the obvious things to ask and no one asks them which is you know maybe i'm the wrong in the wrong there maybe they're not that foundational otherwise other people would have asked them but you can be the judge of that assuming that without this script we ever get to that now we did a show quite a while back called addicted to bondage that looked at the overall human institution of slavery going back you know to the very beginnings of civilization it wasn't as in-depth as that makes it sound but it was more of a holistic look at the

4:55uh slavery question than dealing and i think it specifically tried to avoid the more recent version that was specifically mostly african in nature to give a sense of how common this thing was in human history all over the world and then we examine the sorts of reasons that that might be and you get into these borderline upsetting um sorts of lenses to look at it but when i was a kid and this is what we said in the addicted to bondage episode they were always promising the kitchen of

5:26tomorrow today all these labor saving devices were going to take all the drudgery of life away from you so you could go enjoy your golf game or whatever it was you know radar ranges stuff like that but as we had said in addicted to bondage the ancients and the people in earlier eras and the people in some places still today uh they have the kitchen of yesterday today and it's just as good but instead of labor saving devices that are mechanical they have people that do the same job slaves were one of the

5:58original labor saving devices and when you read the views of slave holders in slave societies they will often connect it to the highest you know aspirations of mankind as a whole right it's people who do the slave type jobs that free up the people that push society forward and think and and write and come up with all these you know pieces of art that otherwise would not be available because they'd have to go to you know the grocery store in the morning the marketplace would probably be more apropos and pick

6:28up the stuff for tonight's dinner and then make it right and then clean up after it otherwise i mean how are we going to have time to write and read you'll see that all the way in the post-colonial times in the united states right this is how societies push forward even you know famous athens in the era where it was democratic right it's sort of the the shining city on the democratic hill for people looking back at at the beginnings of things like democracy it was an enormous slave state nice chunk of its population was enslaved

7:02so what was once referred to as a peculiar institution slavery is not we live in the strange time now a time where slavery is universally reviled now i did read that there were more than 40 million people classified as slaves right now in the world which if true would make it almost certainly this period in human history where there were the most slaves 40 million is a lot but sometimes the

7:36criteria is let's call it slavery on a sliding scale and that isn't meant to be trite but there's all kinds of slavery and it's sort of on a gradient on one end you have things like um you know wage slavery as some people would say right people that are trapped in jobs that don't make them enough money to live but they get paid then you have things like bond slavery debt slavery which is really the same thing indentured servitude all the way down to the lowest level of slavery on the gradient chattel slavery chattel slavery is this is is where we take human beings and we make them things

8:12maybe it would be more uh apropos rather than comparing them to a hammer or a chair to compare them to some sort of animal you'd find on a farm that's how because the the slave owners would often try to keep them healthy the same way you would try to keep some livestock healthy but it's you know you own them you can do whatever you want with them that's chattel slavery serfdom peasantry there's all kinds of these things that would fall somewhere in the category but chattel slavery is the lowest of the low and that's the kind of slavery uh that the world had going on

8:47when christopher columbus found the new world for the europeans in the old world how about that europeans isn't even the proper term because the old world um stretched from you know the edges of europe right ireland western france western spain and what's now portugal right that those are the edges of the of europe the europe eurasian continent and you follow it all the way through though and i mean china on the other side is connected to this pipeline and everything in between now there's

9:18not close contact but silk is making it one way money's making it the other in other words that there are things like um diseases foods um codes of conduct and morality that um are shared you know i mean the mongols alone in the 1300s 1200s would have been spreading a lot of this stuff against everybody else's will so when columbus rolls up into the new world so-called new world and lands

9:51the person that is landing there is a person from the middle ages and this is important to point out now columbus was a bad guy i think when you look at his conduct as judged by the people of his day at the same time it's hard to imagine somebody else showing up and all of a sudden behaving radically different right even if they were not as ruthless as someone like columbus how much different are they

10:23going to behave and how much different is that going to going to make everything that follows afterwards but the important thing to remember is if you look and i always do this if you look at when columbus was born in other words the world he was born into i think he was born in the 1450s the 1450s is like the war of the roses in england go look at a at a picture you know a painting um of what people were looking like in the wars of the roses era these are knights this is medieval combat we haven't even yet or we're just in columbus's day progressing to the point where we're getting

10:59into that period where you have the inquisition and people being burned i mean look at what life is like for these people in the world columbus was born into they break people on the wheel the executions are public i mean so what sort of person was going to show up in the new world and just by modern standards behave right that was an ugly world they were coming from and as i said not you know it's tempting these days people blame it on europe but i mean this is this is the way

11:30it is in north africa what's now the middle east europe of course russia china the mongolian area india i mean this is a shared understanding of man's inhumanity to man and things like slavery well it's everywhere and it's an equal opportunity atrocity in columbus's day before he finds the so-called new world slavers were more likely to care about the slaves religious affiliation than their

12:05skin color the christians in spain would enslave the moors across into north africa the north african peoples who are like moroccans and algerians today and those people would enslave the christians as well the turks had lots of slaves the arabs had lots of slaves the italians had slave markets the russians had slaves the mongols enslaved everyone the chinese had slaves the indians had slaves they had slavery in sub-saharan africa with so-called black africa and they had slavery

12:36in the americas before columbus even got there similar pattern to the rest of the world too some peoples had it some peoples didn't amongst the peoples that did practice slavery it was on the slavery gradient scale too i mean there were and you'll often hear people sort of try to defend these tribes as not really being uh slave owning tribes because the slave was more like a family member a family member who couldn't leave and had to do whatever they were told but that is a little different on the slavery gradient scale than someone who's captured in war and is a slave who's held as

13:13raw fodder for some human sacrificial religious event that is upcoming right you're going to be the star of the show and needless to say things like skin color did not play a role uh because the peoples of the americas were basically you know close to each other's skin color it wasn't playing a large role at the time columbus arrived in the old world yet either anyone could become a slave as we'd said i mean anyone in columbus's crew could have found themselves on a ship captured by pirates or slavers end

13:48up in some slave market on a mediterranean island find themselves auctioned off and a galley slave in the sultan's fleet or something like that white slavery as it was called the pulp comic books of the 20th century play on that a lot right especially the the women who ended up in the sultan's harem the white women it was such a racial trope but during this time period there was some of that and the the turks had christian slave soldiers which is a different slave uh level on the slavery gradient scale too

14:20there could be some really powerful slaves slaves who owned lots of slaves i mean the slavery thing defies easy classification the bottom line though is is one of the things where you start to say okay now why did this happen the interesting questions that come into play is so how did this become a thing where all of a sudden a bunch of powers in the world were hooking black africans up to the you know the proto or early capitalist globalized supply chain and logistically figuring out ways to start a pipeline

14:57of human beings from the african continent over to the americas now there's obviously no easy answer to this if there's any answer at all it's not a two plus two equals four kind of question certainly so i started writing down you know while scouring the history books a bunch of the different ideas that were thrown out there as major influencing factors to this whole thing and as my list got longer and longer and longer i started to realize that this really isn't a list that's about slavery per se

15:28you could better describe this ever lengthening list of influential factors discoveries events as something that tries to explain what reality was like in the so-called old world in the 15th and 16th centuries right what the zeitgeist was like what the economic system was like in other words what you can draw from that is that slavery is so interconnected in that world that you can't tease it out like a strand in a rope it touches everything it influences everything it's such a basic part of the makeup of

16:01things that it's impossible to talk about the influential factors in the slave trade without just talking about the influential factors in life the one thing that has always struck me about this era is because some of it especially economically begins to look like well there's a modernity to it it's not the kind of economic system we have now but we're clearly an evolved form of it right we're descendant from this system that's about to develop in the 1400s because it's the first truly globalized

16:36system right because it's the first time that the so-called old world and the so-called new world are aware of each other first time they're included in the economy the first time you have a global economy right and yet the idea that you could take a kind of a proto-capitalism and inject human bondage as one of the commodities that it works with the same way you would work with sugar or tobacco or oil

17:11today it's bizarre they they seem to be from different eras like slavery should have already died out before we got to this level of ability to you know maximize mercantile operations right we already already decided that things like people shouldn't be the officially traded products on the new york stock exchange right and instead of you know these old ideas going away because they don't fit into a new modern paradigm what instead you see is a fusion don't you of this very ancient human institution

17:48of bondage mixing with the proto-modern economic system of the renaissance the first globalized you know sometimes you'll see history books call it a commercial revolution or a mercantilist revolution or trade revolution but an era where it would not be out of place and i'm sure it's been done and i feel like an idiot for not having checked it in advance but i mean i'm sure an economist could write this history in a way that it makes total sense as crazy as that sounds right if you take the human being

18:19part out of this and you just focus on numbers and trade and profit and loss and well you can make all of this kind of work it's the moral part that screws up the whole slave trade thing and if you want to be a historical optimist you can say that there were there were events on a historical slavery timeline that look like there's progress happening here and there people will eliminate slavery and do away with slavery and make rules that further constrict slavery and i'm not saying they're not progress but when you make rules for example i believe it was one pope

18:53that said that you know christians could be slave owners and christians could be slaves but here on after you can't have christian slaves owned by non-christian slaveholders now anything is progress in the right direction but this to me sounds more like we don't really have a problem with the idea of slavery we just have a problem with people like us being enslaved but again not going to quibble with progress just going to point out that the historical optimists who want to make a point can point to some things that often if you examine them on the ground with a critical eye look again progress but look

19:28more like you're promoting the lowest people in your society a level or two up on the slavery gradient scale right maybe something uh from a chattel slave to a serf or from a serf to a peasant or from a peasant to an indentured servant you know i mean i'm not again saying it's not progress but um the historical pessimist would come back with yes doesn't seem to mean that much when you look at how many new peoples are going to be enslaved and how this is going to be turned into a machine and perhaps you could compare

20:00the entire slave trade as it's always existed as a machine right go to the mediterranean those are old trade networks in people i mean take for example the black sea the black sea is like a slave trading highway that you take them from the areas well a lot of times it was the steppe people the various tribes there would make a living raiding slavic villages stealing people and then selling them they'd be transported across the black sea a lot of times to constantinople and from there to the mediterranean i mean it's it's a trade network in people but you add the modern stuff to it and we

20:34have investors right and big firms and and uh it just again it could be told in the pages of the wall street journal this story if you make human beings a legal commodity to trade i mean opium was that way for a while too you just make it a legal commodity then it is like sugar or tobacco or oil and the mind reels right oil doesn't feel pain right oil doesn't suffer human beings do though right

21:05and yet supply and demand does as good of a job explaining some of this stuff as any other thing you can think of i mean look we've talked about it before i'm not a historian and it's difficult to try to take the various strands in the story and rank them in a triage type of level of importance right this is what happened and then this was more important i can't do that but i can bring in some of the strands that were going on around this time period to provide the context right so let's go back to when we started about columbus's birth period because that's an interesting time

21:37and there's a lot of things that are happening during that same time period now start with the fact that there is the beginnings as we all know of something your history books call the renaissance renaissance means rebirth and it was always associated with new ideas or a better way to put it would be old ideas that were rediscovered the rediscovery of classical civilization was the way my old history book used to you know label it now modern histories do a better job of as i think i

22:08alluded to pointing out that the people in europe for example had gotten their hands on some of this ancient greek and roman stuff a couple of centuries earlier they were pouring through the scientific side of this stuff but at the renaissance they start getting and they become popular right these works never died out they were in small little enclaves of knowledge including you know in in the arabic language that gets retransmitted over but but it wasn't in wide general dissemination and then during the renaissance all of these ancient greek and roman pre-christian cultural and

22:39philosophical and artistic works sort of blow into the consciousness of the literate people in europe and it begins to change everything and to find a historical analogy now is to is to tread into science fiction territory because this is a thousand years or more before the people of the renaissance can you imagine finding a book 1500 years old and it's got all this stuff we didn't know yet in it or calculations we didn't think about or philosophical ideas that we've never been exposed to and then this stuff reaches the internet high of mind and changes everything

23:10that's kind of the crazy stuff behind the renaissance rediscovery of classical civilization but what's funny is part of the reason that this is new to the people in europe at this time period is because they've been living with centuries of you know one sort of mental construct that they were working with which sort of excluded a lot of these pre their mental construct ideas right they lived in a very christian world one one professor professor of mind described it once as a fanatical steaming cup

23:44of coffee that all of a sudden gets an injection of pre-christian you know cream or half and half into the mix and you can imagine you know what that does the turbulence of the time period upcoming is in part um influenced by all of these ideas that a bunch of people who had a very very very very christian worldview and one that was enforced remember this was the kind of um mental thing that if you deviated from it too much you would find yourself in dire dire dire straits you could find yourself burned in this period for having a worldview too far too far off the beaten path

24:21right so to all of a sudden bring in these people who were immune from punishment i mean you can't burn aristotle at the stake uh but all of a sudden people might read it aristotle by the way is not a bad person to pivot off of this because one of the things that the rediscovery of classical civilization did was expose the renaissance europeans to this idea that slavery is just fine right i mean if you're trending away from slavery but all of a sudden and i remember reading one historian who described the renaissance um love affair with the classical greeks and romans or an

24:58infatuation with them right and you're you're looking at this great civilization that was so great that you could actually read stuff from a thousand years ago that they created and it's better than your stuff or more interesting or different or stimulating or you hadn't thought of that right what accounts for such a great society and there's this little bit of you know wondering what the secret sauce of classical civilization is and the people in this time period couldn't help but notice that these societies whether you're talking about the ancient athenians or whether you're talking about the these are slave states maybe slavery's got something to do with and then you start reading some of the ancient greek um justifications for slavery and some of the roman

25:32justifications for slavery and you can't help but notice that these will become like the standard justifications that you will hear all the way up into you know like the united states antebellum 1850 era or something you're still hearing the the lines that listen slavery is good for the slaves what was that philosopher's line you know better to be ruled by the reason of another than no reason at all right you'd be better off listening to your master's uh decisions on life because you'll be a happier person than if you made your own decisions because you're not rational the other idea that comes

26:03from the ancient greek philosophers this idea that you know some people are just born slaves right there's you know it's like created from birth the gods willed it or what have you you're you know some of you born greek some of you born barbarians the barbarians are the slaves then there's that other idea from classical civilization which was absolutely adopted by later slave states and that's that slavery was good for everybody because it allowed society's cream of the crop i'm not sure what the right word to use for these people are but but society's best and

26:34brightest right the most enlightened thinkers and statesmen and you know whatever it might be it allows those people the time to concentrate on what only they can do freeze them because there are slaves to do all the drudgery work right to make them the money on the farm whatever it might be freeze them to push society forward only by being a man of leisure could um you know these people play their role in society just like the slave plays their role in society and you can almost see a cosmic you know organization to it all can't you see how it all fits together

27:05the point being is you know at a time period where maybe a historical optimist could see signs that um you know along with this new modern world maybe there'll be a more modern view of of human relations when it comes to things like slavery and then all of a sudden you get this intellectual competition right a school of philosophy that kind of by way of example argues for just the opposite right well it didn't hurt greece or rome to have all those slaves you also begin to run into a terrible you know this could be on the wall street journal pages too

27:42but it's a terrible supply and demand situation that various developments in this day and age seem to offer a resolution for so let me explain let's go back to columbus's birth again right so 1450 ish 51 52 right in there by this time there have been advances in european ocean going travel that's a good way to put it right ocean going exploration and this is of course one of the more interesting things in all your history books um to go from a situation where for the most part

28:17human beings would hug coastlines with naval vessels to going into the open ocean right venturing forth into the atlantic or the pacific or what have you the indian ocean now they're and this is part of their um their charm and what blows you away about them polynesians in canoes vikings in long ships they they had famously done this stuff but there's a difference between some of that and the sort of regular ongoing commerce that will be initiated by you know man's venturing forth into the

28:48open oceans with big ships and when you go read the accounts from when this first starts right so so go go to what's now portugal right kingdom of portugal kingdom of castile all these places sort of on the most western part of the european peninsula along with ireland and you read their early accounts of venturing forward with the ships if you look at a map it looks like they're going almost nowhere you want to say to yourself really that's a big deal going from you know the coast of portugal to that little island right there it's only a half inch on my map something like that but back

29:20in those days there was a very good chance if you went off into the open ocean even a short distance away you weren't coming home and it was the coming home with regularity part that changed everything and it was different ship designs different navigational tools different theories a bunch of really intrepid individuals who would go a little bit farther than last time and then a little bit farther than that you can go see a timeline of portuguese investigation off of their coast to the islands nearby then the coast of africa and you know every year you can see they're like going a

29:51little bit farther down the west coast of africa then eventually they'll round the tip go up the other side eventually cross the indian ocean this does a whole lot of things obviously right the first thing it does though is open up a direct channel to central and southern africa so-called black africa right sub-saharan africa europeans and sub-saharan africa have always been connected just not directly right so if if africans from sub-saharan africa move across uh their continent up to the

30:25mediterranean sea and get transported to slave markets in italy for example i mean that all happens but it's very different than having a direct you know european correspondence with the great african kingdom south of the sahara desert right and the sahara desert's one of the big reasons that that's not happened before this time it's what 75 80 days to travel across the sahara desert in this time period and it's a total death zone armies can't traverse it i mean there are some slave caravans

30:56and some trading caravans but by and large this is an enormous barrier and then above that if you look at a map north of the sahara desert if you're uh the europeans trying to have direct contact with so-called black africa you have another problem and it's it's powerful north african states right you have you have a barrier there so first you have a powerful north african state blocking you from central africa and then south of them you have the giant sahara desert you could see why the sub-saharan africans and the europeans required middlemen to do much interaction before this time

31:28period but what's so monumentally different about this era is eventually the portuguese making their way down the african coast get to the level that's south of where the sahara desert is in other words their ships make direct contact with sub-saharan african kingdoms and one of the first things that they do is grab some of the people that they see on the coastline throw them in chains and take them back to portugal so a harbinger maybe of things to come this is what's happening like right

32:00around columbus's birth and then in 1453 something famously happens that once again in a supply and demand conversation about the global trading patterns and the price of uh investments and all these commodities um the in 1453 constantinople falls to the turks now if you go look at a map constantinople's modern day istanbul right it's old roman city that becomes a later roman city you would call a byzantine city maybe um and then in 1453 gets taken finally by the turks and if you look

32:36at istanbul today you can see how it basically controls access to the black sea it's the nozzle on the wineskin bag that is the black sea and as we said earlier the black sea is a major major slave transport zone i mean this is how you get your your so-called white slaves from the slavic regions and all there um all the way down to the major slave markets and and when constantinople falls the ottoman turks cut off they divert the slaves that were coming from that area to the major slave

33:09markets in the mediterranean to their own areas the islamic areas in the middle east and places like that which it always had a lot of slaves anyway but when they do this now in our supply and demand situation we have a supply squeeze right what would any good business person do if all of a sudden your access to raw materials were cut off or reduced and that's a good way to look at this too because slavery even though it's like um currency basically i mean people are like money uh and you can get

33:44money for human beings so in a straight-up currency trade there there were value that way but they're also if you consider it like a prime component of everybody else's business it's the same way if energy prices went up it ripples up and down everybody's life doesn't it affects everything the price of meat in the in the grocery stores everything so that's how this slave thing is too because everybody needs slaves there's a relatively constant demand and sometimes a new uh enlightened policies end up making that situation even worse for example if

34:18you say something like uh well you know christians shouldn't be slaves anymore you just cut the market that's available you know in that raw materials category don't you so so this is a time period where there's a heavy duty demand supply gets curtailed and anybody in their right mind is going to look for a new source of raw materials and it's right around the same time period that the europeans have made direct contact with sub-saharan africa which has always been a a big source of slaves not to the europeans to the islamic states for example there was a big big slave rebellion

34:53lasted more than a decade killed a ton of people in what's now modern day iraq led by the black african slaves 869 adce i believe right big rebellion but it shows you how long these trading patterns have been you know working i mean if you're an african ruler and you defeat your opponent in war you take the captives and you sell them or you make them your own slave right and this is not a universal thing it just happens a lot that's a good way to put anything right this is not universal it just happens a lot people could fall into slavery due to crimes and be punished by their

35:29own people the bottom line is that at a certain point the europeans and when we say that now we really mean the portuguese i mean the english are not doing this yet for example but the portuguese start to realize that rather than steal your own men that man stealing is another term that they used to use for slavery man stealing rather than steal your own people you could just tap into the already existing trade network you know make deals with rulers in these areas and let them just cut you in

36:00for some of the slaves they're already capturing and selling to other people anyway a lot of people are going to make a lot of money during this time period and that's another thing that's worth dealing with is one of those strands to try to unpack here and it's a key reason why even people who had nothing to do with slavery ostensibly were impossible to disentangle from the slave trade because money touched everything and connected everything and you never want to say that money is not important

36:32but in different time periods things like currency and trade are more important than others uh in the europe after uh rome fell there was i mean if you could see again the business graphs of historic performance and economic output over the eras i mean that's going to be a kind of a down period there were some places returned to more barter systems trade was curtailed um it was in the middle ages again the part that was percolating beneath the renaissance and then exploded where you started to see the merchant classes develop and they became so powerful and they made enough money that

37:02they wanted uh to be more like blue bloods in the nobility you started seeing the banking houses that would eventually be very powerful arise you started seeing trade increase in places like the baltic or the hanseatic league and all that and and the rise of the italian city states even during the crusades that were financing these things right so you begin to see modern systems of investment right and shareholders and all sorts of things that look again very modern indeed you even see it

37:33affect everything like exploration and warfare so this is a time period in history where a lot of places will just hire their defense forces and usually they'll just like in italy they'll hire a general you know it's a condottieri and that's a word that can is connected to contract right so you hire him you sign a contract and they often come with their own armies everybody signs a contract for two years we will uh be the army of this italian state and this approach to dealing with things actually

38:04is involved in the columbus explorations i mean this looks like a giant uh well-invested well-capitalized financial expedition it's it's entrepreneurial colonialism in a sense i mean columbus if you follow his career he went and gave presentations to potential investors it's like right out of a renaissance version of shark tank you know goes to these people and says i have a proposal i'm going to go uh in the other direction and reach asia and we can open up our own direct trade channels right this is a trade

38:34deal this is a money-making thing he's going to be like pier one imports you know the 1492 style version of it and he gets put off and and the investors don't think he's got his calculations right but at one point the rulers of castile who will eventually become the spanish monarchy they decide they like his idea enough that they don't want him taking it elsewhere so they give him some money to sit tight on it it's almost like a renaissance version of a non-disclosure agreement or non-compete but when columbus eventually undertakes this expedition he's acting as an agent of the monarchy of castile right the spanish monarchy

39:08to be but he's not the spanish navy he's also getting a percentage deal um all right well a percentage deal doesn't sound like it's out of place when you're talking about establishing trade routes with already established great states in asia um since that was the plan it looks very different indeed when you stumble upon lands that are not what you thought and have people on it who cannot militarily resist you then if you're columbus and you're getting a percent of whatever you find or put together or whatever

39:42this expedition turns out in terms of proceeds what are your proceeds when you land in modern day haiti or cuba well it gets a little bit dicey doesn't it and once again i think the angle i'd like to look at this from now and we're going to change this angle over the course of this discussion that we'll focus on different things at different times but i'm trying to get into the you know how impossible this is we're playing a game here right just little games to see if we can get a step closer

40:13to understanding things a little bit more in context with these people i mean if you take the human element out of this question i'd forget about suffering and injustice and death and torture and all the things that this involves and just think of it in you know a profit or loss sort of way um the story has it's interesting how as i said it sort of falls into place i mean take columbus to start with here for a second now i've read some stuff recently that

40:45suggests that maybe the traditional interpretation of what columbus was after may be wrong i still think those are really outlier things so i'm not going to go down that tangent but i wanted to acknowledge that you know he may have told his investors one thing and had a different thing in mind but but the traditional um impression given by columbus himself apparently was that he was looking for another route to asia why would he want this money okay asia is where and asia in in air quotes because these guys have like a marco polo level of uh of understanding of asia what's

41:19more it's like a time machine version i was reading that one of the uh people they were hoping to hook up with was the mongol con um in order to make a sort of a trade deal with them but they don't know the mongol con's not in charge of uh the area anymore right their information's like like seeing the light of a star from so far away you're seeing you know the past light of a star marco polo is the past light of what asia was but they know that's where the good spices and all that stuff come from right think of the money involved the the spices and all the good stuff from asia in air quotes that

41:55stuff comes via a land route to the mediterranean european part of the world um caravans and all those sorts of things and generally you know merchant to merchant to merchant handoffs and we all know there's juice on each of those deals right so by the time that arrives in the um in the i don't know what we want to call it the euro mediterranean theater in north africa that whole area um these spices are old so they're not exactly fresh and uh there have been a lot of markups along the way so they're very very expensive i mean what was the old television commercial with the

42:25crazy 80 guy you know um you know cut out the middlemen and save had columbus really made it to asia in air quotes uh the middleman's gone and the spices will arrive fresh and you can tap into a completely ripe and ready to go and already operating in a trading operation right all you have to do is make a deal and give them something and fill your ships with the good stuff and head back home everybody makes a fortune easy to calculate columbus's percentage then right

42:58columbus has stumbled upon a completely different sort of business thing when he rolls up into the caribbean i had an investor once explain to me that he considers there to be two kinds of investments and he called them green bananas and yellow bananas yellow bananas are investments that are going to be ripe quickly that will pay off in the short term green bananas are the ones that require watering and fertilizing and pruning and maintenance and all sorts of investment to eventually turn into something

43:33that is paying off columbus was heading if the asia destination thing that we always thought was true was true columbus was looking for a yellow banana deal and he stumbled into a green banana deal he has obviously found something valuable and he's got to be giddy don't you think this was a guy that if you were betting on it you were going to bet he was going to die somewhere on the way you know off the map to the west so just surviving is a victory not having his crew mutiny because they think that

44:05they're never going to get to any destination you know throwing him overboard and then going home or taking the ship and himself going home and then living in you know shame and disrepute and embarrassment i mean so this is a victory no matter what but it's not what he was after apparently right he's after an instant payoff and he's arrived at something that's going to require some work the good news is there's a labor force when he gets to the new world and it's the indigenous people of the americas

44:35right there's millions of them we have already established the old world's attitudes about things like slavery and forced labor and all that kind of stuff so it won't be any problem um you know deciding how to employ the indigenous labor one way or the other but you've got people here to turn green bananas into yellow bananas right create cash cows out of these places extract all the the good juice that these islands can produce including sugarcane juice and a lot of them tobacco juice and other ones

45:08that's gross tobacco juice you can see by the way in the letters columbus writes back there's one you can read uh you can find online where i guess he's writing the treasurer or something these are the investor type people and he's basically explaining you know that we found great stuff and the potential is huge and there's as much gold as you want all this kind of stuff it just is going to require a little bit more money i mean this is this is fully stuff that looks like one of those dot com startup ceos telling his old line investors i yeah it's not exactly what we thought but this is maybe

45:41even better just need a little bit more money another round of financing but he's laying out all this stuff that this that this new find that he's claimed for his employers in spain you know all these ways it's going to pay off gold and the stuff that you can grab off the natives ears or trade or trade for their bracelets or other jewelry i mean that's movable wealth right now you have people which as we've already explained during this period is movable wealth and columbus will quickly do a couple

46:12of voyages back and forth across the atlantic and he'll take indigenous peoples back with him to spain kind of to show off listen these people make great slaves or whatever but they start dying quickly in large numbers and that's going to be the problem that crops up in this whole green banana long-term investment deal the indigenous peoples who are going to be the labor force here are dying like flies from multiple causes these causes these causes are so fascinating extreme hardcore intense however you

46:48want to phrase it um that it takes every ounce of my strength without a script here to keep me anchored to resist the ouija board like pull of the storytelling towards the unbelievably fascinating nature of shall we call it first contact fallout um i did a couple of takes where it just went off forever i mean you would have been justifiable if you'd said something like i didn't like the show i thought it was supposed to be about something else so i'm trying to avoid doing that again but it's worth

47:23pointing out that what creates the situation that leads to the atlantic slave trade involves the fact that these indigenous peoples who otherwise would be the workforce aren't around anymore and the number one reason i don't know what two three four five six would be ranked but it's number one and then everything else the number one reason for this is the germtastrophe and the germtastrophe is it's mind-boggling science fiction like twilight zone it's got all those elements that fascinate

47:54someone like me but there's a little guilt in the fact that it's a holocaust and for the most part it's a hidden holocaust the majority of the people affected and the victims of this are going to be in the interiors of the americas having caught these ailments from you know other indigenous peoples through the trade routes and everything that they have going and most of these places in the deep interiors of the far areas of the america's continent won't be discovered for a century or more when lewis and clark by the way finds the peoples and cultures of the northwest

48:30and places like that and then tells the people back in the eastern united states what these cultures are like he has no idea that he's looking at remnants and survivors and um rebuilders and people whose cultures had been skeletonized and whose numbers reduced by 80 to 95 percent there's never been anything like that in his book the slave trade author hugh thomas calls it a population collapse um i'm always fascinated with things like the black death in europe but

49:0285 to 95 percent numbers is much worse than the black death and what's so fascinating about how europe and places affected by the black death or maybe you could even go back and say the justinian plague earlier than that is what they do to societies it's not just the number of people who die it's it it starts destroying the things the framework of societies um you know the the the religious bedrock sorts of elements the interaction between human beings the hierarchies i mean everything gets

49:34turned upside down and society has become unstable and the survivors are like traumatized sometimes for generations and then when it comes back again and takes out the survivors well as charles c mann had written about these diseases and i mean this is the closest you'll ever find to a literal version where you could use the term pandora's box and have it apply because when the europeans show up and it's not just the first you know crop of them i mean it's this establishing this regular back and forth is what

50:07really because the vikings didn't spread a germtastrophe right when they were here in the 1020s but when it gets going it involves all the diseases against a population that's never had any of them charles c mann wrote quote it was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades end quote in his book in human bondage a historian of slavery david breon davis puts it this way to give you a sense of i mean if this is a

50:41pandora's box of of um bad things that can happen to you what exactly are these bad things named you what's in the box davis writes quote the amerindians throughout the hemisphere had little capacity for resisting imported diseases both temperate and tropical pathogens including smallpox malaria yellow fever influenza typhus and the plague given the previous isolation of the western hemisphere this disaster has been called a virgin soil pandemic even whites he writes suffered heavy

51:18mortality of the 2500 colonists who arrived in hispaniola in 1502 1000 died in a fairly short period of time but the spaniards were bewildered he writes and some even horrified as the indian population seemed to evaporate before their eyes end quote he also writes that they couldn't just compensate for the disease deaths by increasing the birth rate because the people of childbearing

51:48years were as badly affected as the old and the young took out everybody in terms of numbers well because no one knows how many people were in the americas in the pre-columbian era nobody has a good idea of numbers or percentages and some of this stuff i mean you keep your fingers crossed might be answered by dna type stuff in the future but um davis writes quote while specialists differ with respect to numbers which are necessarily somewhat speculative we are clearly considering the greatest known population loss

52:21in human history that is mortality is a percentage of population the population of central mexico may well have fallen by almost 90 percent in 75 years estimates for peru and chile he writes where the diseases spread well before the arrival of europeans are almost as high the death rate was even worse in the caribbean he writes where pestilence coincided with the comienda system and much mass slaughter estimates of hispaniola's pre-columbian arawak and i believe it's taino indian population range from about 300 000

52:57to half a million by the 1540s there were fewer than 500 survivors end quote now the thing about the germtastrophe is that for the most part i'm sure we can quibble and there's ways you could argue that it would impact numbers one way the other but for the most part uh it wouldn't have mattered who showed up or what their values were to initiate first contact this germtastrophe holocaust is happening anyway the people who first showed up could have been angelic pacifists

53:29and you're still going to lose let's pretend you can make it better by having a different relationship you're still going to lose seven out of ten it's just it's a holocaust any way you look at it but of course the people that showed up to initiate first contact are not angelic pacifists they are in fact quite the opposite and there's a sense here part of it because columbus is lucky i mean if you believe the accounts he's he's landed in the garden of eden he could just as easily have

54:00landed in some island full of cannibals or you know he could have gotten really unlucky and land in one of those areas of the americas that have organized states with organized militaries and people ready to resist and fight and lots of them instead he lands into a place where the the native indigenous peoples there are almost hopelessly um tame and submissive and passive and friendly and sharing and open and curious and innocent look at the time period these people coming from the old world come from

54:31let's remember you know you would think that history would always be moving in one direction and we'd be getting less and less terrible to each other over time right surely things being done to each other in this time period are not as bad as when we were practically animals in the very distant past but you'd be surprised those of you who know this period will all know what i'm talking about i mean the area you talk from like 1400 to 1700 it's brutal and people have been trying to figure out why forever what the culprit that that is the usual suspect although you know people make arguments

55:04um is religion because this is when you have the great split in western christianity you know protestantism and catholicism and and that sort of uh turns the fire up maybe literally um in in the intensity level in the philosophical wars and the worldview and the hatred for each other in the and the sense that the stakes are biblical in nature the point is go look at the way the spanish behave in the netherlands go look at how the turks behave in the balkans go look at the 30 years war and the apocalyptic scene that is go look at the english in ireland go look at i mean how about this

55:41a generation before columbus's birth tamerlane's running around just east of here and you know killing 15 to 20 million people these people come from the geopolitical equivalent of the serengeti plane you're going to unleash them in the galapagos islands and the indigenous flora and fauna there are going to become endangered pretty quickly we obviously don't have the indigenous people's account of these

56:16happenings but we do have the um accounts of people who were their defenders i mean i'm thinking of one dominican spanish friar in particular uh named bartolome de las casas who is known as the defender of the indians he's a he's a famous figure in places like south america even today in spanish circles he has a more mixed heritage because who's going to love the person that that paints the country in such a negative light there's something known as the black legend which is a contention among some

56:51historians that the uh the enemies of spain be they geopolitical enemies like the english or the dutch or religious enemies like the protestants of all stripes conjured up this this terrible legend of spanish cruelty that isn't deserved and bartolome de las casas his work is often cited as sort of the fountainhead right the origin of the black legend i was trying to research this a little bit and i i stumbled upon one historian who you know the minute i read her sort of um evaluation of the situation

57:23sort of rang true to me so that what she had said was that the black legend itself in terms of the facts on the ground is probably true uh what's going on in the americas for example the people like bartolome de las casas talks about but that the reason it's unfair and sort of propagandistic is by singling out the spanish is somehow unusually cruel and different these people these other countries that were often singling out the spanish were hiding the fact that they themselves have a history in the americas and amongst the slave trade and all these things that have every bit as dark

57:58moments and black marks as the spanish stuff so it's unfair to single them out for behavior all these european colonial powers will be engaged in one way or the other but de las casas talks about the spanish treatment of the natives um you know aside from the whole disease question and he basically portrays them just the way we suggested like predators used to fighting and dying over the water hole in the serengeti who are unleashed upon people that de las casas refers to as gentle lambs

58:33always portrayed in the sort of a garden of eden light and maybe the beginnings of some of these ideas of the noble savage trope and de las casas says quote it was upon these gentle lambs imbued by their creator with all the qualities we have mentioned that from the very first day they clapped their eyes on them the spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days the pattern established at the outset he writes has remained unchanged to this day

59:07and the spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds murder them and inflict upon them untold misery suffering and distress tormenting harrying and persecuting them mercilessly we shall in due course describe some of the many ingenious methods of torture that they've invented and refined for this purpose but one can get some idea of the effectiveness of their methods from the figures alone when the spanish first journeyed there he writes the indigenous population of the island of

59:38hispaniola stood at some three million today only 200 survive the island of cuba which extends for a distance almost as great as that separating valedalid from rome is now to all intents and purposes uninhabited and two other large beautiful and fertile islands puerto rico and jamaica have been similarly devastated not a living soul remains today on any of the islands in the bahamas he writes which lie to the north of hispaniola and cuba even though every single one of the 60 or so islands in

1:00:13the group as well as those known as the islands of giants and others in the area both large and small is more fertile and more beautiful than the royal gardens in seville and the climate is as healthy as anywhere on earth the native population which once numbered some 500 000 was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of hispaniola a policy adopted by the spanish in an endeavor to make up losses amongst the indigenous population of that island end quote so what this dominican friar is saying

1:00:49is that already the spanish are trying to figure out workarounds to their labor issue as people disappear on some islands they go get them from other islands and bring them in which depopulates the old islands and then they die in the in the mines anyway so you know you can only keep that up for so long now the actual reading of de las casas's work is nightmarish i was going to include one of the

1:01:21really horrible scenes uh de las casas talks about uh you know he's very graphic it's it's einsatz group and level stuff i mean really horrible but you can't differentiate one from another and some of these things he saw himself and some he more heard about but it's it's as bad as anything you can listen to and it completely helps explain why in addition to disease there would be less and less of the natives if not only are you killing them but you're scaring the heck out of them they're

1:01:54going to leave so these islands being depopulated is due to several things including these people fleeing you know who wouldn't flee but then you add to that the fact that when the spanish start using the indigenous peoples that they have left for the purposes that they have in mind right the creation of the uh you know processing plant that will turn these green bananas into usable yellow bananas the work kills the natives and de las casas talks about that you know and he links it to these organized

1:02:26um butcheries because he will basically say that after the men are all killed the spanish will take what's left and those are the people that get put to work and de las casas says quote after the fighting was over and all the men had been killed the surviving natives usually that is the young boys women and the children were shared out between the victors one got 30 another 40 a third as many as a hundred or even twice that number everything depended on how far one was in

1:02:57the good books of the despot who went by the title of governor the pretext under which the victims were parceled out in this way was that their new masters would then be in a position to teach them the truths of the christian faith and thus it came about that a host of cruel grasping and wicked men almost all of them pig ignorant were put in charge of these poor souls and they discharged this duty by sending the men down the mines where working conditions were appalling to dig for gold and putting

1:03:29the women to labor in the fields and on their masters estates to till the soil and raise the crops properly a task only for the toughest and strongest of men both women and men were given only wild grasses to eat and other unnutritious foodstuffs the mother of young children promptly saw their milk dry up and their babies die and with the women and the men separated and never seeing each other no new children were born the men he writes died down in the mines from overwork and starvation and the same was true

1:04:02of the women who perished out on the estates the islanders previously so numerous he writes began to die out as would any nation subjected to such appalling treatment end quote in his book the slave trade author hugh thomas calls what's happening in the caribbean during this time period a population collapse and it warms the cockles of every humanist's heart to hear somebody screaming out about the injustice of

1:04:34it right into the pages of the history books to at least represent that there were good people out there that weren't ready to stand for something like this in the defense of good people by the way according to de las casas himself when he got to spain to inform the king of what was going on in the new world he was talking to spaniards on the street and people he knew and nobody had a clue that this was going on they were completely ignorant of it reminds you of stories you hear today about products

1:05:04that you like that are being made by virtual slave labor in some poor country and with us drowning in more media than you can shake a stick at we don't hear the story so not that hard to believe it is worth pointing out that de las casas his views on all this stuff will continue to evolve throughout his entire life and he'll start off as one person he'll evolve into a sort of a middle version of himself and then by the end of his life he will renounce some of the things uh that he believed in the middle version of his life he starts off as a guy who arrives in the new world

1:05:38his father was there like right after columbus brought de las casas as a kid who goes to the new world perfectly seemingly ready to become one of those colonists right he's going to own slaves i think he actually maybe did he's going to live that lifestyle then there's a couple of things that just change him one was he was an eyewitness to the conquest of the island of cuba which seems to have shaken him to his core he said something like he saw things there that no one should ever see and then he has a famous incident and i don't know how true any of this stuff is it they all have a sort

1:06:11of a george washington chopping down the cherry tree sort of ring to them at the same time it's it's it's often cited as the seminal moment in his life like when the light bulb goes off over his head and again whether or not that's true is questionable but i love it because it's another example of somebody even before de las casas speaking out sort of to the gods of history and leaving some example of a light in the darkness back then of somebody complaining about the inhumanity and injustice of the way people were being treated and it's recounted in the introduction to the penguin

1:06:46version i have of de las casas is um a short account of the destruction of the indies it's written by historian anthony pagdan and he writes quote the story is now a famous one that morning a recent arrival on the island the dominican antonio montesinos delivered a sermon in the church of santo domingo taking his text from saint john he drew an analogy between the natural desert in which the evangelist had chosen to spend his life and the human desert which the spaniards had made of the

1:07:19once fruitful quote end quote paradisical island of hispaniola he then turned upon the colonists now quoting the friar quote with what right he demanded of them and with what justice do you keep these poor indians in such cruel and horrible servitude by what authority have you made such detestable wars against these people who lived peacefully and gently on their own lands are these not men do they not have rational souls are you not obliged to love them as yourselves pagdan then writes

1:07:57quote the last three questions were to become the reference of every subsequent struggle to defend the rights of the indigenous peoples of the americas for las casas in particular the third are you not obliged to love them as yourselves was to guide his actions for the rest of his life end quote now as i said de las casas's views will continue to evolve for the rest of his life and he won't believe at the end of his life what he believes in the middle of his life just like he didn't believe

1:08:28in the middle of his life what he believed earlier on in the middle of his life he thinks he has an answer to how to stop this population collapse and this injustice his answer is to bring in other people to do the work that is killing the indigenous people and the other people he thinks should be brought in to do this are africans from sub-sahara black africa a couple decades later in his life he will decide that no one should be slaves

1:09:01but during this time period he thinks that this is the humanitarian answer and what's so hard for us to get our minds around is that it actually probably is some sort of an advance but it's a 16th century version of a moral humanitarian advance which doesn't look like much of an advance to those of us in the 21st century there's also an element here of throwing one group of human beings under a bus in order to improve the humanitarian circumstances of another group of people i read something recently

1:09:39and i don't know if it was fernando cervantes's book um on conquistadors a new book he has out but it was talking about the extra responsibility that the portuguese and the spanish felt in this area because they were the ones who had to write the original laws as compared to something like in africa where there was an already an ongoing slave trade and they were just essentially customers so compare it to a drug situation it's one thing to be buying uh drugs from the manufacturer or from a middle person it's another thing to be setting up your own meth labs and so some of this appears to be

1:10:13discussions over a different level of culpability here and a lack of laws on how you run things right it's not up to the spanish or the portuguese how the african rulers in africa handle the beginnings of the slave trade but here at ground zero in the caribbean it is you have to organize it from the get-go so things are a little bit different and you can if you look for them find clear evidence of trying to somehow be something like humanitarian a lot of the laws strike us as nibbling around the edges

1:10:45and get frustrating and a lot of times these laws that look like they're done for the welfare of the natives are in fact a sound business decision sometimes those two things dovetail for example keeping the natives healthy works in favor of both the dominican friars who are advocating for their welfare and the business people who would like to see their product show up to market in good shape commanding the highest available price so when in 1513 the portuguese pass a rule saying uh that you

1:11:19can't have more than a certain number of slaves on a slave ship that is both a humanitarian benefit because if you're on the slave ship you'll be glad you're not as packed tightly to your neighbor as you otherwise might be but it's a good business practice too i mean if we were talking about tomatoes here you'd rather have them show up to market unbruised and in the best shape right so sometimes what might appear to be humanitarian in nature might just be a money question too and it's not always easy to disentangle those things

1:11:50now there is a huge move made by the rulers in spain when they eliminate slavery in the new world make a rule no slavery so the people on the ground just come up with ways around it including the fact that there's exceptions to the rule i think it was queen isabella that said something like okay no slaves unless they're cannibals and so all of a sudden all these slaves that are working on these plantations in the caribbean just happen to be cannibals see how that works but it's affecting the labor

1:12:23pool nonetheless and people who are not humanitarians people that are worried only about the bottom line right the figures the profits uh the accounting those people notice right away too that we better be talking about replacement workers and those replacement workers are probably going to have to come from africa in his book the slave trade which is um heavily geared toward the economics of it all hugh thomas writes quote a philip to the african slave trade was naturally given by the trend towards

1:12:56the outlawing of indian slavery in the americas as a result of the agitation of bartolome de las casas and other dominicans an indication of the mood in 1544 is shown by a letter of cristobal de benevente public prosecutor of the supreme court in mexico to the king now quoting the letter to the king quote every day the gold mines are giving less profit because of the lack of indian slaves in the end if your majesty abolishes local slavery wrote benevente there will be no alternative to allowing blacks

1:13:31into the land at least in the mines end quote now that's from mexico where uh there was a ton of movable wealth when the spanish conquered that area but once you take away all the stuff that's there i mean the gold that's sitting out in buildings and decorations i mean the movable wealth then it's all about okay how do we get the you know the wealth out of the land how do we turn the green bananas into yellow bananas and if there's not going to be natives somebody's got to do the work and as we had said it was only a generation before that the europeans have tapped into this african slave trade

1:14:05and the africans are an alternative for any number of reasons the first one and the most obvious is they're there right there's a huge demand explosion during this period and there's labor there so that might be the number one reason but there's a bunch of other reasons and it contributes to some very uncomfortable realities including once again treating human beings as though they're non-human and having an exchange rate that reminds one of a currency exchange rate right how many dollars to

1:14:38the pound how many deutschmarks to the frank how many yen to the ruble how many indian slaves to the african slave this is like a landmine and i feel like we're going to encounter these all throughout this discussion and so i thought of how we should approach these cultural landmines these issues that can explode in our faces because they're a combination of um offensive we're dealing with people with a completely different mindset there's a bunch of things that go into this and i thought we're going to deal with it together we're going to go up to this landmine we're going to look at it

1:15:08we're going to look at it from all sides we're going to unravel and try to untangle what's going on here how do we untangle something like this uh famed historian of slavery david breon davison in human bondage has this line and what this essentially is is something that historians can see written down this isn't anecdotal evidence this is the exchange rate the human exchange rate from one type of human with one color skin and from one culture to another type of human with another color skin from another

1:15:40culture davis writes quote throughout the new world colonists agreed that the labor of one black was worth that of several indians end quote now when davis says colonists in this case he means early first contact colonists the spanish and the caribbean the portuguese and brazil um and the going rate is multiple indians for every african now in an earlier era people like the greeks and aristotle and whatnot might consider that a sign

1:16:15right there that you should be a slave obviously they're good at it they make good slaves that's a sign that they're they're in that class of people born to be slaves and if you go to like the antebellum south and maybe the 1820s 1830s 1840s they'll make it a totally racial question right well that's just how that's the ethnicity that's the genes and you can see it in the people and that's they're just born that way the concept of race as we understand it today develops during this era and if it's valuable

1:16:46to learn about this era if for no other reason than that considering the importance of the concept of race in our modern world before this time period it wasn't like people were all kumbaya and that they didn't notice you know the difference between us and them the them group was just a lot bigger and your skin color was only one of many things that played into it for an ancient greek someone who was black from africa they would call them ethiopians probably that was in in the ancient world the greeks would have maybe thought of them as ethiopians sure they might have had some issues with them but

1:17:18just like they had issues with the scythians and the thracians and the epirates and the persians i mean this difference in color that separates people of every nationality into groups of people that are only designated by their skin tone that comes from this era modern historians have done a wonderful job though if we can deactivate this landmine in front of us explaining why you might pay more if you were a slave owner or might have to pay more for an african a sub-saharan african slave than a native

1:17:53american slave and it has to do with completely logical and understandable reasons that we would understand today in the free labor market simply based on the value to the employer that's what we'd say in the free labor market simply based on the value to the slaveholder that's what we'd say in the unfree market i mean consider this for example besides the fact that the labor is there which is huge africans come from the old world which means that a lot of the things that people take for granted

1:18:30amongst people of the old world includes the africans i mean they understand things that just come with the territory that everyone would be expected to know and if you didn't know them it would impede your ability to be a functional worker or slave i mean how about horses you go to the new world and remember they don't know about horses they don't know about cattle these are both things that are a very big deal i mean horses are cars and trucks and and planes and railroads all rolled into one in this period if you had a worker or a slave who couldn't ride a horse couldn't

1:19:05care for a horse was scared of horses i mean that would make them a lot less valuable right there than someone from the old world and there were several uh african tribes sub-saharan african tribes that that were famous for dealing with horses well right there you'd pay more for someone who could deal with horses in the free market if you're running a ranch than someone who can't what about agriculture large-scale agribusiness in the new world they of course planted things and did farming but there was a lot of hunting and gathering going on it was a much it was a much less rigorous

1:19:36agribusiness kind of style and the people there didn't know what they were doing when you started to put them into giant teams of of workers under overseers i mean but in africa they had large-scale agribusiness and they grew all kinds of stuff in fact they grew things in africa that the europeans wanted to grow in the new world but didn't know how to grow very well in the new world so the africans showed them how rice was a perfect example so uh once again if we're talking about free labor here

1:20:07and you're trying to hire someone for your rice growing business do you hire someone who doesn't know how to grow rice has never worked in agribusiness or do you hire someone who's worked on many farms knows how to grow rice and knows how to grow rice so well they're going to show you how to grow it hmm all of a sudden it's not too hard to see why one african slave might be worth more than multiple indian slaves there was another reason that was brought up to me that i hadn't thought about that was very interesting and i forgot i apologize i should have written down where i'd

1:20:39seen it but someone had made the point that when you're talking about original slaves we're not talking about second generation third generation you're talking about people who are captured in africa and um my thanks to brenda e stevenson the historian who wrote uh what is slavery where she reminds us that the trauma that is slavery starts much earlier in the process than we think it does the actual capture can be extremely traumatic and the time between capture and making it to the coast to get on the slave ship is often well more severe and traumatic than what most of us ever deal with in

1:21:14our lives and that's before they even get on the slave ship right which as we know is awful in its own right but the people that are being captured in africa are often being captured in wars and the people you are getting are often warriors these are soldiers and with that comes all kinds of things and as i was making a list of these things and as i was reading historians talking about them you couldn't help but notice there's a lot of crossover in what would make a valuable soldier to a commander and would what would make a valuable slave to a slave owner or a laborer to a free you know employer

1:21:50i mean take for example physical fitness these are people that have taken care of their bodies they've trained they've worked out they're in in good shape they're strong right they've probably probably done calisthenics and exercises and all kinds of things that puts them in good shape to begin with then you talk about things like discipline and the ability to you know follow commands working groups efficiently command others like an officer and the ability to be tough and resilient i mean

1:22:23these are all qualities that work in soldiering and in a labor force free or slave and finally the africans from sub-saharan africa have a superpower and there's no other way to put it a superpower that has served them well for millennia and now in a terrible nasty ironic twist makes them a better laborer in the new world also and i've always thought of it as sort of an invisible pathogenic

1:22:58force field over their entire region of africa and the diseases that this force field contains within it kills outsiders reliably i mean it keeps the riffraff out of central and southern africa if you're looking at it from a native who's had to live with these diseases from time immemorial now that doesn't mean central africans for example don't get malaria they do they just don't suffer as badly due to the

1:23:31you know inherited long-term resistance that they've developed right this is standard medical stuff as we all know um but it means that the natives are less affected by it than outsiders go look at your classic history of the pith helmet wearing white explorers going into deepest darkest africa and how lethal that is for them during this time period the portuguese are going to start setting up um forts slash trading posts slash holding areas for slaves all up and down the african coast right off the right off the

1:24:05mainland and the people that are stationed there are going to die in droves also i actually remember an ongoing discussion back in college uh with the other history majors the history geek karate over whether or not alexander the great could have conquered central and southern africa i was on the side of the people who said that he could not because his whole army would have died from the disease was my argument forget the sahara i'm enough of an alexander fan to think he could have handled the logistical

1:24:42nightmare that that would have been but there is no logistical defense against you know malaria or you know i mean i mean the truth of the matter is if alexander's army and alexander had died from disease in africa alexander probably would have ended up dying then from the same thing that actually killed him in babylon which nobody knows what that is some people you know think it's poisonous and nefarious but if it wasn't it was probably one of those diseases like malaria that would have destroyed a macedonian macedonian army had it ever made it to sub-saharan africa but the point being

1:25:15that when the africans are taken to the americas to the new world they don't die anywhere near as quickly as the native american the indigenous peoples do and they don't even die as quickly as the europeans do this is a super valuable commodity obviously if you own people because you'd rather have one that lived longer than one or two or three that didn't now is this going to work in the favor

1:25:46of the african slave heck no it's going to be something that actually prolonged the agony of slavery meant they got to live longer before they expired on the job in some of these places they were able to rationalize not even taking you know the investment money that would be used to make life a little easier on their slaves because since they were going to die anyway the investment wasn't even worth it just work them to death and they did so that's the very long-winded and multifaceted

1:26:19examination of how the heck africans got stuck into this logistical supply line that was developing now between these two worlds that you know up until recently had not been connected or even known of each other's existences now just because you have african labor in the americas starting doesn't mean native american slavery died out in fact there's going to be quite a bit of it they may not work well in the mines or

1:26:50the agribusiness area but there's plenty uh if you're a an enslaver i read that word in one of the new histories and it's being used in place of slave owner enslaver um it's a lot harsher but probably should be right i mean so so if you're an enslaver there's plenty of jobs on your farm or in your household or in your kitchen or who knows i mean we forget the element that the sort of the the hidden between the lines element of sex slavery and the whole slavery question but it's enormous so lots of things that um one would find the native population valuable for even if they

1:27:26couldn't do the sort of jobs that they're bringing in old world people to do and i think it's worth for a second examining the numbers a bit in what we're talking about here time to zoom out now that we've laid the foundation for how it got this way to what it is and how it develops historian brenda a stevenson from ucla um whom we quoted earlier in her book what is slavery goes over the numbers a little bit and these are all difficult to figure out occasionally because

1:27:56sometimes the records are great and sometimes they're not um but she says that most of the historians dealing with this subject now agree that some 28 million africans were enslaved and sold between the 15th and 19th centuries so that's the 1400s and the 1800s and she says quote approximately 12.5 million left for the americas and the caribbean about 16 million purportedly were traded

1:28:27not across the atlantic but rather to north africa on the coast of the indian ocean and throughout the middle east but the 11 million or so who arrived in the americas did not account for the millions some believe at least four million who died as part of the slave raiding warfare during the forced marches to the slave trading coasts or who perished in the middle passage the ocean trip from africa to america as a result of scurvy and other diseases dehydration starvation harsh treatment or suicide

1:29:01nor does it measure she writes the millions who lost their homes and families and who were physically displaced as a result of the trade end quote and you can trace the development of all of this so economically as i said this is what makes the whole period seem like it's beyond its sell-by date the mind sort of you know you have to shake your head out of the lethargy when you just assume we're talking about free labor here but you're not i mean you can see how the slave numbers go

1:29:34into orbit in terms of a growth curve as soon as some of these early places in the new world start churning out the first really popular yellow bananas right the green bananas turn into the yellow bananas and the yellow banana in this case is probably sugar it is hard to get your mind around what a big deal sugar could be not a big deal now i mean it's just in everything it's ubiquitous you don't even think

1:30:04about it it's not that expensive but what if it was what if they only made it in a few places and what if there was no good alternatives can you imagine the value of this what would you pay right people would go to war over the i mean it's fascinating to think about something that it's like thinking about pepper in terms of value it'd be just it doesn't even compute you have to think of oil you have to think of something that's really big in our world now the point is is all of a sudden there's

1:30:35a sugar boom when um you know europe and other places all of a sudden develop this huge appetite for something they didn't have a huge appetite for before they have to have it and it doesn't grow in a lot of places even before columbus makes his trip to the americas the um the spanish and the portuguese have some islands from the earlier uh age of discovery stuff that you know leads step by step to columbus and the ones that are out sort of off the african coast or out into the atlantic a bit

1:31:07can grow sugar and so they instantly start turning those places into you know little growth centers but they're going to pale in comparison to what's going to happen in the caribbean and in brazil where these places turn into sugar factories run by human labor and churning out wealth of the sort that can keep whole countries afloat but the demand for labor is never ending whereas in the americas you

1:31:39will have a very unique situation in north america during the famous american slave period where slaves are able to keep their population levels up through marriage and birth rate that happens in very few other places normally this is a one-way trip and children are not part of the deal historian david breon davis put it this way and this is his by the way it's a it's a little bit of a long quote but it's his way of describing the green banana yellow banana thing the coming in and taking the

1:32:13movable wealth first and then figuring out okay what's the long-term wealth in this place and how do we get to it and he writes quote while europeans settled each new world colony in a special and often fortuitous way we can also see a more general pattern being repeated from hispaniola and brazil in the 16th century to virginia and carolina in the 17th first he writes we note a strongly human element of greed a desire for instant wealth from gold and silver whether stolen from indians seized from

1:32:48the spaniards by dutch british or french pirate ships or gained from forcing indians to work in the mines for mineral wealth he continues though and here's the green bananas quote in a second and usually later alternative colonial leaders turn to cash crops such as tobacco and especially sugar produced by slaves imported from africa after initial experiments with indian labor for reasons we will later examine the african workers could never come close to reproducing their numbers

1:33:21except in the chesapeake in the 1720s and in south carolina a half century later hence he writes the need for a continuing and growing stream of labor from africa to make up for the slave mortality and to clear new land and found new colonies for cultivation much of the new world then came to resemble the death furnace of the ancient god moloch consuming african slaves so increasing numbers of europeans and later white americans could consume sugar coffee rice and tobacco end quote that might

1:33:57sound harsh to some people but one could make the case that that still applies today we just have you know slave labor or close to slave labor in some places producing supplies that not just americans anymore but everybody uses and consumes we're still addicted to bondage the terms may be a little different though and uh the benefits more spread out and this is a good time now that we've sort of laid

1:34:29the foundation for how did this even come to be to take a more blitz edition oriented approach here um because as i said i'm not qualified to give you the history of slavery but we could sure talk about some of the really interesting aspects of it and the first one here is this lack of an ability and maybe it's just me and maybe i lack the imagination but i'm sharing with you the fact i'm having a hard time seeing really plausible counterfactuals in this situation you know other alternative things that

1:35:02might have taken place as opposed to this nightmarish outcome because there's counterfactuals that are really easy to imagine the classic one we always play with in the united states uh maybe they do in britain too is what if the british had won the revolutionary war the american revolutionary war because that could easily have happened it's not that hard to imagine that's literally a sort of a turn of fortune kind of thing whereas something like imagining a significantly different unfolding of the new world

1:35:34um you know first century or two i mean that that to me looks more like a mudslide like a force of nature sort of deal where the best intentions of the most humanitarian of people in any of these societies would be drowned out by the sheer crush of momentum of the time i mean you know we didn't even talk about it but it's only a little in a couple years i think after columbus finds um the caribbean thinking he's found uh the you know

1:36:08asia as he would have called it uh when somebody actually goes the other way vasco da gama around africa into the indian ocean and does find asia in air quotes precipitating what i think is probably i mean you know you have to adjust for inflation and all that sort of financial nonsense but uh i think you can easily say precipitating the greatest financial boom in the history of humankind globalization 1.0 right all of a sudden the whole world is connected with trade routes with regular shipping uh it had i mean

1:36:42the money that could be made and you're already as we said transitioning from a period where things like uh your name and your birth and your aristocracy and your blue blood and all that stuff really mattered as to whether or not you could participate in a lot of different things and that was being blown open uh by all kinds of things you know professors will tie it into the plague and population i mean there's there's bazillions of ways to try to untangle the rope that represents the zeitgeist in this era but money's not a bad way to sort of frame it i think where you can judge humanity is how quickly you bounce

1:37:17back if this is like an inevitable mudslide that's going to bury this a lot of people in this first contact sort of period how long does it take you to morally in a humanitarian sort of collective sense to dig your way out of the mudslide right how long how long till you rebound from this tragedy that's a creation of forces that no one had ever seen before infused with mentalities that are only very recently having the middle ages reflected back to them in their historical rearview mirror

1:37:53but these kingdoms and empires and states are all in direct competition with each other in places like europe and when the americas are discovered the entire competition just seeps over the atlantic ocean into the new world and if the spanish and the portuguese thought they were going to keep the new world all to themselves just because they got there first they're crazy history geeks like yours truly always enjoy talking about the treaty of tortoiseus the one where the pope brokers this

1:38:26deal where the the portuguese and the spanish get to divide the undiscovered planet into between them thinking that they're going to actually make this deal stick with the rest of the countries of the world is nuts it does have an effect though i mean the reason the portuguese kind of have a stranglehold on the african atlantic trade stuff is because they're the ones who get according to that treaty control of of the west african coast where they're building all those forts slash holding pens so it has an effect but the english who will become the british in the early 1700s right as part

1:39:01of this changing from kingdoms into states they're not going to pay any attention to this and once there's the religious schism you know between catholicism and protestantism you know the people that leave catholicism don't pay any attention to anything the pope says anyway so they don't care we're not staying out of the americas right all these other countries are going to crash the american private party they're just going to be a little behind places like spain the whole time i mean spain will be in like uh california and texas you know in the not too distant future remember it's going to take hundreds of years to explore all this new country and the other european powers will be about

1:39:3550 75 100 years behind them every step of the way so the spanish and the portuguese get this head start and then when the other countries arrive they have all these ways to make up for the lost time though like stealing the spanish stuff through piracy this is the great age when all the pirates are around really the period from about 1492 when columbus stumbles on the americas and about 1800 is the period um in which you look at this area and you see the giant risk board new world version and all these

1:40:07islands change hands and warfare happens and other settlements and the the french get involved the british get involved the dutch get involved uh you even see the danish and the norwegians get involved that the price for entry right in order to play this new world colonization game you have to have a significant fleet right you have to be a naval power the countries that get locked out of this giant you know gold rush right the globalization 1.0 um gold rush fever time are places like central

1:40:38european landlocked countries now there is no germany at this time right germany is a bunch of different states it won't coalesce um for several hundred years but what that means is there's no giant german state with a german fleet that can send the german fleet out there to participate in all this why does this even matter well because you know in the early 1900s one of the complaints that led to the first world war was this idea that there were countries that had gotten there and the phrase was place in the sun and then were these other countries that were left out when all that

1:41:11was taking place right the game of musical chairs started before they were even a country well the period where the enemies of the kaiser's germany in the first world war were getting their place in the sun is this period and after the spanish and the portuguese take some of these places from the indigenous peoples the people from the old world come over and start taking it from the spanish and the portuguese it's like the the cheetahs were the first arrivals and they started eating all the peaceful furry plovers in hispaniola and then after a significant period of time but not that long

1:41:45the lions from the old world arrive and start pushing the cheetahs you know deeper into the interior you'll see these islands change hands between the spanish and the french and the french and the british and it's a giant game of musical chairs for a couple centuries you'll also see the beginnings of settlements into places where the spanish didn't even go the spanish will be in places like florida for example but they won't be in places like massachusetts or virginia or what's now part of canada but the french and the english will the dutch will too i mean they settled new york originally right

1:42:21new amsterdam and all these different peoples are going to bring the general way of doing things the institutions and the culture from you know the european old world but because of the subtle differences between each of them right the english from the french the french from the spanish uh the development in all these places will be a little bit different treatment of the slaves for example a little bit different there'll even be one or two communities that won't even allow slavery in them in north america but by and large you get the the general consensus that labor is unbelievably necessary and in short

1:42:57supply and what's also interesting is if you buy into the premise from the primary sources and i mean from multiple different nations cultures eras i mean over hundreds of years you can read plea after plea after plea from these people in the americas writing back to the old country saying if we don't have more slaves then we can't settle this place at all and it didn't necessarily have to be african slaves i mean this is also the period

1:43:29where the famous indentured servitude era really takes off big but it doesn't appear that many of these people are talking about free labor in any way shape or form it's either going to be slaves or indentured servants or something like that and if you take their arguments at face value and i can't figure out if this is somehow sort of a lack of imagination or the blinders that are put on because these people come from a different era in a different economic system but if you take their arguments at face value it's as though they're saying that if the americas had been found you know with the modern eras sort of values

1:44:05in mind right where we pay people for work that it simply wouldn't be settled or that we'd still be stuck hundreds of years later on the eastern seaboard still trying to chop down the primeval forests in the east with paid labor i mean it's interesting to contemplate right the what ifs here and and what we're dealing with one thing you can say though is that the numbers are borderline shocking even for someone who should know better like yours truly in inhuman bondage david breon davis writes um gives you some statistics that show you the amount of people that are coming over from the old world to

1:44:39the new world and i all you can say is i should have known this listen to these numbers and tell me if this doesn't shock you davis writes quote in retrospect it appears that the entire new world enterprise depended on the enormous and expandable flow of slave labor from africa though in 1495 columbus transported some 500 native american slaves to seville and dreamed of a profitable slave trade of american quote end quote indians to iberia italy sicily and the atlantic islands some african slaves