America: a brief history of exploitation.

"In Castile, Portugal, Aragon,...and the Canary Islands they need many slaves, and I do not think they get enough from Guinea.... Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first." Columbus wrote King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1496 on establishing a slave trade from Haiti in lieu of finding gold.

The letter illustrates the economic motivation of the exploration of the New World as well as the ruthless exploitation of the its indigenous population. Columbus’s “discovery” of the Caribbean islands lead to the colonization of the larger American continent by other European countries including Portugal, France, Holland, and England (p.606). The example set by Columbus and his men would dictate the relationship between natives and European colonists in the Americas for the next five hundred years. The tone of the letter revels a fundamental disregard for both the native people as well as those brought from Africa to the Caribbean as slaves. These people where viewed by their Spanish conquerors not only as savages, and infidel but as less then human. Seen as disposable, people of both American and African descendants, were brutally worked, abused, mutilated, raped, and murdered by their Christian overlords.

Howard Zen wrote in his book A People’s History of the United States that Columbus desperate to “fill up the
ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend... went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died in route (p. 4).”

Many indigenous people, who did not die directly at the the hands of European, where eradicate by the diseases that the foreigners brought with them. In his Book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond wrote:
The grimmest example of germs’ role in history come from the European conquest of the Americans that began with Columbus’s voyage (p.197)... the Indian population of Hisponiola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535 (p.213)

As the population declined the Spanish where forced to important slaves from Africa to work. “In 1518 the first shipment of slaves went directly from west Africa to the Caribbean, where they worked on the recently established sugar plantations (p. 707).” In this way Columbus not only changed the nature of the islands by annihilating the local population but by involving the economic interest of the crown created an artificial demand for the rich and fertile islands to be repopulated by a second subjugated peoples. Thereby changing the demographic population of the world forever.

Long after Columbus’s death in 1506 American and African descendants would continue to be subjugated by descents of wealth Europeans. The institution of slavery continued throughout America until the nineteenth century. Native Americans where isolated to small portions of the land as European descendants streamed westward. After slavery was abolished in 1865 segregationist policies continued to suppress African Americans and rob them of the opportunities given to European Americans. Racial conflict plagued the South throughout the twentieth century, and racial discussion dominated the 2008 presidential campaign. The conflicts which proceeded the institution of slavery in the Americas and those that followed did more then displace or endanger entire populations. It determined the future of the continent and left irrevocable marks on the consciousness of it’s people.