In 1453, the Ottomans — who had become major players in Islamic civilisation by this point — finally conquered Constantinople and put an end to the old Roman Empire for good and all. (Actually there had been a Turkish-Persian society in Anatolia that called itself the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and thereby claimed to be a continuation of Rome every bit as much as the Byzantines, but *they* got demolished by the Mongols in the 1290’s. They were a whole thing, the Mongols. We don’t have time to get into it.) The upshot of this was that the Ottomans from then on were the undisputed rulers, and therefore taxers, of trade between the Mediterranean and Asia and, to a lesser extent, East Africa. The Ottomans did not stop conquering Eastern Europe of their own accord, either; like every expansionist power in the history of the world, they kept conquering until they ran into the limits of logistics and another society which could muster up enough local force to effectively resist them.
Ottoman logistics in Eastern Europe reached their breaking point and Ottoman cannon reached its maximum range on the outskirts of Vienna in 1529. You will recall from the previous chapter that this loosely coincided with the beginning of the Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, and the geographically astute will note that Vienna is a major city located near what was then that empire’s south-eastern border. It is likely no coincidence that the Thirty Years’ War did not break out in earnest until it became reasonably clear that the Turks posed no threat of rolling over Central Europe and imposing their rule over the entirety of (Western) Christendom, as they had done piece by piece to the Byzantines in preceding decades until the Byzantines were no more. It is also probably not a coincidence that the Turks tried to conquer Vienna again in 1683, after the Thirty Years’ War had spilt the blood of so many millions in the heart of Europe.
The Ottomans also failed in that second attempt, and from then on became but one player in the game of dominating Europe, the basic rules for which were established by the Peace of Westphalia. Thereby Western Europe remained by and large fractiously Christian as its westernmost societies explored, and almost immediately exploited, the newly-to-them-discovered continents of North and South America. This expansion of what was by now firmly the West in fact (if not quite yet in name) would of necessity change the character of the West, along with the rest of the world. It is worth touching on some of the important beats.
In 1492, a bunch of Iberian sociopaths used swords and cannon of their own to take over the last little bit of Iberia still ruled by Muslims, whose ancestors had almost completely conquered the peninsula a few centuries before. Christian warlords had spent the intervening time painstakingly retaking the lands which they viewed as integral to Christendom (and integral to those warlords becoming or remaining rich), and when they succeeded, the newly-minted Spaniards celebrated by unifying into one kingdom, promptly expelling the Jews and Muslims from their territory, starting the Inquisition to make sure those Jews and Muslims that did not leave were discovered or driven so deeply underground as to be lost to time, and sending Cristopher Columbus to find a way to Asia that didn’t involve going through (and thus having to pay) those pesky Ottomans for the privilege of using the Silk Road.
Because, by this time, the sword-wielding sociopaths and the racketeering priests in the West had come to see the benefits of letting their merchants trade with Asia and (to a lesser extent) East Africa and India in between their bouts of burning each other’s cities and villages down and torturing their peasants to death for asking inconvenient questions. And they reckoned they could make out like bandits if they could find a way around the Ottomans.
It is well established that Scandinavians had had some furtive contact with what would come to be Eastern Canada a few centuries before Columbus set sail across the Atlantic. It is also possible that a few Irish priests made it to North America before Columbus; we even have some scant circumstantial evidence of Ancient Roman and Egyptian contact of some sort (the former case including a painting of what looks suspiciously like a pineapple, the latter case including mummies buried with what seems like cocaine and nicotine in their systems). But even in the undisputed case of Norse contact, much less the more speculative possibilities, the Americas remained a land entirely unknown to the broader European cluster of societies before the 1490’s. Within a generation of Columbus’ voyage, however, the “New World” would be an integral and intimate part of European politics and economics until the present day.
Christopher Columbus ran into the Caribbean more or less by accident, thought he’d probably made it to Japan, and wound up calling the people he met there Indians for some reason. He and his male crew also almost immediately took several of them as slaves, including prepubescent or barely-pubescent girls, to reward themselves for their long and hard weeks at sea. When they returned to Spain, they regaled the sociopaths in charge with stories of endless gold and eternal youth and uncountable souls waiting for the privilege of Christianity.
The Spanish crown saw an incredible opportunity to make themselves wealthier than they had ever imagined, even if he hadn’t technically found Asia, and within a generation Spain became the richest and most powerful empire in the world up to that point. Through some fantastic luck, a bit of cunning, and a lot of diseases to which the natives were not immune, Spain was ready, willing, and able to conquer enormous settled societies in Central and South America, which gave them undisputed control over the fates of tens of millions of people and tens of millions of square kilometres.
We call the subsequent movement of peoples, resources, and even basic crops “the Columbian Exchange”, in the dubious honour of the man who directly facilitated it. It revolutionised how Europeans and indigenous Americans lived (the former usually, though not always, for the better; the latter usually, though not always, for the worse). Modern European staples such as potatoes and tomatoes and beans and corn all came from the Americas, along with chocolate and chili peppers and also possibly syphilis. Later on, many of these foods would also become integral to Indian and Southeast Asian cuisines, which gives lie to the myth of “fusion” cooking as some kind of modern culturally-appropriative abomination.
Of course, the pre-contact Americans had been building their own societies — with plenty of their own sword-wielding sociopaths — for thousands of years before Europeans showed up. Estimates vary, but it’s probable that upwards of a hundred million people lived in the Americas in 1491, and of this population, less than ten million would remain after just a few generations. Often this destruction happened without any direct European intervention; diseases such as smallpox propagated through sophisticated networks of trade and war and cultural exchange among the indigenous Americans themselves, with entire regions collapsing from plagues decades or centuries before any Europeans set foot there.
Of particular consequence is that, when Europeans finally arrived to these areas and found them scantily populated and mostly wilderness, Europeans concluded that the indigenous Americans were by and large hunter-gatherers, noble savages who lived in harmony with nature, barely more than animals themselves. In some cases this was true, as far as it went, but often what those Europeans stumbled into was simply the shadow of a civilisation that had fallen and become overgrown, whose descendants were meagrely scraping by. These first impressions echo in our own time, distracting and detracting from everyone who either lionises or dismisses indigenous Americans as a monolithic cult of eco-hippies; they were not, and did not become so through the Columbian Exchange. They were, and remain, as human as any of us.
As awareness of the sea route to lands in the west spread, England and France (who, again, were poor disease-ridden hellholes arguably no better than our own North Korea at this point in the story) didn’t pay terribly much attention at first, seeing as how they were focused on fighting each other at least once a generation. Portugal, the sole remaining Iberian kingdom that had not become Spain, decided to get into the exploration and colonisation game as well — though, being good Catholic societies, both Spain and Portugal consulted the Pope to decide how to divide the world up between them, under the guise of spreading the Word of God to those who had not yet heard it.
Spain wound up getting Pope-approved claims on everything west of a little bit of South America, while Portugal wound up getting claims on that little bit of South America, along with Africa and Asia up to the Pacific Ocean. The Americans, Africans, and Asians were not consulted in this matter, but Spain and Portugal agreed not to interfere with each other’s attempts to bring the rest of the world to heel, so they didn’t see any issue with proceeding anyway. This agreement is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the Philippines are named after a Spanish king with a president named Rodrigo, among other pieces of trivia that do not bear much on our purpose here.
The task of establishing an alternate route to Asia remained, and Portugal took up this gauntlet with great vigour. There were three options open to them: they could try going either north or south around this New World, which they had agreed was (mostly) under Spanish provenance, or they could attempt to sail around the southern tip of Africa. At this point, Europeans weren’t even sure there *was* a southern tip of Africa, but they knew that India lay to its east, with a sea route to China beyond.
So the Portuguese decided to let the Spanish do the bulk of exploration in the New World, and they poured the lion’s share of their efforts into circumnavigating Africa. Though the Pope had given his blessing to the Portuguese to claim the whole of Africa for themselves, Portuguese sailors mainly avoided the continent’s interior, instead establishing fortresses and supply stations on islands just off the coast, or on the coastline itself only in places that were extremely defensible and not very populated. There are many reasons for this, but two are worth noting.
Firstly, West Africa had many well-organised societies which could and did offer armed resistance which the Europeans of the 1500s could not militarily defeat. Secondly, sub-Saharan Africa in particular was and is home to a great many diseases to which Europeans have no natural immunity, so even in areas without the organisation required to resist European settlement and colonisation, Europeans simply could not survive without medicines and other technologies which would not be invented for centuries.
Therefore Portugal skirted around Africa’s coastline, crossing into the Indian Ocean in 1499, at once leaving most of Africa free of direct European influence and robbing the Ottomans of tax revenue on the most lucrative trade route in the history of the world. Almost immediately, many of the goods which once travelled overland from India and China through Iran and Anatolia to reach Europe were redirected to Indian and Chinese ports, where they were loaded and brought to Europe on Portuguese ships.
This made Portugal wealthy in its own right, and it made sure that all of those forts established just off of West Africa’s coastline were bustling with Portuguese traders and entrepreneurs every bit as much as Portuguese soldiers and explorers. And it is this state of affairs which set the stage for Europe’s indirect meddling in West African society from the 1500’s onward.
In the New World, Spain had given up on finding a sea route to Asia, as it was far too busy conquering and colonising every bit of land its soldiers could find. The ease with which Spanish conquerors toppled and replaced the empires of Central and South America is remarkable, and the reasons for this are far more complicated than we have the space to delve into, but the effect of this conquest on Central and South America was drastic.
Spain set up a multi-level hierarchy in the lands it administered, with a small number of Europeans at the top and various classes of non-Europeans — including those of pure European ancestry born in the colonies — in circumscribed castes beneath them, in a reconstitution and elaboration of European feudalism. The kinds of agriculture and mining work which the Spanish engaged the colonies in were extremely labour intensive, and the Spanish aristocrats and entrepreneurs who had relocated to Central and South America had no interest in dirtying their own hands with this work. So the Spanish forced the indigenous peoples to do it, in return for “civilising” them with Catholicism and the Spanish language and arbitrary rules and sexual depredations and the occasional bout of recreational murder.
Concordantly, many indigenous Americans under Spanish rule died of starvation and overwork and the slow enervation brought about by endless gruelling hunger and innumerable indignities and the many European diseases to which they had no immunity. Enough of them died to imperil the righteous project of making Spain — and especially the Spaniards who had moved to the New World — as rich and powerful as possible. But the Spanish came up with a terribly clever (and simply terrible) idea: If the indigenous population could not reliably perform the back-breaking work which would make the Spanish rich, the Spanish would bring people who could do this work.
The climate of the Spanish colonies of the 1500’s was remarkably similar to that of sub-Saharan Africa, to the point that none too few Spaniards died from tropical diseases during their conquest and subsequent colonisation. Therefore it was befitting of a kind of cold logic to take human beings from West Africa — who were resistant to all of Europe’s diseases along with many tropical diseases to which Europeans had no resistance at all — to work in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, alongside and in place of the more perishable indigenous population. As noted, however, West African societies were not in a position to be subordinated to Spanish interests in the matter; the Spanish knew well enough from abortive and instructive Portuguese attempts that it would be impossible to bring any great number of Africans across the Atlantic by conquering and subjugating West Africa. And that is where the Portuguese merchants along West Africa’s coastline came in.
For all the terrible things one might note about Christianity’s influence upon Roman and later European civilisation, there was one unambiguously good thing Christianity did for Europe, and that was the abolition of the Roman practice of slavery. That Christianity did this by essentially enslaving almost everyone complicates matters a bit, but at least by the 1500’s, the not-technical-slavery condition of serfdom had also largely been obviated in the West, and the Catholic Church in particular remained vocally against the practice in any form reminiscent of the Roman institution. The Catholic clergy even forbade Columbus and those who followed in his wake from bringing sizeable numbers of the indigenous Americans they had enslaved to Europe, though they either could or did not forbid the practice in the far-off Americas.
The Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa did not emulate this particular strain of Christian thought. Indeed, Islamic pirates raided European coastal villages along with European shipping from Ireland to Greece until the 1900’s, and those pirates counted human beings along with material goods among their plunder. At least one million Europeans, and potentially twice that many, were forcibly transported to North Africa to be bought and sold and used as human property. This of course does not excuse the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to which we turn presently, but it does show that the European monsters who initiated it were not singularly evil in the ambit of human experience; they were merely men, perverse and cruel and greedy, like so many before and since.
In any event, the Spanish landowners in America needed workers, and the Portuguese had trading posts and naval stations set up off the coast of West Africa. West Africa was settled by a sophisticated collection of societies who had largely come to embrace Islam, in a way not dissimilar to how Europeans had come to embrace Christianity — that is, by local rulers using the animating force of monotheism to justify conquering their heretical neighbours, converting their subjects under threat of torture, marginally adapting to local traditions, and such like. And, as we have just discussed, this Islamic civilisation was (and, to a certain extent, remains) entirely comfortable trafficking humans as tradeable goods.
So the Spanish and the Portuguese, rather than conquering West Africa, decided to open those Portuguese forts for business. In return for European weapons, European silver, and faster access to wares Europeans had procured from the Americas and Asia, African merchants were quite happy to forcibly march as many human beings to the coast as the Europeans could ask for. And it turned out that those Europeans could ask for an unfathomable amount of human beings over the next couple of centuries, becoming a market so lucrative for West African societies that much of their economy became based on capturing and transporting people to sell into slavery, with ruinous long-term consequences for the societies in question.
But we’re getting off track again; where were we? Ahh, yes, the Spanish and the Portuguese divvying up the world and reintroducing slavery to the economies (if not the territories) of Western Europe, more or less the moment serfdom had been finally dispensed with. The Catholic Church was good enough to effectively forbid the large-scale importation of African slaves into Europe itself, but they did nothing substantive to curtail the practice as it emerged in the New World, too busy as they were with saving all of those New World souls and enjoying all of that New World gold.
The thing about the gentlemen’s agreement between the Pope and the leaders of Spain and Portugal, though, was that the other states of Western Europe had not been invited. And though the Iberians wound up administering the entirety of South and Central America along with much of the Caribbean, many other European states carved territories of their own out of what was left. At one point, even the Duchy of Courland laid claim to a couple of Caribbean islands for about a decade before the Dutch took those islands off their hands. (Russia eventually took Courland off of the Duchy of Courland’s hands, but that is another topic beyond our scope.)
But England and France became the most consequential colonisers of North America, and this in turn became the most consequential development in shaping the West’s identity, especially in our own time. The question naturally arises, for example, that if Spain is a part of anything one might call “The West”, being as it was a powerful society (for a time the most powerful society) in Western Europe and instrumental in Western Europe’s expansion to the Americas, why is Latin America not generally considered Western today (with the exception of a few Latin Americans)?
A short answer is that Latin America developed into a deliberately-disunited collection of feudal societies whose sole purpose was extracting material wealth to send to Spain, peopled to a large extent by individuals of non-European or mixed ancestry who occupied the bottom rungs of the elaborate social hierarchy imposed by Spain which kept the small number of Europeans (again, people *actually born in Europe*) at the very top, and run in many ways (and occasionally explicitly) as out-and-out Catholic theocracies. Mismanagement by Spain, brutal wars of independence (especially in Mexico), civil and regional wars, and meddling by the eventual United States also played a large part in crippling the region and hindering its development.
North America, by contrast, was largely denuded of its indigenous population, and while resource extraction to Spain and France and Britain formed an integral part of the reason for the existence of the colonies founded there, the non-Spanish colonies also served other purposes to their founding societies and therefore developed along different lines. The upshot of the more comprehensive North American genocide, along with the English and French desire to extend their strategic interests — often in order to fight one another more effectively — was the mass movement of Europeans themselves to the New World.
The justifications for this movement of people can get a bit complicated and myth-heavy, but the gist is that Western Europe was tearing itself apart over the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War and a growing amount of urban poverty in the absence of the old feudal order, so many of these Europeans ventured to North America to establish autonomous communities away from the direct oversight of Paris or London or the various German states.
In the centuries after Columbus landed on the island he named Hispaniola, North America developed four similar but distinctive patterns of settler colonialism which would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the United States both as the richest and most powerful society in the history of the world, and as the arbiter of what it meant to be Western in the 1900’s and the opening decades of the 2000’s. It is worth outlining these four settlement patterns in order to establish the context for that emergence, and contrast it with how Western Europe developed in the same period.
The Spanish settled what became northern Mexico and the southwestern United States with large, autonomous ranches far removed from the imperial centre of Mexico City and thus in many ways much more similar to the rest of North America than to Central and South America; they also colonised Florida, though here along similar lines to their colonies in the Caribbean, and Florida did not remain Spanish in any sense for very long. The Spanish territories of what was then “el Norte” are, incidentally, where we get most of our notions of “the Wild West” from; by the time these territories were integrated into the United States, the “Wild West” was essentially over. Nevertheless, this area and pattern of settlement has done much to inspire the notions of liberty, independence, self-reliance, and obstinate chafing under government oversight which have gone on to characterise much of America’s ideas of itself and its mythos abroad.
The French laid claim to an enormous swathe of territory, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, though their intimate involvement in the Thirty Years’ War and related affairs in Europe — along with the harsh climates on the northern and southern extremes of their claim — prevented them from settling this land as intensively as they might have hoped. Even so, there is a still-vibrant Francophone society within the modern state of Canada. Canada is even officially bilingual, though only 20% French; the rest is English, and it is so because the English violently wrested these territories from the French as part of the more-or-less continual state of warfare which these two societies engaged in for nearly a thousand years.
The last, and by far the most consequential, European society to settle North America was, of course, the English. They established a series of colonies along the eastern coast of North America, from Georgia to Maine, along with Newfoundland and what would become northern Canada. Through the aforementioned appetite for mutual bloodshed, England would eventually relieve France of its possessions east of the Appalachias. The English even committed a genocide against the French inhabitants of what we now call the Maritimes, which were then called Acadia; the displaced French people resettled along the New England coast, and especially to Louisiana, where the Acadians evolved into the near-mythical Cajuns.
But this collection of English colonies, while contiguous and interconnected, were marked by two distinctive settlement patterns, the effects of which echo throughout the history of the eventual United States unto our own time. The colonies of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont were largely settled by Englishmen and other Europeans fleeing religious persecution; these people set up communities just as stifling and tyrannical as those they had left, only according to their own peculiar creeds, and these communities often condemned one another to the fires of Hell for failing to follow the Word of God correctly — essentially the only thing they all agreed upon was that the Anglicans were basically Catholic, and the Catholics were basically pagan, and the pagans were all going to Hell. Indeed, these colonies would prove foundational in the establishment of American secularism precisely because of their religious diversity; as Christopher Hitchens was fond of pointing out, the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, urged Thomas Jefferson to institute a “wall of separation” between the exercise of religion and the practice of state power because they feared the Congregationalists in Danbury coming to power there and persecuting them, once the American colonies successfully rebelled and seceded from Britain. (England took over Scotland to become Great Britain in 1707, well after all of these colonies were founded, in part to bail Scotland out of its own failed colonising enterprise in Panama. But, again, we don’t have time to get into that.)
The English colonies of Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia were settled by plenty of religious refugees of the sort outlined above, but also by a large share of English aristocrats (or would-be aristocrats) who established large monocrop farms we call plantations, in a manner quite reminiscent of the Spanish colonies to the south. Initially the labour for these plantations came from British and Scottish and Irish peasants shipped over the Atlantic more or less against their will; many of them were criminals — one must note, however, in the England of the 1600’s it was a crime to be homeless, to beg, to refuse an offer of a menial job, to stand around for too long while unemployed, to owe money without regular repayment, or to do or say anything which might hurt the feelings of a merchant or an aristocrat or a priest, and to not profess the Anglican version of Christianity. Criminals could look forward to short stints in filthy jails, ended either by a public flogging or by a public hanging, depending on the nature and multiplicity of the offense.
The plantation colonies offered a respite in the form of labour contracts facilitating “indentured servitude” for a fixed period of time, usually seven years, after which they were supposed to be remunerated and able to establish homesteads of their own. It was not uncommon, however, for the terms of the indenture to be extended or the promised remuneration reduced or withheld, ostensibly for the servant’s behaviour or lack of adequate service. And make no mistake, this “service” was dangerous, constant, heavy manual labour in accordance to the whims of an aristocrat, from before sunrise to after sunset, every day. If they were able to do this tireless work for at least seven years, avoid the wrath of the master of the house (which for female domestic servants could be as tricky as you would expect), and subsist on the meagre gruel and shoddy accommodations they got in recompense, then these indentured servants could leave the plantation and do what struck their fancy in the New World.
The first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, brought in by Portuguese traders to fulfil landlords’ demands for labour which British criminals and peasants alone could not sate. For about forty years, these Africans were treated as indentured servants, little different from their European counterparts. Beginning in the 1650’s, however, Africans in Maryland and Virginia who broke the terms of their indenture began to be sentenced to life-long service (whereas Europeans would normally face a shorter extension of service or loss of compensation for supposed offenses), and it was not long before all of the plantation colonies developed a legal system of permanent intergenerational servitude for Africans and their descendants.
Between 1500 and 1866, at least twelve million human beings were stuffed into ships off the coast of West Africa, and of these, about ten million disembarked in the Americas. Relatively few of these people, about five percent, arrived in what would become the United States; colonies in the Caribbean and Central and South America (particularly, but not exclusively, Brazil) were such brutal environments to toil in that most of the enslaved Africans died after just a few years of labour and thus required a constant stream of replacements, whereas the type of agriculture pursued in the American South — while backbreaking and harsh and intense — allowed the North American slave population to grow domestically.
Indeed, in a parallel to West Africa, much of the North American economy became intertwined not just with the exploitation of slave labour to extract resources, but with the institution of slavery itself. The transportation of African slaves across the Atlantic was officially outlawed by Britain in 1809, but by then the United States was its own country, and it had developed a robust internal slave market in any case. This market formed a significant proportion of the American economy and legal apparatus, along with incentivising pirates to flout the British ban on transporting Africans and ensuring a continued flow of slaves to augment that market’s domestic supply up until the institution was abolished.
As already mentioned, slavery was not exactly unique to the Americas in world history, and indeed we should note that the British authorities continued to press Europeans into indentured servitude in the Americas up until the American colonies successfully rebelled. But there are few societies where the institution of slavery became synonymous with a distinct ethnicity of people as a static fact of caste, over centuries, as developed in the American South.
Normally, where slavery exists, it is a matter of circumstance; one is captured in war or in piracy, one falls into debt or runs afoul of a law, and in all of these cases lacks the resources or connections to secure one’s freedom. Even in societies such as Rome, where slavery could be intergenerational and formed a significant part of the economy, it was possible for nearly anyone to become enslaved and for many slaves to eventually secure their and their family’s freedom. It was essentially a legal and a financial matter; indeed, one of the most popular recourses for absolving one’s debts was to sell oneself into slavery for a period of time, on the hope that one’s master would not have you killed on a whim in the meantime.
This was not the case with the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the southern colonies of North America. Whereas in Rome, to extend the example, it was not uncommon for a slave to be literate and even well-respected, African slaves were treated by their enslavers as barely-sentient farm animals who were proscribed from learning to read on pain of amputation or death. To put it another way, as brutal and deranged from our notions of human rights as the societies of antiquity were, they still viewed their slaves as human beings whose fates happen to have cast them into the possession of other human beings; American slaveholders considered Africans inhuman, and indeed somehow elevated by the imposition of their bondage.
This is, if not unprecedented, a deeply atypical and particularly cruel basis upon which to build a society, especially the society which became the United States of America, whose very founding was justified on the grounds of resisting tyranny and ensuring that men (at least those men who owned property…including slaves) had the right to pursue their own goals as they saw fit. A lot of pixels have already been scraped together over America’s founding, and I shan’t belabour it here, except to underline the contradiction of a society whose declaration of sovereignty rested upon the enfranchisement and freedom of its citizens not only tolerating but relying upon a large and powerful institution dedicated to depriving a whole class of people of their very humanity in exchange for a lifetime of unremunerated labour.
The institution brutalised the men in charge of enforcing and furthering it, in the original sense of that word; that is, the men were turned into brutes, their minds poisoned until they professed that the height of civilisation was identical to the imposition of the institution upon black people by white people, their morals perverted to the point that anyone who opposed the institution was cast as an opponent of the West itself. It, that peculiar institution, is a stain upon the United States and the whole of the West, a sustained crime against humanity as ghastly and unfathomable as any which came before or since, and whose consequences seem to have only reverberated the more strongly the further we have come from the institution’s abolition.
We’ve meditated upon this subject long enough for one chapter, however; next time, we will survey the contemporaneous developments in a Europe injected with so much wealth from the New World, and see how the West finally named — and nearly destroyed — itself.