The
underpinning narrative Marx develops in Capital cannot ignore India, Slavery,
Colonialism, the story of the extraction of surplus value in the factories is
the continuation, is co-constituted, with the plunder of India, Virginia,
slavery and opium. Here are some of his commentaries:
The discovery of gold
and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of
the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the
East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of
black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On
their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe
for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes
giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the
opium wars against China, &c. LW 751
P915
In England at the end
of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the
colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation LW751
On the
Dutch Christians:
Of the Christian
colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says:
“The barbarities and
desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of
the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be
paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and
however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.”
The history of the
colonial administration of Holland — and Holland was the head capitalistic
nation of the 17th century — “is one of the most
extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness”
Nothing is more characteristic
than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers
were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were
the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young
people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were
ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:
“This one town of
Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other,
crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains,
forcibly torn from their families.”
To secure Malacca, the
Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641.
They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to “abstain” from the payment
of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and
depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over
80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce! (LW 752)
Yet again on the
East India Company:
"The English East India
Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the
exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in
general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting
trade of India and between the islands, as well as the internal trade of India,
were the monopoly of the higher employés of the company. The monopolies of
salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth.
The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy
Hindus. The Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites
received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists,
made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day;
primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling. The trial of
Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for
opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an
official mission to a part of India far removed from the opium district.
Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day
for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared
that after all he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid
before Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000
from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a
famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at
fabulous prices"
The
‘redskins’ (massacre of native americans)
"The treatment of the
aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for
export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated
countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even
in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive
accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the
Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of
£40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of
£100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain
tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards
£100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners
£50, for scalps of women and children £50". (LW 753)
