Christopher Columbus and the Enslavement of Amerindians in the Caribbean

As soon as the last Duvalier had fled Haiti, an angry crowd toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Port-au-Prince and threw it into the sea. This Columbus, the object of their wrath, was not, clearly, the great explorer of Western myth. Hispaniola, the island of which Haiti is a part, was the first European colony in the New World, and therefore the first to suffer the ravages of colonialism. The crowd knew Columbus as the first of a long line of despots leading to Duvalier. He was, indeed, the father of modern colonialism and all that it meant in the New World—the expropriation of the natural resources for the benefit of capital accumulation in the metropolitan center; despotic governments run by foreigners; the decimation of the native population and its replacement by millions of slaves from Africa; the institution of slavery as an international system; and the establishment of Europe as the hegemonic power in the new order of international capital. Christopher Columbus is the first great symbol of modern capitalism.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Capital (architecture) · Capitalism · Colonialism · Economic history · Ethnology · Hegemony · Political science · Politics · Population · Power (physics) · Sociology · Statue · Symbol (formal) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Demography · History · Law

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