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Christopher Carrico
Amerindian Research Unit
University of Guyana

Originally published in À


, History This Week,
25 November, 2010

http://ccarrico.wordpress.com

When Europeans came to the Americas, they came with clearly

defined ideas about what was civilised and what was not. The
classical European notion of civilisation was first developed in ancient
Greece, where µcivilised¶ meant to be a male citizen of a Greek city-
state. The Greek word for µbarbarian¶ applied to nearly all non-
Greeks.

Greeks did recognize some groups as being more civilised than

others, so while they believed that they were superior to all other
peoples, they did recognize that other state-based and class-stratified
societies had more in common with Greeks than they did with
µbarbarians¶. For example, the societies of the Nile River Valley (see
the argument in Frank Snowden¶s 

  , 1970), the Near
East, and Mesopotamia were relatively civilised when compared to
the Germanic, Celtic, and other peoples of Northern Europe who
were not yet state-based societies.

The Romans inherited many of the prejudices of the Greeks, and also
saw Egyptians, Ethiopians, Mesopotamians, etc. as civilised like the
Greeks and Romans, while they had little respect for the culture and
way of life of the tribes of Northern Europe. By sending conquering
armies to the north, and enslaving and subjugating the peoples there,
the Romans thought that they were bringing the benefits of a civilised
life to the wild tribes that lived at the northern frontiers of their empire.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the business of µcivilising¶ Europe
was taken over by the Church, and knights and warriors who had
sworn allegiance to kings and queens loyal to the Roman Catholic
Church. A good indication in the medieval European mind as to
whether an area had become civilised was whether there was a
bishop who oversaw the region. See 3 
 (Barlett
1994).

The feudal states that developed in medieval Europe in the wake of

the fall of the Roman Empire were class-stratified tributary states.
Slaves, serfs, and peasants were the common agricultural labourers,
while both the aristocracy and the clergy largely lived off of the tribute
and the tithes which were paid to them by working people. Most
Medieval scholars believed this unequal division of labour was God-
ordained, and part of the natural order. Peoples who did not live in
class-stratified, state-based societies like those of feudal Europe
were considered to have an inferior way of life, and to subjugate
these peoples was justified because it brought them the gift of
civilisation and of Christianity.

Even by 1492, the Spaniards who sponsored Columbus¶s first voyage

to the Americas were fully immersed in this ideology of the feudal
world. Catholic Spaniards had been involved in a centuries¶ long
struggle against the Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula, a
period known in Spanish history as the  

± the
µreconquest¶ of Spain from Islamic infidels. Immediately following
 

was the Inquisition, where the Church used torture to
get confessions from suspected infidels. The Inquisition was aimed
at hunting down those who still practiced the Islamic faith, European
pagan traditions, or Judaism. Converting non-Christians to the faith
through violence and persecution was not a new idea to the Spanish
when they brought this same pattern to the Americas.

 

Slavery was a fundamental part of the way of life of many of the

earliest class-stratified and state-based societies. The labour that
built Egypt, Greece, and Rome as Classical civilizations was largely
slave labour. The idea that democracy was founded in ancient
Athens, for instance, needs to be understood alongside the fact that
the society was only democratic for male, property owning citizens
whose wealth and free time were made possible by slave labour.
Greco-Roman civilisation was founded on slave labour, and slavery
was a legal practice in most of Europe until the nineteenth century.
As the main form of labour, slavery dwindled in importance after the
fall of the Roman Empire, being largely replaced by serfdom. Like
slavery, serfdom was an unfree form of labour. Serfs belonged to the
land that they were born on, and to the feudal lords who were the
owners of that land. Still, serfs had managed to maintain some rights
and privileges which had been stripped away from slaves.
While slavery had dwindled in importance during the European
Middle Ages, it never completely disappeared. Slave raiding and
trading continued to be a common practice in the areas around the
Mediterranean, with Christians and Muslim raiding each other¶s
territories for the taking of slaves, and each raiding µpagan¶ groups
that had not converted to either religion. The area where the greatest
amount of slave raiding took place was in the Black Sea area, as
raiders from the Italian city-states, and from the Ottoman Empire, for
instance, took slaves from the southern Slavic areas. In northern
Europe, the main slave raiders were Scandinavians, who raided
Russia to take slaves. Because of how common slave raiding was in
Slavic countries, the English words for  and 
have the same
etymological root.

Columbus came from Genoa, one of the major players in the

Mediterranean slave trade. While it is often emphasized that
Columbus came to the Americas in search of gold and other riches, it
is clear that he also came with the goal of capturing slaves.

The Amerindians who Columbus first made contact with were the
Tainos of the Greater Antilles. The Tainos were an Arawakan-
speaking people who had developed a settled, agricultural way of life,
a deeper division of labour than most horticultural peoples, and a
system of hierarchy wherein there were commoners, and persons of
chiefly status.

Because of the fact that the Tainos were a hierarchical society, with a
settled agricultural way of life, Europeans recognized them as being
somewhat more civilised than groups that were more egalitarian,
and/or semi-nomadic.




3
 
 

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The Lesser Antilles, and the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts of the
South American mainland, were of relatively little concern to the
Spanish during the early years of their colonisation when compared
to their interest in the areas in and around the Aztec and Inca
Empires (Mexico, Central America, and the Andes). However, what
are today Venezuela, Trinidad, and islands off of the Venezuelan
Coast did become areas for economic exploitation by the Spanish by
the first few decades of the 16th century.

Regionally, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church had decreed
that it was illegal to enslave the relatively more civilised Arawakan
speakers of the Caribbean and Northern South America, while it was
legal to enslave the µsavage¶ Cariban speakers of the area. It has
long been assumed that these distinctions were based on real
cultural differences between the two language families, but what has
become clear in recent scholarship is that the categories of Arawak
and Carib often shifted in European definitions based on European
strategic interests in the area. Let¶s look a couple of examples.

The peoples of the Lesser Antilles were mainly speakers of Arawakan

languages, but they violently resisted Spanish colonialism throughout
the early colonial period. Therefore, merchants, slave raiders, and
prospective colonists wrote letters to the Church and the Spanish
Crown convincing Europeans that these peoples were Caribs and
therefore fair game for enslavement and violent conquest.

Similarly, all of the peoples of northern Venezuela, Trinidad, and the

Guyana coast were initially categorized as Caribs and could be
legally raided for slaves. However, once lucrative pearl fisheries
were discovered off of the islands to the north of the Venezuelan
coast, the Spanish realised that they needed the assistance of local
people for labour and provisions. The Spanish enlisted the help of
the Lokono Arawaks of Trinidad and of Guyana¶s Essequibo coast to
supply the provisions that fed the labourers in the pearl fisheries of
Cubagua, Isla de Margarita, etc. Peoples living deeper in the interior
were still considered to be µwild¶ Caribs and could be taken as slaves,
with some of the most violent and dramatic raids taking place along
the Orinoco during the 1530s and the 1560s.
During the 16th century, the Spanish developed a special relationship
with the Lokono Arawak of Trinidad, the Orinoco Delta and the
Essequibo Coast. The Arawak provided provisions, mainly the in the
form of cassava in exchange for a privileged access to European
trade goods. Ojer and Boomert propose that the Arawak of Aruacy,
Trinidad had regional political dominance, but Anna Benjamin (1987)
suggests that privileged trading access was not accompanied by
political authority, and that political authority did not extend beyond
the level of the village or the settlement. However, the privileged
access of some Arawaks to trade might have meant that already
existing rank and lineage distinctions were reinforced within Lokono
Arawak settlements. The Spanish also introduced a pattern of
awarding slaves to the Arawaks who then subsequently sometimes
used slave labour to produce provisions for European colonists.

As we can see, the idea that empires are civilising the victims of their
conquest is one that has deep roots in the Western tradition. It was
perpetuated in the past in the name of bringing inferior peoples the
gift of Christianity or the gift of Civilisation. It is often perpetuated
today in the name of bringing them the gift of Democracy and Human
Rights.