“Columbus didn’t set off with this big old plan to create in the 21st century the industrialized world that we see before us today, of course he didn’t,” Akala says.
“He wasn’t that clever a man. He set off, he murdered a whole bunch of people, committed genocide, and out of a whole series of historical circumstances, and accidents, and some planning, this world system of European-based capitalism evolved – along with white supremacy.”
Fundamental in all of this was the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, Akala says: “There was an interesting program on the BBC of all places a few weeks ago, called ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners,’ by David Olusoga, which outlined something historians used to consider controversial. Eric Williams wrote a book in the 1940s called ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ and he put forward the thesis that Transatlantic slavery was really the foundational moment in the formation of European capitalism.”
The BBC’s program effectively confirmed Williams’ thesis, drawing on extensive research by banker-turned-historian Nick Draper.
But, as Akala puts it, “It’s not rocket science. Imagine if Apple Macintosh didn’t pay a single one of its employees. It’s already the richest company in the entire world.
“Imagine it only paid the most senior management and it didn’t pay anyone else – no-one who worked in the stores, none of the people who made the products – no-one, only Steve Jobs and his cohorts. It would be an infinitely richer company than it is today. Now imagine a whole nation of companies that applied that principle. So it’s not difficult to see how Europe became so wealthy.”
To some extent, things have changed since then, of course, thanks not only to the Haitians, but also to the two world wars, where European powers were forced to arm those they had colonized whilst weakening themselves in the process.
Akala says: “All of the allies needed their colonies to win that war, so the French needed their Senegalese, and their Mauritanians and others to fight for them; the British needed their Indians and their Africans and their Jamaicans to fight for them, and it created this kind of ‘gap in the market’ if you like, where for the first time in a few centuries, European power was challenged, leading directly to the limited decolonization that we have.
“Europe has tried to hold on to power in as many ways as possible, including using the IMF, and the World Bank, and America.”
His theme is that while colonialism changed its form, it never truly ended: neocolonialism replaced it.
