Part one
PRIOR PRACTICES AND BELIEFS set the context in which post-abolition and post-colonial racial order was constructed. Analysts of Brazil’s “exceptional” lack of legal racial domination and conflict have argued that Portuguese colonialism, Catholicism, more “humanitarian” slavery, and a greater physical mixing of populations preordained a later, more tolerant racial order. By implication, racial domination and conflict in South Africa and the United States (for all their differences) can then be explained by their alternative legacies of British or Dutch colonialism, Protestantism, harsh slavery, and lesser extent of miscegenation. In Part One, I assess these arguments, using trilateral comparisons to demonstrate that prior historical trajectories were not so fully determinant in their own right.
To simply refute the explanatory power of early history and culture as uncertain, and thereby to dismiss consideration of them, would be a serious mistake, inviting simple-minded, ahistorical conclusions. Instead, I will argue that colonialism, religious tradition, slavery, and miscegenation were later interpreted in particular ways to fit the political situations in each of the three cases under consideration. These interpretations were widespread in each culture, shaping perceptions of what and how post-abolition racial order could be and was constructed. And after that construction was refined, selective interpretations of past legacies justified the racial order that would come to prevail in each country. The point is that it was not historical facts per se that predetermined subsequent racial orderings, but purposeful interpretations of those facts.
The past impinged but did not bind. Societies were not as locked into past patterns as Louis Hartz suggested,1 but instead developed their own dynamics building on past divisions and practices. History presented “problems” that actors sought to address in varying ways, with each such “solution” rationalized as historically necessary. But interpretations of cultural legacies and values change over time, and the point is to explain such change. Early historical bequests thus remain relevant. To explicate this argument, it is necessary first to assess the prior historical record, before we can appreciate how interpretations of this record twisted, forgot, or embraced the past to fit emerging projects of race making.
2
How did differing experiences of colonialism and its aftereffects shape later racial orders? I begin with an examination of Brazil, where arguments for such historical determinacy have been employed to explain the later lack of racial domination. To check such arguments, I then turn to comparisons with the colonies that would become South Africa and the United States.
Portuguese Brazil
The image of a Portuguese colonial legacy of racial tolerance is tantamount to an official ideology, at least within the former colonial power. Modern Portuguese officials have claimed that among Europeans, their predecessors “alone practiced the principle of multi-racialism, which all now consider the most perfect and daring expression of human brotherhood . . . in which men are limited only by their ability.”1 As early as 1923, the usually astute W. E. B. Du Bois agreed that “between the Portuguese and the African and the near-African there is naturally no racial antipathy – no accumulated historical hatreds, dislikes and despisings.”2 According to Gilberto Freyre, the leading advocate of this thesis, “the absence of violent rancors due to race constitutes one of the peculiarities of the feudal system in the tropics,” characteristic of Portuguese rule. In their colonies, the Portuguese supposedly pursued policies of incorporation more than imposition, consistent with a “plasticity of the national character, of its classes and institutions, which are never indurated or definitely stratified.”3
Colonial racial tolerance has been described as the result of Portugal’s geographic proximity and contact with Africa. Freyre argued that the early experience of domination by the Moors, “a dark-skinned race but one that was superior to the white race in various aspects of moral and material culture,” had helped to prepare the Portuguese for respectful and friendly interaction with Africans.4 The purported result was “an ancient element of racial cosmopolitanism here, which facilitated the absorption of the non-European into the feudal structure.”5 However, their North African rulers “were no darker than the Portuguese,”6 and even Freyre notes that the Portuguese were united in their “hatred for the Moor.”7 Such foreign rule may have made it difficult for the Portuguese to “nourish preconceptions of racial superiority,” but “the long warfare between Portuguese and Moors [did not] result in a spirit of racial toleration.”8 Moorish rule more likely encouraged racial antagonism, camouflaged by the Portuguese as racial tolerance and respect in order to preserve their pride.
After the withdrawal of the Moors, Portugal was the first European power to project itself into Africa during the sixteenth century. The image of racial tolerance was later extended to this experience. Because “the Portuguese in the mother country had for centuries been acquainted with people of darker skins,” they were supposedly predisposed to “essentially harmonious” race relations in Africa.9 But just as it is unlikely that the Portuguese thought of their relations with Moorish conquerors as harmonious, it is at least as difficult to imagine that the victims of later Portuguese incursions into Africa would have described their slave and colonial masters in such friendly terms. Instead, Portuguese colonialism in Africa was highly discriminatory and produced “the absolute, literal nadir of African misery.”10 Freyre’s efforts to find a consistent pattern of Portuguese racial tolerance led him to misrepresent the reality of Portuguese colonial practice in Africa. Of course, other colonial powers were similarly and falsely self-laudatory.
The general argument for a tolerant Portuguese colonial legacy is unfounded, and as applied to Brazil is best assessed separately. Financial pressures on the Portuguese crown impelled early conquests, including that of Brazil, where the land was initially divided among captaincies tied to the crown. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crown saw Brazil as a source of goods to be extracted, with the geography allowing for only coastal settlement, limiting colonization.11 As a dominant European empire already in decline, Portu-gual was threatened and injured in its pride by the invasion of northern Brazil in 1624 by the rising Dutch empire.12 By 1654, free and enslaved blacks fighting with the Portuguese had repelled the Dutch, leaving in their wake a country more unified by its “struggle against a common enemy.”13 However, the complete withdrawal of the Dutch left no remnant of this common enemy against which national unity might otherwise have continued to be refined. “No great sense of national identity” remained in Brazil.14 Slavery and subordination of blacks did remain.
Portugal’s persistence against the Dutch paid off handsomely. Within forty years after their victory in the “War of Divine Liberty,” gold was discovered in Brazil, sparking two centuries of economic growth and trade. The gold find proved a boon to the Portuguese crown, which used resulting revenues to pay for imports, largely from Britain.15 A royal monopoly and tax on the gold trade was imposed, with gold production encouraging a rapid expansion in the importation of slave labor to work the mines.16 Mining and the rising threat of British and French competition further impelled Portuguese penetration inland. And as the flow of gold ebbed, sugar, diamonds, and coffee took its place. Global demand for Brazilian sugar exploded when French production fell in the wake of the slave revolt in St. Dominique.17 The good fortune of diminished international competition, sequential mineral finds, increased agricultural production, and cheap slave labor combined to make Brazil into what the Portuguese king called the “milk cow” of his empire.18
Profits from Brazil flowed directly to the Portuguese king, reinforcing state consolidation and centralized rule. The Dutch and the British would later develop their colonies by relying on strong private companies. By contrast, the Portuguese crown invested for itself, eclipsing any merchant class at home, while developing Brazil as “the king’s plantation” under a strong bureaucracy. But by the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Portuguese centralization and profit-taking fed growing Brazilian nationalist resentment. In 1709, a Paulista revolt against Portuguese control and taxation of the gold trade was crushed, providing a further impetus for the crown to exert its authority.19 With reduced gold production, local resistance rose gradually toward crisis. In Minas Gerais, where debt to Portugal soared despite the mineral wealth taken, a plot for sovereignty in 1789 was inspired by U.S. independence, and crushed. The crown then sought compromise, for instance in reducing its “royal fifth” of profits by half, in order to avoid further confrontations and to retain its lucrative colonial rule.20 But despite such efforts at appeasement or repression to retain colonial rule, by the end of the eighteenth century analysts concluded that “Portugal without Brazil is an insignificant power,” and that “so heavy a branch cannot long remain on so rotten a trunk.”21
Economically inspired Brazilian independence seemed to loom, but geopolitics conspired against a dramatic break. In November 1807, Napoleon’s army advanced toward Lisbon. The British, concerned about Portuguese assets falling into French hands, threatened to destroy the fleet of its ally. The threat was credible – the British had earlier bombarded Copenhagen. With only four days to spare before the French took Lisbon, Dom João IV acceded to British demands that they escort him, his court, fleet, treasury, and even a printing press, into exile in Brazil. Joáo’s arrival in Bahia in 1808 marked the first time a reigning European monarch had set foot in the Americas.22 A royal exile began, made palatable by the greater wealth and development of the colony than of the home country. Even more astonishingly, the monarch and his family settled and established strong roots in the tropical soil, turning the table of domination from Europe to colonial rule from a colony. Heirs of the Portuguese crown remained in situ and in command of Brazil until 1889.
The unique historical development of a European power ruling from a colonial seat had a profound impact. With its royal presence, emergent Brazilian nationalism shifted from being anti-Portuguese to embracing a localized monarchy. The Brazilian Empire was consolidated around the symbolism of the “moderating power” of the crown. The result was a remarkable degree of unity and stability, reinforced by state-controlled exports and British support for its trading partner.23
When serious conflict did emerge, it was consistently defused by compromise and rearrangements in the distribution of central power, which did not seriously disrupt the basic order. A troop rebellion in 1821 gained the support of the regent Pedro, who simply declared independence and named himself emperor of Brazil the next year, after his father the king had reluctantly decided to leave Brazil and return to Lisbon. Formal independence was achieved out of “continuity” more than “rupture,” without a shot being fired.24 Another outburst of protest in 1831 led Pedro I to abdicate in favor of his son, Pedro II, who then ruled Brazil for fifty-eight years of relative tranquillity, punctured by serious revolts in the 1830s and 1840s and a war with Paraguay from 1865 to 1870.25 Despite such occasional instability, loyalty to the Emperor largely endured. Astonishingly, though he was a descendant of the Portuguese royal house, Pedro II was embraced by Brazilians as “like us,” even in skin color.26
The Brazilian Empire was remarkable for the persistence of Portuguese rule of an independent country. Amid conflict, the center held; “there was no Brazilian civil war.”27 This relative stability also provided the opportunity for a dramatic further consolidation of state power. The Portuguese colonial tradition of a strong crown and weak private sector provided a strong base on which the two emperors could build. Provincial governments, the judiciary, Church, army, mines, the business community, locally powerful and wealthy coffee and sugar barons, all remained under the control of the crown, whose rule has been described as a form of “tropical feudalism,” albeit centralized.28 The result was an occasionally clogged but still highly effective royal authority, able to circumvent or withstand challenges while the same elite remained in power.29 According to Stein Rokkan, this centralization was reinforced by the unifying influence of the state-supported Catholic Church, as contrasted with the sect divisions and exclusiveness of Protestantism.30 Thus, the Brazilian tradition of prebendal clientalist or patrimonial rule was firmly established by Catholic Portuguese colonialism and maintained through the peaceful transition to independent empire.
Did Brazil’s early political consolidation come with an imported tradition of racial tolerance? The Portuguese “royal family set the example of social acceptance of the darker Brazilians,” with the emperor liberating his own slaves in 1840 and freeing some 6,000 slaves who fought in the Paraguay War of 1865-70.31 More generally, Freyre argued that the recurrent tendency to head off revolts and challenges through compromise also encouraged “no absolute ideals, with no unyielding prejudice.”32 But most importantly, stability was also preserved by an informal religious and “racial hierarchy.”33 For instance, remarkably low state investment in education, indicated by the lack of any university and high rates of illiteracy, reinforced the low status of Afro-Brazilians.34 Whites went from Brazil to Coimbra for university study. Blacks did not. The resulting hierarchy enabled the state to “divide and rule” by fragmentation, using a nonconfrontational strategy that effectively enforced the racial order at little cost.
State authorities also enacted formal discrimination, contradicting claims of official racial tolerance. For instance, already in 1755 Portugal had limited “mixed marriages,” religious distinctions were consistently used to enforce discrimination, and only Portuguese served as ministers of the empire.35 As Boxer concludes, “the oft-made claim that the Portuguese had no colour-bar cannot be substantiated,” for there remained few “darker skinned” officials either in Portugal or its colony.36 Exceptions were notable. If anything, racial intolerance was a strong part of Portuguese tradition, consistent with its history of Catholic fundamentalism defeating the Moors, the Inquisition, and its status as the largest slave-trading nation in history. Despite its universalistic doctrines, the Catholic Church itself reinforced status distinctions by race, with Africans at the bottom of the formally inclusive hierarchy.
Arguments that Portuguese colonialism brought a legacy of racial tolerance have purposefully misrepresented the facts. The image of a tolerant tradition emerges as “a romantic myth (at best), or an invidious lie (at worst), used to obscure the realities of Portuguese colonialism,” which was highly extractive and racially discriminatory.37 The mythology of racial tolerance was consciously fashioned “to abolish . . . differences within a single, mystic unity” that simply did not exist. What did exist was a high level of Portuguese “economic and social retardation,”38 in contrast to the more advanced form of decentralized development established elsewhere by British and Dutch colonialism. Rather than face this fact, Lusophiles “turned the country’s inferiority complex inside out and converted Brazil’s multiracial past from a liability into an asset,” in part to impress liberal foreigners.39 If the Portuguese could not claim comparable success at development, they would at least claim success in establishing tolerance. Archaic feudal hierarchy imposed on a colonial setting was projected as an advanced form of liberalism, with history later misrepresented accordingly.
Portuguese colonial and imperial rule over Brazil is distinguished by the dramatic extent to which state authority was imposed and preserved. State-led colonialism, which developed under the Portuguese before a strong private sector emerged (if it ever did), left a legacy of patrimonial rule. The Portuguese crown, its descendants, and related elites established firm control over the colony and its economy, proving themselves astonishingly resilient. Power was distributed among the elite, but that elite remained dependent on the center. Most notably, the unique happenstance of the Portuguese court being forcibly transferred to Brazil reinforced colonial rule and diminished separatist nationalism. The resulting lack of major violent conflict compared to elsewhere, notably the absence of any war of independence, is startling. Even after the economy of the former colony had outpaced that of its “mother country,” the same Portuguese elites remained in control of Brazil, finessing pressures for greater separatism through accommodation and reform. But they were only “racially tolerant” by accommodating blacks at the bottom of their well-entrenched hierarchy.
Dutch and British Colonial Legacies
Early Portuguese explorers of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope did not firmly established their claims. A century after Vasco da Gama anchored near Table Bay in 1499, Portugal was already in relative decline and Dutch power on the rise. The Dutch East India Company was founded and began to replace Portuguese traders and claims.40 By 1652, the company had established a small station on the Cape to provide provisions to ships making their way around Africa to India. With little fresh water and few perceived opportunities for trade or industry in the Cape, and with Holland having no population surplus seeking migration, the Dutch initially saw little interest in establishing a major settlement. But to encourage greater productivity, the Dutch East India Company did permit private landholding by burghers after 1657. Only in 1700 did the Dutch begin to actively encourage greater settlement by offering free passage to the Cape.41
While Brazil was enjoying a golden economic boom across the Atlantic, the Dutch Cape colonials in South Africa spent the eighteenth century developing slowly. The Dutch settlers, or Afrikaners, farmed for their own sustenance and to trade with in-transit sailors. They initially distinguished themselves from the indigenous population not so much on the basis of race, but as Christians rather than heathens, with some Africans incorporated by baptism.42 Afrikaner Calvinist beliefs were unadulterated by the European Enlightenment, from which they were largely cut off.43 The natives were more densely settled and more needed for labor than in the Americas. Africans were forced to trade or work, pushed off their land, defeated in small wars, and decimated by disease, such as smallpox.44 Meanwhile, Europe seemed to disappear for a time far over the horizon.
By the end of the eighteenth century, South Africa’s relative isolation was broken. The aftermath of the French Revolution sent Shockwaves not only west to Brazil but also south to the Cape. Though they were initially uninterested in colonizing the region, the British were eager to keep the strategically located Cape from falling into Napoleon’s hands, much as they were concerned about the fate of the Portuguese fleet. Lacking a surrogate ally to protect their interests akin to the Portuguese king, the British acted for themselves. By 1795, a year after the Dutch East India Company had declared bankruptcy, the rising British Empire moved to displace formal Dutch rule on the Cape.45 To “stabilize the frontier” of their new possession and to export excess domestic labor, the British sent 5,000 settlers to the Eastern Cape in 1820.
British colonial policies toward the African population were inconsistent. Missionary education was extended to Africans. British subjects were not permitted to own slaves, and liberals such as Dr. John Philip successfully pressed for further reforms, consistent with the extensions of citizenship in Great Britain. In 1828 “statutory discrimination” was formally abolished, overturning requirements that coloureds (people of mixed African and European – and later East Asian – ancestry) carry passes or avoid vagrancy, and ending prohibitions against blacks owning land, the chief mechanisms by which the Afrikaners had previously forced coloureds to labor for them.46 In 1833 emancipation was mandated, with little or no compensation to slave owners. By the latter part of the century a minority of Africans had been granted the franchise in the Cape, though property qualifications were raised to ensure white dominance as more blacks were incorporated into the territory.47 A tradition of tolerance was apparently established that would later be as proudly hailed by the British as it was by the Portuguese. But during the same period, in the rural areas the British purposefully pitted one “tribe” against another or forced “removals,” and when that was not sufficient to establish control, used direct military force. Most notably, after suffering a major defeat at the hands of the Zulus at Isandhlwana in 1879, the British moved to crush the Zulu kingdom and adopted rhetoric “dehumanizing” Africans.48 Coloured students were expelled from Cape schools, and urban segregation was pioneered in Durban under British rule after 1843.49 By 1894, the Glenn Grey Act formally established segregation in the Eastern Cape, ostensibly under the guise of reforming land tenure. Shepstone pursued a similar policy in Natal, where “native reserves” had been established in 1864.50 All told, racial segregation was pioneered by the British, sometimes despite official colonial policy, long before formal apartheid was enacted.
Liberal aspects of British policies toward the Africans adversely affected the empire’s relations with the Afrikaners, who represented the greatest threat to colonial rule. Unlike Brazil, where the Portuguese repelled the Dutch and remained then as unchallenged European rulers, in South Africa the late-arriving British encountered the Dutch descendants who had taken root. The British incursion was not welcomed by the fiercely independent Afrikaners, who particularly resented policies anglicizing their education. Early British reforms in the treatment of Africans, who had by then been long subordinated under Dutch rule, further aggravated relations, provoking a series of rebellions by Afrikaners in 1795, 1799, and 1815.51 They deeply resented, as an early Afrikaner put it,
the shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves . . . as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God, and the natural distinctions of race and colour, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke, wherefore we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity.52
In the less generous interpretation of a British official, the Afrikaners were united and mobilized by their insistence on being able “to wollop their own niggers.”53 In either case, the Afrikaners resisted the extension of citizenship rights to Africans.
Determined “to preserve proper relations between masters and servant” and with little hope of defeating the British Empire, thousands of Afrikaners opted for flight rather than to fight, trekking north. Eager to avoid an “irresolvable conflict,” Britain let them go.54 But the seeds of British-Afrikaner animosity had been planted, with British and Afrikaner loyalties solidifying in opposition to each other. Despite much agreement on white superiority, treatment of Africans had been established as a focal point of the emerging conflict for power. Afrikaner racist ideology was consolidated by resistance to British impositions of reform.
The trek north relieved pressure between Afrikaners and British, for a time. Afrikaners still resisted state rule, even their own, breaking up into separate republics in the Transvaal and the Orange River Sovereignty. To mollify the Boer trekkers, in 1852 and 1854 the British grudgingly ceded independence to these republics, concluding that imperial interests were not threatened by such ramshackle, inland states often in conflict with each other.55 In kind, Paul Kruger’s South African Republic in the Transvaal ostensibly sought to be inclusive toward its English inhabitants, while limiting their franchise in order to maintain an Afrikaner majority.56 The republics were less accommodating toward Africans. The 1858 constitution of the Transvaal Republic declared that “there shall be no equality between white and black in church or state.”57 By 1893–5, job “colour bars” and a mandatory “pass system” were in place.58 British protest was muted and the republics remained with their racial policies intact.
The uneasy peace between Britain and the Afrikaner republics was broken by the destabilizing effects of major mineral finds. After their discovery in 1867, South Africa produced half of the world’s diamonds. The British responded initially with some uncertainty. With the excuse of offering protection for the Zulus, the British annexed the Transvaal and its diamond fields by 1877. Transvaal self-rule was then reestablished in 1881.59 But in 1886 gold was discovered there, which would come to make up one-quarter of global supply. Thereafter “the story of South Africa is the story of gold.”60
The form, scale, and timing of the gold discoveries were crucial, exacerbating intrawhite conflict. Afrikaner Calvinists were concerned about the “pernicious moral influence on our national character” of such material “temptation.”61 Kruger resisted private claims and investment and blocked the extension of railroads to carry the gold. But the ore was of poor quality and far from ports, requiring substantial investment in refining and railroads, which the British were eager to provide and to protect under their rule.62 The British were then suffering a domestic economic crisis and facing increased global competition in their efforts to achieve dominance. Britain needed the riches that had fallen into the laps of the more ambivalent and isolated Afrikaners. Establishing rule in South Africa beyond “the mother colony” of the Cape, both to assert British supremacy and to turn “the richest spot on earth” into a treasury for the empire, was too great a temptation to resist.63 If the British state still hesitated, its subjects did not. Cecil Rhodes launched a raid on the Transvaal in 1895–6, and after that failed British colonials continued to push for state intervention. Afrikaner resistance and British agitation grew apace in the years that followed.
Long-standing conflicts over power were coming to a head, spurred on by the prospect of great wealth. South Africa seemed to advance “politically by disasters and economically by windfalls.”64 Fortune brought misfortune. The discovery of gold just when the British Empire was reaching its height and needed further resources brought the full force of the world’s greatest power down on the heads of the Afrikaners.
What then is the implication of this overview of South African colonial history in terms of race relations? The Afrikaners were committed to labor coercion and racial domination, and were even willing to give up land in the Cape to preserve such domination and to avoid their being dominated in turn by the British. Their views on race reflected their own interests and religion, rather than official Dutch colonial policies or eugenics, from which Afrikaners were relatively isolated. British policies toward the Africans were somewhat more ambivalent, with reforms and abolition enforced from London but segregation and conquest pursued by local officials. With British and Afrikaners in control of different parts of what was to become South Africa, policies on race relations were officially recognized as “diverse.”65 But a common early pattern of discrimination and exploitation was established, whether by British liberalism or Afrikaner conservatism.
Describing the treatment of Africans in this way highlights the overriding influence of the conflict between British and Afrikaners. This conflict was the major legacy of the colonial period in South Africa. By the end of the nineteenth century, with imperial aims and mineral riches drawing British north from the Cape, the contest for control between the British and Afrikaners could no longer be finessed. Relations with Africans were of secondary importance, shaped by the more pressing competition between European descendants. The contrast of this situation with that of Brazil is marked, for there no such intra-European conflict emerged, nor did a fully fledged ideology of racism develop to counter externally imposed reforms. Relations with African descendants in Brazil developed more unilaterally. Thus, while Brazil’s resulting colonial legacy was one of relative stability and unity, that of South Africa was instability and growing conflict.
Whereas colonial (or imperial) rule lasted in Brazil and parts of South Africa for most of the nineteenth century, it lasted in the United States only until the end of the eighteenth. Unlike the Portuguese monarchy, the British crown was effectively challenged at home by Parliamentary opposition and abroad by Spanish and French competition. The Seven Years’ War (1756-63) consolidated British control of its American colonies but also shattered the image of British invincibility and raised the self-esteem of colonialists who had fought for Britain. The crown remained unable or unwilling to engage itself in direct colonial investment. Instead, Britain relied on the private investment of large firms or individuals granted territory.66
Domestic political power was decentralized among the thirteen American colonies, including those in the more agrarian and rural South, and what would become a more rapidly industrializing North. Native Americans were pushed aside, establishing a pattern of racial exclusion. Within the South, particularly Virginia, early rebellions had raised the fear of insurrection uniting black slaves and white indentured servants. “Resentment of an alien race” was gradually encouraged by white planters in order to unify whites “in common contempt for persons of darker complexion.”67 Benefits for poorer whites were offered to head off insurrection, solidifying cross-class white support for the enslavement of black labor.
The South’s commitment to labor-coercive slavery helped to unify whites within those colonies, but also exacerbated later division between the regions. For instance, when independence was declared, the South rejected Northern efforts to condemn the slave trade. Such division would emerge as more similar to South Africa than to the unified colonial rule of Brazil, though in the United States later tensions tended to focus on regional interests and slavery, in contrast to South Africa’s conflict over ethnic self-determination and the treatment of free Africans. But as in South Africa and Brazil, U.S. whites generally agreed, in the words of Jefferson, that “blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in body and mind.”68
American independence was won by military victory, again in contrast to the peaceful transition to empire in Brazil. The United States was born out of violent conflict akin to that which would give birth to a unified South Africa more than a century later. But unlike South Africa, the British were defeated in the United States by a cross-regional effort unifying whites.
In the aftermath of the War of Independence, the thirteen colonies formed a united state. As a leading force in the independence movement, the South resisted any threats to its autonomy, while assuming that it would control the central authority. Constitutional negotiations among the former colonies left purposefully unresolved the issue of the future of Southern slavery. This compromise allowed for a degree of unity, but also reinforced the potential for a regional divide. Despite Northern opposition, the South remained committed to “ride the tiger” of slavery, particularly when the Napoleonic Wars led to increased demand for slave-harvested cotton, made all the more profitable by the cotton gin after 1794.69
The ambivalence of this arrangement was reflected in the U.S. Constitution. Federal authority and a veneer of coordination were established, but decentralized states’ rights maintained. Guarantees of equal rights were set forth, but without mention of race or the effective exclusion of blacks. Governance was established, but “who were these people to be governed” was not finally resolved.70 This delicate arrangement allowed for the formation of the United States. But the balance of state and federal power and the extension of rights remained unresolved issues that would fuel later conflict.
Maintaining black slavery served not only Southerners’ economic interests, but also provided the basis for political order within the region. As in Virginia even before independence, racial antagonism was used to encourage cross-class white unity, especially where blacks outnumbered whites.71 Nonslaveholding whites, socially tied to planters, joined in supporting slavery, enjoying “the privilege of whipping someone else.”72 Southerners rallied around regional “solidarity at the price of provincial status,” with that solidarity defined by the commitment “that the South shall remain a white man’s country.”73 When slavery was further challenged from the North, more explicitly racial justifications of it and of the cross-class white coalition emerged, further consolidating Southern white solidarity on the basis of race. As V. O. Key concluded later, “there is one, and only one, real basis for Southern unity: the Negro.”74
While the North opposed slavery, it also used race as a basis for unity across class. With few blacks and with slavery abolished in the North by the mid-nineteenth century, labor was drawn from native whites and later European immigrants.75 To protect the interests of white workers from potential black competition, Northern states enacted early forms of Jim Crow. Indeed, segregation was pioneered in the North, as contrasted with the use of slavery, religious distinctions, and lack of segregation in the more rural South. New York levied a special tax of $250 on black voters, after 1803 newly admitted Northwestern states prohibited blacks from entering and from voting, and only five Northern states “allowed the black man equal suffrage, and even there he was confined to menial occupations and subjected to constant discrimination.”76 Early racial prejudice was not then peculiar to the South. Indeed, Tocqueville noted that racial prejudice was nowhere “more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known” or abolished.77
While the North and South were not divided on the issue of race, sectional tensions over the fate of slavery remained, requiring constant adjustment. Disagreements over the future and extension of slavery were finessed by a series of concessions to Southern interests, for instance with the Missouri Compromise of 1820 balancing the admission of a slave and a free state to the Union. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied blacks citizenship even in free territory. As long as such arrangements held, the union remained intact, reinforced by common economic interests. The South continued to draw its capital from the North, which in turn earned profits by processing and trading the crops grown in the South. The ideology of “manifest destiny” reinforced common racial assumptions of white superiority over blacks and Indians, the latter being “removed,” “scattered,” and “exterminated.”78 And the South’s concern about Northern domination was further assuaged by the high proportion of central government positions filled by Southerners.79 As much as these unifying pressures eased the tension, they did not erase the fundamental regional divide and potential for conflict.
Comparative Overview
The early histories of South Africa, colonial North America, and Brazil reflected the competition of imperial powers based in Europe. The Iberian powers were first to emerge on the world scene, primarily as traders rather than as settlers or colonialists. Such early expansion brought Portugal to the fore with all of the strengths and weaknesses of a global power just emerging from feudalism. As such, the Portuguese crown depended heavily on coercion at home, and projected itself without an independent capital sector. This left “Lisbon and its king relatively independent of powerholders elsewhere in Portugal, but dependent on frequently corrupt officials. Such a monarchy could only prosper when gold and goods flowed freely from the colonies.”80 Diminished production left Portugal relatively marginalized after 1640. Already by the 1620s the Dutch Empire had become predominant, relying on a high level of independent capital concentration. Increased competition for power within the emerging burgher class and between the major trading companies then contributed to a rapid decline.81 By 1763, the British Empire had become dominant, relying on strong independent capital pursuing profits globally under the protection of a well-funded navy.
The rise and fall of European empires had direct consequences for the colonies of Brazil, in North America, and in South Africa. The Portuguese “discovered” Brazil in 1500, began the importation of slaves by 1538, and after repelling Dutch incursions, remained the rulers of Brazil, with the later acquiescence of Britain. In North America, the British, French, and Dutch established early settlements and then separate colonies, with the British emerging as triumphant until their defeat in the American War of Independence. South Africa was “discovered” by the Portuguese, but effectively abandoned to the Dutch traders and settlers who came in 1652. By the start of the nineteenth century, British incursions produced an ethnic conflict between European fragments of Dutch and British ancestry, which came to a head a century later, when the British established dominance. South African colonial history thus recapitulated the evolution of imperial power and competition.
Running through this interconnected history of colonialism is a vein of gold. Its discovery in Brazil in 1695 “revived the Portuguese colonial economy, but failed to restore anything like Portugal’s seventeenth century hegemony.”82 Already by 1712, gold production had peaked, though it remained sufficient to pay for goods imported from Britain, with the English not yet powerful enough to exert direct control.83 History’s largest cache of gold was discovered in South Africa in 1886, preceded by diamonds two decades earlier. These riches whetted the appetite of an ascendant Britain. Finally, the discovery of gold in California in 1848 came too late to draw European powers back into the United States. But the ensuing gold rush did add fuel to the rising North–South conflict over the extension of slavery into the West.
If one figure looms over a major turning point in this history, it is not a Dutch, British, or Portuguese, but instead a French emperor. Napoleon’s incursion into Portugal in 1807 brought pressure from Britain on the Portuguese king to flee and take up residence in Brazil. The Portuguese thereby solidified their rule in Brazil, muting Brazilian nationalist urges. And Napoleon’s costly war with Britain forced the French sale of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States, further exacerbating conflict over the extension of slavery into Western U.S. territories. Napoleon’s defeat then freed the British to extend their control over South Africa. Before that, Napoleon’s primary concern with war in Europe contributed to the success of the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791–1803. The resulting disruption of sugar production in Haiti bolstered Brazil’s sugar trade. Britain’s war with France also cut European cotton production, which was replaced by the U.S. South. The result was increased dependence on slave labor in the American South and Brazil, with the Haitian revolt sending shivers of fear through the slaveholders in both countries. Masters then proceeded to reinforce legal controls over slaves.
Competition between colonial powers produced or exacerbated conflicts within South Africa and the United States more than in Brazil. Relatively late British incursions into South Africa and the discovery of gold there brought conflict between them and Dutch descendants. While the United States rebuffed such potential European incursions after the War of Independence, European wars and the slave revolt in Haiti exacerbated conflict between the North and South over the future of slavery. In contrast, the early consolidation and consistent maintenance of Portuguese rule in Brazil helped leave that country relatively free of comparable internal conflict.
The most significant conclusion that thus emerges from an overview of comparative colonial history is the legacy of greater unity, stability, and state centralization inherited by Brazil than by South Africa or the United States. In Brazil, the crown ruled supreme, with regional captaincies and other elites dependent on the crown for their monopolies. Such greater state centralization brought relative stability, with the Portuguese rulers in situ peacefully able to finesse the transition from colony to independent empire. Portuguese Catholicism further reinforced such hierarchical unity and stability, in contrast to the Protestant divisions that accompanied British and Dutch colonialism.
South Africa and the United States enjoyed no solidified rule comparable to that of Brazil. During the nineteenth century what would become South Africa was divided between British colonies and Afrikaner republics in constant conflict with each other. The United States was also born with in-built potential divisions among colonies, states, and regions, though these were long contained and did not take the ethnic form they did in South Africa. The unifying federal authority in Washington remained weak, forced to compromise between conflicting interests for as long as possible. As a result, when elites in all three countries would seek to consolidate nation-state authority and unity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they confronted significant divisions and impediments in the United States and South Africa that were not equally present in Brazil,
In terms of early understandings and constructions of race, the contrast between the three cases emerges as less clear-cut. Indeed, in all three there is evidence of early racial prejudice among European descendants and in colonial policy. Analysts of Brazil have claimed exception to this trend, describing the Portuguese in Brazil as more moderate than the English in their prejudice.84 Like other Latin American societies (even those that suffered other forms of major internal conflict), Brazil did apparently enforce and “experience comparatively low levels of overt racial strife,” but this was accompanied by racial discrimination.85 Economic underdevelopment further dampened incentives for racial provocation, together with an entrenched hierarchy that established a clear social order with blacks at the bottom. But in South Africa and the United States, British and Northern “liberalism” provoked more explicit racist ideologies among Afrikaners and Southerners, respectively. In the relative absence of such early conflict, racism was somewhat more muted in Brazil, though discriminatory practices were clearly evident.
For all its difference then, Brazil did inherit a colonial legacy of racial distinction and discrimination that might have been extended into modern forms of explicit racial domination. That this did not occur, contrary to the experiences of the United States and South Africa, cannot be adequately explained by colonial practices. Instead, Brazil’s greater degree of unity and stability appears likely to be more significant in explaining later racial constructions.