November 13, 2024
Mightier Than the Sword:
How Three Obscure Treaties Sanctioned the Enslavement of Millions and the Exploitation of Continents for More Than 400 Years
Lorraine Atkin
Author
Mightier Than the Sword:
How Three Obscure Treaties Sanctioned the Enslavement of Millions and the Exploitation of Continents for More Than 400 Years
Lorraine Atkin
Author
Miquelon Weyeneth, introducer, abd Lorraine Atkin
Minutes of the Tenth Meeting of the 83rd Year
The Old Guard of Princeton met on 13 November 2024 at Springdale Golf Club. George Bustin presided. Francis Slade led the invocation. Minutes of the previous meeting were read by Jock McFarland. Rick Ober, who chaired the ad hoc committee on revising the bylaws gave a brief report on his committee’s work. George Bustin then conducted a voice vote on the revised bylaws; they were adopted without dissent.
There were two guests present. Ricardo Fernandez brought Dr. Jay Kuris, who is a candidate for membership. Ferris Olin brought Judith Brodsky.
Attendance was 90 members.
The speaker was introduced by Micky Weyeneth. Lorraine Atkin hails from Ardsley, New York, received her B.S. from Thomas Edison University in Trenton, and continued her education over the years at Rutgers University. She has been involved in criminal justice and politics in the state of New Jersey over the course of her adult life, having served as mayor of Manalapan, the Executive Director of the N.J. State Association of Chiefs of Police, Commissioner of the N.J. State Parole Board, and a founding member of the Citizens for the Public Good.
Ms. Atkin opened her talk with the famous quote from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” meaning that the written word is more effective than violence as a means of social change. Ms. Atkin finds this especially true in the case of treaties, which are typically drawn up to declare peace after a battle. But that is not the case in the three treaties her book focuses on, treaties that resulted in the enslavement of indigenous people who were forced to exploit their own lands for the profit of five (and sometimes six) other countries.
Why are these three treaties so important? They fit nicely in the time period between 1500 and 1900. Those 400 years bracket the stages of exploration, exploitation, colonialism, empire building, and imperialism, as they pertain to the five prominent countries in Europe during this time period: Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and sometimes the Netherlands.
The scope of this exploitation harmed five continents; some of the resulting colonialism lasted beyond WWII, Ms. Atkin said, noting that in Australia indigenous people were not included in the census until 1950. The devastation it caused lasted forever and it set in place, the speaker believes, a surreptitious caste system that exists today. All this was achieved without the use of standing armies and with no fighting amidst the countries themselves.
The treaties led to a trail of mercantilism, capitalism (the East India Trading Co.), and free traders, all of which were based on slaves, slave labor, slave trading, and the resources of the lands that were exploited. Since these economies were based on treaties, the treaties eventually became law—Eurocentric law—and then eventually international laws. Sometimes these laws were called “civilizing missions” because there was a clause in the treaties themselves that said missionaries must be allowed to proselytize among the natives, making sure that God was on “your side.”
Part 1 of Ms. Atkin’s book starts with an “organizational accident” and ends with “an incredible real estate windfall.” It describes the Treaty of Tordesillas.
After Columbus “discovered” America, Ferdinand and Isabella, worried about interference from their rival Portugal, sought reassurance from the pope that they could retain ownership of the lands Columbus had claimed. So, in 1494 Pope Alexander VI created the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the known world in half; Spain got North America and South America (with one exception). Portugal got Brazil and the western coast of Africa, where it was already using several western African ports.
Brazil was already yielding up its redwood to Portugal, and after it was depleted, it was replaced by sugarcane. Alas, local Brazilian labor was not up to the task. Fortunately, Portugal had ports in Africa, so they replaced the Brazilian workers with imported African slaves. Portugal reaped the riches of gold and silver from this slave labor for about 300 years.
Not to be outdone by the pope, the Europeans developed their own “deed of conveyance,” a “doctrine of discovery,” which was really just a concept, perhaps based on the ancient Roman idea of “wild lands,” which were considered as “free spaces,” but this ignored the people who were already living there with their own established culture. An example of this is that in 1497 King Henry VII of England gave John Cabot property in what is now the U.S. state of Virginia.
The repercussions of this were enormous. Ms. Atkin gave some examples, including Captain John Cook of Britain claiming Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania for Britain by carving the details of his claim on a tree upon his arrival in Australia. Another example is that the American colonies based their legal system on British law and used the Doctrine of Discovery against the Native Americans; our Articles of Confederation state that Native Americans could never attain nation state status as equals.
Two U.S. Presidents used treaties to take land from Native Americans and one U.S. President, Andrew Johnson, although he didn’t write anything down, did not resist the return of slavery after the Civil War in the form of “codes” that discriminated against blacks, e.g., forcing them to have a permit to move around, travel, get a job, etc., and then making it impossible to secure such a permit. Blacks were “free” but dispensable, not protected by any law.
Part 2 of the book delves into criminal acts that were wrapped in treaties and charters. Moguls ruled India for many hundreds of years, but the British moved in with the British East India Company by way of a charter from the British government. The charter had restrictions on what the company could do, but the company managed to get around them and gain control of what India produced.
The East India Company wanted access to China’s markets to trade their wool for China’s tea. But China wanted silver for its goods. Then the British found they could trade opium, which was grown in India, with China for the tea they wanted. Thus developed a triangle of dependency between India, Britain, and China.
Opium replaced wine as the drug of choice at that time; wine was very expensive and therefore mainly reserved for the upper classes. Worse for the Chinese, as they smoked it, which guaranteed a faster addiction. The situation deteriorated and eventually led to the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. The British benefitted greatly from this treaty, even though the Chinese were at the negotiating table. China had to open more ports to free traders, had to pay for the opium they destroyed, had to cede Hong Kong to the British, and had to cede more territory to Britain, including more ports, which made importation of opium easier. Most favored nation status for Britain was also included in the treaty, to the extent that if any favor was given by China to any nation, it had to be given to Britain as well.
Britain still wasn’t satisfied, and a second opium war resulted, this time with France as an ally. This wasn’t a true war, as conditions for settling the “conflict” were already drawn up before it began. These included opening more ports, but more importantly, making opium legal, even though it wasn’t legal in Britain and the Chinese were resistant. Furthermore, the treaty allowed in Christian missionaries and opened the land adjacent to the ports to British concessions which often excluded Chinese. The result was that the British, and to a lesser extent the French, obtained a colonial foothold with little expense and complete exemption to Chinese laws.
Part 3 was labeled by Ms. Atkin as “From Lexicon to Law” and she introduced this part of her talk with another quotation: “What’s in a name?” In the context of this book, a name bestows legitimacy. Ms. Atkin listed the variety of names that could describe the lands that were subjugated: colony, protectorate, occupied, sphere of influence. They all amount to a hierarchy of greed; the more money that the European country put in, the greater the control it had, but only if the profits warranted the investment.
Parts 4 and 5 cover how the colonization of Africa became a race of rivals. In the mid-1800s “exceptionalism” became the “ism” of the day. The idea of “social Darwinism” was exploited. Europeans were given to be superior, and propaganda was used with religious zeal to promote the idea that whites were a superior race. Advances made in the Industrial Revolution were used as demonstrations to shore up this notion, ignoring the facts of advanced cultures in Africa. Ms. Atkin used Zimbabwe as an example.
The Kingdom of Zimbabwe had an advanced civilization from the 9th-15th century. Its main city was chosen as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, but the white-ruled government of Rhodesia pressured archaeologists to deny that the city could have been designed and built by Black Africans.
From the 1600s on, the exploitative slave trade needed only to gather people from the coastal regions, rather than venture further inland. By mid-1800 the European slave trade encompassed most of Africa even though the traders controlled only 10% of the population. And by 1850, when Europe banned slavery, it was not banned in the American colonies.
The railroad opened up the so-called “dark continent.” David Livingstone, a missionary, inadvertently facilitated the slave trade by making some of the first maps of Africa and introducing quinine to combat malaria; of course, the quinine water he promoted was only available to whites. This led to the greedy partition of Africa and the third of the three major treaties.
Otto von Bismarck, after securing the Congress of Berlin (to divide the Balkan territories) in 1878, next turned his attention to Africa. He wrote the chapters of the Conference of Berlin (1884-5), which explained the rules for the conquest of Africa, dividing it up amongst the major European nations. One of the major tenets was that the Niger and Congo Rivers and all the contiguous lands would belong to the Europeans. Ms. Atkin cautioned her audience that the word “contiguous” was the “gift that keeps on giving,” noting that there was never any indication on where that ended.
There was, however, a sense that this treaty was to try to eliminate the slave trade, but the rules for the future occupation of African territory were fuzzy; therefore, it was difficult to say which lands were already occupied. Bismarck wanted to keep things a bit loose so that the countries could do what they wanted with the understanding that they wouldn’t fight amongst themselves. Ms. Atkin noted that, before the Conference of Berlin, 80% of Africa was under indigenous rule; by 1908, all of it was under European rule except Ethiopia. Germany became the third largest colonial power.
By the turn of the 20th century, the ideas of exceptionalism, prestige and racial arrogance moved these European countries to nationalism. People from the colonies had started moving to Europe. The start of the first world war put an end to the idea that these countries wouldn’t fight each other. And the world order changed with the U.S. and Russia entering that war.
Ms. Atkin mentioned one last treaty, a fourth one, the Treaty of Antarctica, signed in the 1950s, which was conceived to try to curb nuclear testing. She ventured that perhaps it was easy to agree on this treaty, since no one lived there, and added that this treaty is still in force today.
The Question-and-Answer part of the program yielded further interesting information. First, most of us think of a treaty as two or more sides agreeing to something, but most of the treaties discussed seemed to be one-sided. Ms. Atkin confirmed that only in the Treaty of Nanjing were two opposing sides represented. In a follow up, she acknowledged that in the three main treaties discussed, no white people were hurt or disadvantaged. Indigenous people were not considered to be human, so the whites rationalized they didn’t belong on their own lands. Conflicts with indigenous people were definitely advantaged by the superior weaponry and armaments on the side of the Europeans. Guns, the railroad, and eventually the advancements made possible by the Industrial Revolution all had big advantages over the bows and arrows of the indigenous peoples. Finally, Ms. Atkin noted that the role of missionaries in the treaties was very important, as was that of scientists, especially to the British. They lent the appearance that the exploitation was a civilizing mission.
Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Ringer
There were two guests present. Ricardo Fernandez brought Dr. Jay Kuris, who is a candidate for membership. Ferris Olin brought Judith Brodsky.
Attendance was 90 members.
The speaker was introduced by Micky Weyeneth. Lorraine Atkin hails from Ardsley, New York, received her B.S. from Thomas Edison University in Trenton, and continued her education over the years at Rutgers University. She has been involved in criminal justice and politics in the state of New Jersey over the course of her adult life, having served as mayor of Manalapan, the Executive Director of the N.J. State Association of Chiefs of Police, Commissioner of the N.J. State Parole Board, and a founding member of the Citizens for the Public Good.
Ms. Atkin opened her talk with the famous quote from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” meaning that the written word is more effective than violence as a means of social change. Ms. Atkin finds this especially true in the case of treaties, which are typically drawn up to declare peace after a battle. But that is not the case in the three treaties her book focuses on, treaties that resulted in the enslavement of indigenous people who were forced to exploit their own lands for the profit of five (and sometimes six) other countries.
Why are these three treaties so important? They fit nicely in the time period between 1500 and 1900. Those 400 years bracket the stages of exploration, exploitation, colonialism, empire building, and imperialism, as they pertain to the five prominent countries in Europe during this time period: Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and sometimes the Netherlands.
The scope of this exploitation harmed five continents; some of the resulting colonialism lasted beyond WWII, Ms. Atkin said, noting that in Australia indigenous people were not included in the census until 1950. The devastation it caused lasted forever and it set in place, the speaker believes, a surreptitious caste system that exists today. All this was achieved without the use of standing armies and with no fighting amidst the countries themselves.
The treaties led to a trail of mercantilism, capitalism (the East India Trading Co.), and free traders, all of which were based on slaves, slave labor, slave trading, and the resources of the lands that were exploited. Since these economies were based on treaties, the treaties eventually became law—Eurocentric law—and then eventually international laws. Sometimes these laws were called “civilizing missions” because there was a clause in the treaties themselves that said missionaries must be allowed to proselytize among the natives, making sure that God was on “your side.”
Part 1 of Ms. Atkin’s book starts with an “organizational accident” and ends with “an incredible real estate windfall.” It describes the Treaty of Tordesillas.
After Columbus “discovered” America, Ferdinand and Isabella, worried about interference from their rival Portugal, sought reassurance from the pope that they could retain ownership of the lands Columbus had claimed. So, in 1494 Pope Alexander VI created the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the known world in half; Spain got North America and South America (with one exception). Portugal got Brazil and the western coast of Africa, where it was already using several western African ports.
Brazil was already yielding up its redwood to Portugal, and after it was depleted, it was replaced by sugarcane. Alas, local Brazilian labor was not up to the task. Fortunately, Portugal had ports in Africa, so they replaced the Brazilian workers with imported African slaves. Portugal reaped the riches of gold and silver from this slave labor for about 300 years.
Not to be outdone by the pope, the Europeans developed their own “deed of conveyance,” a “doctrine of discovery,” which was really just a concept, perhaps based on the ancient Roman idea of “wild lands,” which were considered as “free spaces,” but this ignored the people who were already living there with their own established culture. An example of this is that in 1497 King Henry VII of England gave John Cabot property in what is now the U.S. state of Virginia.
The repercussions of this were enormous. Ms. Atkin gave some examples, including Captain John Cook of Britain claiming Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania for Britain by carving the details of his claim on a tree upon his arrival in Australia. Another example is that the American colonies based their legal system on British law and used the Doctrine of Discovery against the Native Americans; our Articles of Confederation state that Native Americans could never attain nation state status as equals.
Two U.S. Presidents used treaties to take land from Native Americans and one U.S. President, Andrew Johnson, although he didn’t write anything down, did not resist the return of slavery after the Civil War in the form of “codes” that discriminated against blacks, e.g., forcing them to have a permit to move around, travel, get a job, etc., and then making it impossible to secure such a permit. Blacks were “free” but dispensable, not protected by any law.
Part 2 of the book delves into criminal acts that were wrapped in treaties and charters. Moguls ruled India for many hundreds of years, but the British moved in with the British East India Company by way of a charter from the British government. The charter had restrictions on what the company could do, but the company managed to get around them and gain control of what India produced.
The East India Company wanted access to China’s markets to trade their wool for China’s tea. But China wanted silver for its goods. Then the British found they could trade opium, which was grown in India, with China for the tea they wanted. Thus developed a triangle of dependency between India, Britain, and China.
Opium replaced wine as the drug of choice at that time; wine was very expensive and therefore mainly reserved for the upper classes. Worse for the Chinese, as they smoked it, which guaranteed a faster addiction. The situation deteriorated and eventually led to the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. The British benefitted greatly from this treaty, even though the Chinese were at the negotiating table. China had to open more ports to free traders, had to pay for the opium they destroyed, had to cede Hong Kong to the British, and had to cede more territory to Britain, including more ports, which made importation of opium easier. Most favored nation status for Britain was also included in the treaty, to the extent that if any favor was given by China to any nation, it had to be given to Britain as well.
Britain still wasn’t satisfied, and a second opium war resulted, this time with France as an ally. This wasn’t a true war, as conditions for settling the “conflict” were already drawn up before it began. These included opening more ports, but more importantly, making opium legal, even though it wasn’t legal in Britain and the Chinese were resistant. Furthermore, the treaty allowed in Christian missionaries and opened the land adjacent to the ports to British concessions which often excluded Chinese. The result was that the British, and to a lesser extent the French, obtained a colonial foothold with little expense and complete exemption to Chinese laws.
Part 3 was labeled by Ms. Atkin as “From Lexicon to Law” and she introduced this part of her talk with another quotation: “What’s in a name?” In the context of this book, a name bestows legitimacy. Ms. Atkin listed the variety of names that could describe the lands that were subjugated: colony, protectorate, occupied, sphere of influence. They all amount to a hierarchy of greed; the more money that the European country put in, the greater the control it had, but only if the profits warranted the investment.
Parts 4 and 5 cover how the colonization of Africa became a race of rivals. In the mid-1800s “exceptionalism” became the “ism” of the day. The idea of “social Darwinism” was exploited. Europeans were given to be superior, and propaganda was used with religious zeal to promote the idea that whites were a superior race. Advances made in the Industrial Revolution were used as demonstrations to shore up this notion, ignoring the facts of advanced cultures in Africa. Ms. Atkin used Zimbabwe as an example.
The Kingdom of Zimbabwe had an advanced civilization from the 9th-15th century. Its main city was chosen as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, but the white-ruled government of Rhodesia pressured archaeologists to deny that the city could have been designed and built by Black Africans.
From the 1600s on, the exploitative slave trade needed only to gather people from the coastal regions, rather than venture further inland. By mid-1800 the European slave trade encompassed most of Africa even though the traders controlled only 10% of the population. And by 1850, when Europe banned slavery, it was not banned in the American colonies.
The railroad opened up the so-called “dark continent.” David Livingstone, a missionary, inadvertently facilitated the slave trade by making some of the first maps of Africa and introducing quinine to combat malaria; of course, the quinine water he promoted was only available to whites. This led to the greedy partition of Africa and the third of the three major treaties.
Otto von Bismarck, after securing the Congress of Berlin (to divide the Balkan territories) in 1878, next turned his attention to Africa. He wrote the chapters of the Conference of Berlin (1884-5), which explained the rules for the conquest of Africa, dividing it up amongst the major European nations. One of the major tenets was that the Niger and Congo Rivers and all the contiguous lands would belong to the Europeans. Ms. Atkin cautioned her audience that the word “contiguous” was the “gift that keeps on giving,” noting that there was never any indication on where that ended.
There was, however, a sense that this treaty was to try to eliminate the slave trade, but the rules for the future occupation of African territory were fuzzy; therefore, it was difficult to say which lands were already occupied. Bismarck wanted to keep things a bit loose so that the countries could do what they wanted with the understanding that they wouldn’t fight amongst themselves. Ms. Atkin noted that, before the Conference of Berlin, 80% of Africa was under indigenous rule; by 1908, all of it was under European rule except Ethiopia. Germany became the third largest colonial power.
By the turn of the 20th century, the ideas of exceptionalism, prestige and racial arrogance moved these European countries to nationalism. People from the colonies had started moving to Europe. The start of the first world war put an end to the idea that these countries wouldn’t fight each other. And the world order changed with the U.S. and Russia entering that war.
Ms. Atkin mentioned one last treaty, a fourth one, the Treaty of Antarctica, signed in the 1950s, which was conceived to try to curb nuclear testing. She ventured that perhaps it was easy to agree on this treaty, since no one lived there, and added that this treaty is still in force today.
The Question-and-Answer part of the program yielded further interesting information. First, most of us think of a treaty as two or more sides agreeing to something, but most of the treaties discussed seemed to be one-sided. Ms. Atkin confirmed that only in the Treaty of Nanjing were two opposing sides represented. In a follow up, she acknowledged that in the three main treaties discussed, no white people were hurt or disadvantaged. Indigenous people were not considered to be human, so the whites rationalized they didn’t belong on their own lands. Conflicts with indigenous people were definitely advantaged by the superior weaponry and armaments on the side of the Europeans. Guns, the railroad, and eventually the advancements made possible by the Industrial Revolution all had big advantages over the bows and arrows of the indigenous peoples. Finally, Ms. Atkin noted that the role of missionaries in the treaties was very important, as was that of scientists, especially to the British. They lent the appearance that the exploitation was a civilizing mission.
Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Ringer