The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism by Gerald Horne

25,000 were killed, 1,000 civilians and tens of thousands shipped off to Barbados. The American Revolution was but “an enslaver’s revolt” – not “give me liberty or give me death” but more like “give me the liberty to give death to the resident native population and those I choose to enslave.” Cromwell offers historians a “demo” for settler-colonialism in Drogheda, Ireland where Cromwell said, “Put them all to the sword” in 1649. But by 1776, the British had begun to grow tired of slavery and Native extermination while the colonists were just getting started.

What caused the slave trade of old still exists: “free trade, anti-monarchism, and a racially sharpened and class-based democracy.” The Glorious Revolution of 1688, opens the doors to an unfettered slave trade and disposed indigenes “while shouting from the rooftops about the ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ they were demanding”. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.” It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors.

To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers.Ĭentering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. Virtually no part of the modern United States―the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements―can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation.

Chronicles how American culture - deeply rooted in white supremacy, slavery and capitalism - finds its origin story in the 17th century European colonization of Africa and North America, exposing the structural origins of American 'looting'

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism by Gerald Horne