“All colonial countries create false stories about their past.”

Marcus Rediker (Owensboro, Kentucky, 1951) is one of the most famous historians in the United States. His studies of the slave trade from Africa to America to work on the notorious plantations in the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil earned him prestigious awards such as the George Washington Book Award. Author and co-author of dozens of books—such as Slave Ship: The Transatlantic Traffic (Captain Swing, 2021) or Villains of All Nations (Dream Merchants, 2023)—Rediker is one of the world’s best black figures. We strive to reinterpret America’s conquest to wash contemporary consciences of what was a terrible time. “All colonial countries, like Spain, create false stories about their past,” says the Atlantic history professor whose colorful style of telling history “from below,” something he shares with his Midnight Notes Collective colleagues Peter Linebaugh and Sylvia. Federici has brought him countless followers. A brilliant essayist, he unceremoniously throws overboard theories that make the Spanish conquistadors’ turn so perfect now that October 12 approaches. He asks: “What freedom, peace and prosperity has it brought to millions of indigenous people who have lost their lands and millions of whom have died from diseases to which they have no immunity?” Rediker adds that the answer was already given by William Faulkner when he wrote that “the past never dies.” It’s not even

Abolitionist William Wilberforce told us the harsh truth about slaves being transported crammed into the holds of slave ships when he wrote that “so much misery condensed into so little space is more than the human imagination has ever conceived.” That was an intense nightmare. On a medium ship, 300 men, women, and children were crammed into a small space below deck where they were to remain while crossing the ocean for nine to twelve weeks. They would only go up to the main deck for a few hours a day, and only if the weather permitted. Seasickness, stench, epidemics and mass death defined ocean crossings. The captain of the slave ship used whips and other violent means to try to control the slaves. Violence dominated the slave ships and was itself an instrument of terror. Many Africans did not survive. During the existence of the slave trade, between approximately 1500 and 1870, one in eight people, about two million people in total, died en route. Their bodies were thrown overboard to the sharks that followed the ships that crossed the Atlantic. Those who survived took the fight to the land and to the plantation system to prove, as the great African American writer Ralph Ellison put it, that the people “are more than the sum of their brutality.”

-How can such shame be tolerated for so long?

—There are two main reasons for understanding why the slave trade, with all its horrors, persisted for so long. First, the slave trade was crucial to wealth creation. Many powerful people around the world have benefited from it. They encouraged and protected human trafficking. Secondly, because the majority of white Europeans and Americans believed that slavery was a “natural” system, and considered in a racist way that African peoples had adapted to it. Even after the emergence of abolitionist movements at the end of the eighteenth century, the slave trade continued to be active for another eighty years.

-Was slavery one of the greatest genocides committed in human history?

-The slavery system caused the death of millions. In this sense it can be considered genocide like many others. But the difference is that the goal of slavery was not to kill people, but to keep them alive so that they could work, and bring benefits to the enslaved and their governments. Those who directly benefited from slavery viewed the millions of deaths caused by slavery as perfectly acceptable “collateral damage” as long as the system remained intact, because that allowed them to continue accumulating capital and power.

– How many millions of people could have been kidnapped in Africa and sold in Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Brazil?

—The current estimate of the total number of people transported to America in the transatlantic slave trade is about 12.5 million. Most were sent to Brazil or the Caribbean, which combined account for more than 80 percent of arrivals.

-And the illegal slave trade?

-After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and signed treaties with Portugal (1817) and Spain (1835) to end the slave trade, the trade continued illegally until around 1870 because demand was still high in Cuba and Brazil. It is estimated that Spain and Portugal illegally imported 1.3 million slaves.

— Many slave company owners amassed enormous fortunes. Have they survived to this day?

– Yes, they took a long time. Many wealthy families in Europe and the United States today amassed a significant portion of their fortunes in the slave trade or slavery. The same applies to companies, especially in the banking and insurance sectors. Lloyd’s of London, for example, insured tens of thousands of slave voyages, and continues to prevent historians from searching its records today.

– There are those who believe that moments of maximum enrichment for the elites of the empire coincide with great atrocities. what do you think?

– This would undoubtedly describe the period in which Spanish imperial officials extracted vast amounts of gold and silver through the exploitation of indigenous laborers in Latin America. In the slave trade and the slave system, it was more difficult because it lasted for more than 400 years. a lot of time. Most periods of extreme violence in human history have been fairly short.

– The King of the Belgians apologized in 2020 for the colonial violations suffered by Leopold II in the Congo. The Netherlands did something similar, but few took up their responsibilities for slavery. Do you believe the past is history or do many centuries of oppression still have repercussions today?

-We live with the lingering effects of the slave trade and slavery every day of our lives. That is, the slave ships continue to sail. I argue that the impact of slavery and the slave trade in the United States persists through racial discrimination, multigenerational poverty, deep structural inequality, racial incarceration, and premature death. The American novelist William Faulkner actually wrote: “The past never dies. It’s not even the past.

– Can you ask forgiveness for four centuries of slavery?

– Asking forgiveness is easy. Taking concrete steps to overcome the injustices that persist today over the slave trade and slavery is much more difficult. Reparations are necessary to overcome the damage caused by this long period around the world. For those who want to understand the various forms that reparations can take, I recommend reading William A. Darity, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. African Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

In Spain, slavery is associated with the United States, Great Britain, and France, but little is said about the Spanish Empire. What role did you play in the slave trade?

—Over the course of the slave trade, between 1500 and 1870, approximately 1.6 million enslaved people were imported from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. One million of them were transported on Spanish ships, and the other 600,000 on Portuguese, French and British ships, thanks to a contract the Spanish Crown signed with individuals called “asiento” to outsource human smuggling. Spain was one of the major players in the transatlantic slave trade.

– But here there is still resistance to taking responsibility for the atrocities committed during the colonization of America. A conservative political sector claims that “Spanish conversion” brought freedom, peace and prosperity to the American continent. As a specialist in Atlantic history, what do you think?

– What freedom, peace and prosperity did the Spanish bring to millions of indigenous people who lost their lands and died by the millions from European diseases to which they had no immunity? Freedom, peace and prosperity for the millions of Africans who died in the transatlantic slave trade and for the millions more who toiled to produce the sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton that made their enslavers rich? Defenders of American imperial expansion, from the nineteenth century to the present, say the same thing. All colonists make up false stories about their past. Their selfish views are challenged by a move toward “history from below,” which examines the lives of ordinary workers in the bloody construction of global capitalism.

— A few months ago, the British government rented Baby Stockholm, a floating prison for immigrants. Do you find any similarity in the humane treatment of slave ships 400 years ago? Do you think that in today’s world there are still slaves in the service of power?

-I’ve seen pictures of the floating prison and I find it quite terrifying. There is a direct line of continuity between Brooks’s famous slave ship scheme of the late eighteenth century and this latest conception of the ruling class imagination designed to transport and commodify human labor. I should add that sociologist Kevin Bales has calculated that there are currently about 28 million people working as slaves worldwide, a larger number than existed at the height of the Atlantic slave system, albeit a much smaller proportion compared to the world population. These are people who are exposed to terrible working conditions under the threat or reality of violence. Slavery is still a part of the world we live in. In the past two decades, new abolitionist groups have emerged to combat the return of slavery. We still have much to do to achieve a world free of slavery.

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Cover photo: Historian Marcus Rediker presenting his book “The Wicked of All Nations” in Madrid. /Dream Merchants