Carving up the world

 “We’ll break our trip for one night in Tordesillas,” I was told as we drove out towards Cantabria, in Northern Spain, for a holiday with family.

Tordesillas: a fine place to break a long journey

I had no objection, especially as I understood it was a fine place to visit. It wasn’t till quite some time after we’d got there that I realised that the name of the place should have rung a bell, though it hadn’t. It was the site of a pretty significant incident, and I like to think I know about the history of such events.

It was galling that I hadn’t spotted it at once.

This was the place where the two leading powers of Europe of the time decide to carve up the world between them. 

In today’s Europe, it’s hard to think that it was those two nations that led the way, but that was the way things were back in 1494. Portugal was the first European nation to have started building an overseas Empire. And, just recently, Spain had sent Christopher Columbus out westward across the Atlantic in search of a new route to India. What he actually came across was the colossal double-continent in the way, the lands we now know as the Americas. That had happened only two years earlier: as we all learn as kids, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

On his return, he called in on Lisbon first and let the Portuguese king, John II, know about his discoveries. Which rather put the cat among the pigeons. After all, the Portuguese had a decree of the Pope, no less, saying that any lands ‘discovered’ south of the Canaries, would be theirs.

Because, of course, the Pope had every authority to make such a dispensation. And the people who actually lived in those places had obviously not discovered them, until Europeans got there.

“Hey, guys,” the new arrivals would say, “consider yourselves discovered.”

“What a relief,” the locals must have replied, “it was such a bore being undiscovered and not really counting for anything in the world.”

Or possibly not.

So here was the upstart Spain – and not even all of Spain, but just one of its two Kingdoms, Castile – poking around in what was obviously south of the Canaries and therefore clearly Portuguese.

The result was the meeting in Tordesillas. On the one hand, there was Isabel Queen of Castile, with her husband, Ferdinand King of Aragon, together the so-called Catholic monarchs of Spain. On the other hand, there was John II of Portugal. Both sides were accompanied by significant people supporting them, but not significant enough for me to remember their names or anything about them.

The decision was to split the world between Spain and Portugal. Any new lands ‘discovered’ to the west of a line of longitude running 270 leagues west of the islands of the Azores would be Spanish, anything east of it Spanish. That wasn’t particularly clear, since no one really agreed how long a league was, nor where in the Azores the measurement should be made from, but hey, it was good enough. It meant that most of what we now know as Eastern Brazil would be Portuguese, which is why modern Brazil speaks its version of that language, while the rest of what was to become Latin America would be Spanish.

Just over ten years later, the Pope endorsed the agreement, giving it divine authority. Or so everyone involved imagined. Or pretended to imagine. 

Ten or so years after that there was a debate about whether the dividing line continued all the way around the world, splitting Asia too between those powers. Further negotiations led to a new division out there as well.

The importance of all these decisions left me a little dumbfounded at not remembering any of it until I saw the monument in the city celebrating the event. That taught me a salutary lesson on how much history I simply don’t know, or have forgotten.

Monument to the Treaty and its main signatories

After all, it was a significant event, what with its papal endorsement and everything. Though perhaps more for what it left out than what it included.

For instance, it only involved Spain and Portugal among the European nations. Portugal was already a declining force. England and Holland were beginning to show the first stirrings of ambition. Meanwhile, there was a rising power that was already snapping at Spain’s heels and destined ultimately to overtake it, in the form of France. None of those nations were mentioned in the Treaty. Not even the Pope’s blessing was going to make those nations keen on accepting a partition of the world between two of their rivals.

Besides, less than a quarter of a century after the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Reformation would split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states. Protestants felt under no obligation whatever to accept the Pope’s authority on any of these matters. So, while Spain and Portugal more or less stuck to the Treaty, everyone else pretty much stuck two fingers up to it.

But, significant though all that is, it leaves out the most striking aspect of all in the grand negotiations at Tordesillas.

They made absolutely not mention whatever of the people who might actually be living in the lands these great powers were carving up between them. The ‘discovered’ people had no say in the negotiations, no rights confirmed by the treaty. Spain and Portugal were given possession of ‘new lands’, but those already living there were given possession of none, least of all their own.

No wonder we’re still having to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ five centuries later.

That aspect was far more eloquently captured by a street mural we came across in the city, than by any monument to the Treaty.

Spain and Portugal carving up the world. While an ‘Indian’ weeps at the rape of her lands

The history is bad enough, we don't need the monuments

Pulling down statues? Oh, it’s a controversial question in Britain today.

The Prime Minister has said that removing statues of celebrated men of the past is in effect lying about our history. But, like so much that Johnson says, that’s simply false. The history is there with or without the statues. No one is suggesting rewriting it. Statues aren’t about recording history, they're about honouring people who helped make it.

Why honour those responsible for some of its most shameful moments?

The demand to rid the country of statues to our most discreditable historical figures comes chiefly from the Black Lives Matter movement. I support their general aims, and in particular their desire to free ourselves of those blots on the urban landscape, though I would like to see it go a little further.

Edward Colston's statue drowned
Black Lives Matter protestors dump slave trader's monument

Would I have backed the tearing down and dumping in Bristol harbour, of the statue of Edward Colston? I don’t know. It might have been better to have the City Council remove it by democratic decision. But, in purely pragmatic terms, it’s probably easier for Councillors not to put it back in place, than it wold have been to take the initial decision to get rid of it.

Maybe the protestors did the Councillors a favour.

Certainly, the streets of Bristol are cleaner for not having the statue there. I remember clearly the shock I had on seeing it for the first time. I hadn’t previously known anything about him, far less that he had a public monument. Discovering that he did left me speechless. How, I thought, could we honour a man who was a major figure in the Transatlantic slave trade? He may have been a benefactor to Bristol, London and other places, but some at least of his wealth came from slavery. Doesn’t that mean that whatever worthy cause he funded, and however much he gave, what he was handling was the filthiest of dirty money?

Let’s be clear. The slave trade in which Colston prospered believed that men and women could be treated as cargo. It took 12-12.8 million free men and women, captured either in slave raids or as a result of African wars in which Europeans had no legitimate interest, and transported them across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 and 2.4 million of them died on the voyage, the conditions were so inhuman.

Once in the West Indies or Americas, they were reduced to they status of cattle. They had no protection against rape, torture or murder. A white slaveowner had the legal right to do what he liked to a slave with whom he was dissatisfied, or with whom he wanted to satisfy a desire.

The justification for slavery was that the enslaved, for the most part black Africans, were less than human. So the institution set out deliberately to dehumanise them.

How can anyone who played a leading role in this business deserve a statue, simply because he endowed some schools, hospitals and almshouses? Should Berlin erect a statue to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, on the grounds that he put up some fancy buildings?

The Black Lives Matter movement exists precisely because whites have still not fully emancipated themselves from the attitudes that legitimised slavery. The slogan  is needed because at some fundamental level, we live in societies which don’t think black lives matter enough.

Getting rid of statues of slave traders, of those who resisted the end of slavery, or of those who felt they could treat some people as inferior to others, will contribute to emancipating us all from those shameful attitudes. So I support the movement wholeheartedly.

However, I would like to see the movement go further still, at some time, without distracting from the top priority today, bringing to an end the undervaluing of black lives. I have longed for years to see at least one additional statue removed. It shocked me the first time I saw it just as much as the Colston statue later did. And I saw it a lot, as I was a student for four years at King’s College London and the statue is in the Strand, not far from the College.

It is the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who headed the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War 2.

Bomber Harris's statue in the Strand

The principal actions of Bomber Command were mass air raids on German cities. They were sometimes masked as aimed at ‘military targets’, but it’s hard to see how carpet bombing the whole of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, could possibly be necessary to hit the few, if any, legitimate military targets they contained.

Dresden after the bombing
A legitimate military target? Seriously?

More honestly, if still euphemistically, the raids are sometimes defended as action to ‘break the enemy’s morale’. In other words, it was hoped they would batter the German population into withdrawing its support from Hitler. That’s military action to obtain political change. And that means action directed against a whole population, and therefore against civilians. 

There’s a name for that. We call it terrorism.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during that war. Indeed, he was a Navigator in a bomber. But he was never in Bomber Command, serving instead in 101 Squadron, which dropped supplies to resistance fighters, towed gliders or dropped paratroops.

Leonard Beeson
Bomber Navigator but never a terror bomber

He often said he was relieved that he’d never taken part in any of the raids on cities. He was forever grateful that he had, by good fortune, avoided being involved in terrorism.

So it shocks me that we still have a statue to the main architect of that terrorism in one of the great streets of the British capital.

The key issue today is to teach us all that Black Lives Matter. So let’s get rid of the statues of the slave trade traders and deniers of freedom, today.

But tomorrow? Perhaps we can move on and learn to stop honouring our terrorists either. After all, we need to remember the role these people played in history, but we don’t need to honour them with monuments.

Slavery and Trump: the poison lingers

We’re about to commemorate, because celebrate really isn’t the right word, the fourth centenary of the introduction of slavery on the North American continent, in 1619.

The first permanent European settlement in Virginia was established in 1608. So it took just eleven years before they were importing slaves from Africa. 

Anyone in Britain who feels any sense of superiority over their American cousins over this should think again. Those settlers in Virginia were decidedly and entirely British.

By a curious coincidence, as a Brit myself, I’m reminded of this dismal past regularly in my new home in the suburbs of the Spanish city of Valencia. Not far from where we live, in a wheat field, stand the ruins of a farm building. On the intact wall, an artist has painted a black man raising his fist as he looks at a field in which he has, no doubt, been working and will soon be working again.

Even today, even in Spain, still yearning to be free

It’s a curious sight not only because it reminds me of the Africans taken to America, but also because Africans come to Spain each year for the kind of work the man in the painting does. They’re paid, of course, and they go home afterwards, so they’re not slaves. But free? I’m not sure men driven by economic necessity so far from where they live can really be said to be free.

The institution of slavery marked American culture profoundly. If you believe that a group of people is so debased, so inferior that it is perfectly possible to buy and sell individuals from it, and you treat them as cattle for the best part of two and a half centuries, how long will it take you to understand that they are no different from you and certainly no less valuable?

There is something shocking in the fact that a movement has to be called ‘Black Lives Matter’, as though that were some kind of surprising new discovery. The United States was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. How is it a shock to discover that it really applies to all women as much as all men, and all blacks as well as all whites?

However, it seems that this truth is still a shock. The L A Times recently reported that one in a thousand black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of police violence. That’s two and half times more than their white equivalents.

In passing, those figures are bad enough entirely independent of race. Something like three people are killed by police each day in the US. So far in 2019, two have been killed in the UK, 1 in 2018. US police kill as many people in a day as the UK police killed in each of the last two years.

But above all, it is the contrast between black and white deaths that is particularly striking. It underlines why a movement called ‘Black Lives Matter’ had to be set up. There is still an indifference to the value of black life permeating US society, and in particular its power structures such as the police. I’ve quoted these words before but they’re worth quoting again, since they reflect how that indifference came from the very top of US society. This is Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1857, talking about slaves and their descendants, whether free or not, who, at the time of the Declaration of Independence:

…had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…

Why is all this of any particular interest now? Well, it isn’t just because of the commemoration of the introduction of slavery. It’s also because, by an ironic coincidence, this is the week in which Donald Trump made his offer to buy Greenland from Denmark.

The Danes, sensible in their adoption of twenty-first century standards, and sensitive to the needs of the Greenlanders, dismissed this proposal as absurd. And Trump, far from admitting his error – and when will he ever? – responded by cancelling his planned visit to Denmark.

To him, what he was proposing was “essentially a large real estate deal”. That’s a far more telling statement than he and even most of his critics realised. Because he wanted to buy an entire country, including its 50,000 inhabitants. And that to him is just “real estate”.

Trump: buying and selling a nation and its people
is just a real estate deal

People who look or sound different from the ruling Anglos in the US just don’t matter to a certain section of those Anglos. They can be bought and sold like real estate, or indeed like cattle. They can no longer be enslaved as they once were, but it seems they’re still viewed as inferior can still be shot with casual frequency.

The poison that entered the US soul four centuries ago hasn’t yet been worked out of the system. It’s interesting that it still drives Trump’s attitudes. And isn’t it appropriate that this should be revealed in the week we commemorate its four hundredth anniversary?