Examples Of Savage Barbarism In The 1600s

Throughout the stains of history, there are countless examples of savage barbarism and heartless violence. Ironically, much of the violent oppression that occurred throughout the 1500s and 1600s occurred at the hands of the colonial white man, despite fervent condemnation of indigenous peoples for what they perceived to be primitive. The real primitiveness, however, can be traced back to the colonists overwhelming and distinctly cultural desire for profit. Though not all of the violence can be traced back in this way, much of its emergence in the 16th and 17th century correlated with the rise of production sites and modern capitalism. In this way, the culture of capitalism laid the unprecedented groundwork for horrifying instances of mass genocide,

Though Columbus wanted to set up factories, or trading outposts in the early 1500s to produce profit, the native’s cultural lack of trade necessitated capitalistic innovation. The mines were the answer to this dilemma, as they were not sites of trade but of production. By enslaving the aboriginals and forcing them to mine for gold, the colonists could obtain their precious metals and sell them for a profit. The violent and harsh working conditions, however, led to mass depopulation through death and emigration. In tandem with the difficult conditions of labor, disease spread throughout the indigenous populations and augmented their suffering and eventual demise. This epidemic reveals there to be a bio-social phenomenon, as the germs of disease didn’t become deadly until the punitive working conditions of the mines. With all of this in mind, one sees that these capitalistic sites of production contributed directly to the Great Dying, or the violent genocide of indigenous peoples. In pursuit of profit, the colonists violently enslaved other humans and contributed to their deaths by brutally forcing them to

These sites were the result of capitalistic greed, where owners did everything to maximize the profit of the commodities they sold. For example, owners shifted away from producing subsistence crops, and emphasized monocrop agriculture. The production of just one crop was more profitable, just as it was more profitable to use unfree workers. Since the amount of arable land was high, plantation owners would have to pay workers higher wages. Therefore, owners took this land:labor ratio calculation as motivation to purchase slaves and violently forced them to work the land. In an effort to maximize their profits, owners sometimes punished slaves so severely that they would die. Importantly, this was done when the price of slaves was low enough to where their profit margins would not be hurt. All of this reveals the plantation to be a capitalistic site, where violence was a specific tactic used to maximize profit. Accordingly, the concept of profit was an ideology of domination used to veil the severity of the plantation owner’s violence. Certainly, violent subjugation was a principal element of these capitalistic