gerald horne the apocalypse of settler colonialism

Whiteness was used to justify the opening up of slave markets, the accelerated brutality of colonial and settler colonial genocide and extraction economies, and the solidification of a categorical Other underwriting the war logic that continues to define modernity. White supremacy, as Horne’s historical research shows, is a tool of capital accumulation.

For example, Horne shows how the American revolution of 1776, often understood as a liberal democratic rebellion, was less laudable: a merchant class of capitalists used the “democratic” spread of white supremacy to wrest wealth from a divinely ordained monarchy’s monopoly on slavery. In Horne’s adroit analysis, seventeenth-century merchant class revolts against the monarchy, long thought to be paeans to democracy and liberalism, are shown to be inextricable from the violent enslavement of Africans and Native Americans. Horne’s deft archival work reveals rebellion to be a powerful and primary historical force, and clarifies whiteness as a category of convenience used to quell the vibrant cross-class and cross-racial revolutions which erupted throughout the seventeenth century-from England to Jamaica, Barbados to Boston-rebellions that reverberated through the formation of the United States forward to this day. Through a focus on English colonial projects, Horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure. In this, his thirtieth book, Horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class.

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean.

Gerald horne the apocalypse of settler colonialism