Gerald Horne > Quotes

“This also laid the foundation for exponential growth of capitalism and its handmaidens: white supremacy and slavery.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Some settlers were beginning to see the revolt against British rule not only as a thrust toward “independency,” opening even more the growingly profitable trade with Hispaniola and France, but as a simple attempt at survival in the face of a perceived attempt at their liquidation propelled by London and Africans alike. The planter class was explosively angry about Lord Mansfield’s demarche as a result, with one among them claiming that now “slave holding might perhaps be very well discontinued in every province of the North American continent situated to the north of the Carolinas.”
― Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

“as the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new god, with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Management theorists have sanctified capitalism in much the same way that clergymen of yore sanctified feudalism. Business schools are cathedrals of capitalism. Consultants are its traveling friars. Just as the clergy in the days of feudalism spoke in Latin to give their words an air of authority, the myrmidons of capitalism speak in a similarly indecipherable mumbo-jumbo.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Thus, by 1530, 69 percent of the enslaved in Puerto Rico—now a U.S. “possession”—were African.”
― Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

“This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Then finally, in 1776, they pulled off the ultimate coup and exhibited their novel display of patriotism by ousting London altogether from the mainland colonies south of Canada, while convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves, and profit was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“This blatant power and money grab by merchants was then dressed in the finery of liberty and freedom,45 as the bourgeois revolution was conceived in a crass and crude act of staggering hypocrisy, which nevertheless bamboozled generations to follow, including those who styled themselves as radical.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“For the Negroes on the island” of Jamaica “being 80,000,” it was said in 1714, and the “white people not above 2000,” the former “may at any time rise and destroy the white people”; besides, Jamaica had a “formidable neighbour,” referring to the “French on Hispaniola,” which increased the peril, as the internal and external antagonists could combine.”
― Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

“It is not easy to seize land on which another people reside, oust them, then shout from the rooftops about alleged democratic principles.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Indeed, the forces unleashed by the rise of London, then New York, proved little less than apocalyptic for Africans and the indigenous of North America.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“In short, enslaved Africans arrived in North America under the English flag decades before the notionally accepted date of 1619 and, if one counts the European trade generally, decades before the 1560s when the Spanish arrived in Florida.31”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“To put it another way, the weakening of monarchy which was essential to the emerging republicanism was driven in no small way by the desire of certain merchants to weaken the monarch’s hold over the lushly lucrative African Slave Trade.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“This form of slavery coexisted roughly with enslavement of Africans, leading to a catastrophic decline in the population of indigenes. In the Caribbean basin, the Gulf Coast, northern Mexico, and what is now the U.S. Southwest, the decline in population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was nothing short of catastrophic. Population may have fallen by up to 90 percent through devilish means including warfare, famine, and slavery, all with resultant epidemics. The majority of the enslaved were women and children, an obvious precursor, and trailblazer, for the sex trafficking of today.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“This form of slavery coexisted roughly with enslavement of Africans, leading to a catastrophic decline in the population of indigenes. In the Caribbean basin, the Gulf Coast, northern Mexico, and what is now the U.S. Southwest, the decline in population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was nothing short of catastrophic. Population may have fallen by up to 90 percent through devilish means including warfare, famine, and slavery, all with resultant epidemics”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

“Though even those on the left, often in a one-sided fashion, hail the point that London’s bastard child in North America merits a salute because of its bringing of bourgeois democracy, this was more akin to burning down the house in order to roast the pig.”
― Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean