The Other Slavery

                                                  The First Slavery
      An exceptionally well-written book on Indian slavery named The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez is perhaps the first broadly systematic and specifically focused book on the long under-looked and under-researched topic of Indian slavery on the North American continent yet written. Reséndez acknowledges that the topic has long been covered by scholars of South America but I would argue that even here it has gotten the short-shaft in comparison to the far more visible and far better documented subject of  African slavery in the Americas. Certainly to the book's credit it rests on solid historical foundations based on primary sources and is written in a style that lacks the "advocacy" that the anonymous Economist reviewer of Baptist's book apparently found so irksome. I have no small historical interest on the topic of slavery having done both some brief historical research on it as an undergraduate and in writings I've published in this blog: here and here. On that note, the book has helped me make dot a lot of "i"s and make a lot of connections that I had not made previously and I am sure it will probably cause a major shift in Indian studies; perhaps without meaning to it will favorably add to ongoing research on African slavery in the Americas. It includes some well-thought out and somewhat novel arguments that should change the way we talk about the colonization of the Americas.

         The most important argument that Reséndez makes for our broad understanding of post-Columbian American history is on the long hotly debated double-question: how many Indians inhabited the Americas? And what was responsible for their decline? The most popular explanation is the "virgin soil" thesis which holds that between 80-95% of indigenous peoples were killed by the transmission of previously unencountered pathogens to the New World via the Conquistadors.  The single most wide-reaching popularization of this thesis is Jared Diamond's book and documentary of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel which places disease as the primary cause for Indian decline and accords European slavery, land-expulsion, settlement and outright genocide a secondary role in "mopping up" what was left of the Ameridian population. But Reséndez high-lights some major holes in that narrative, holes that honestly scholars should've noticed and drawn correct conclusions from earlier,  in his analysis of the population decline of Hispaniola and the broader Caribbean-Gulf region. Reséndez revises the population estimates of Hispaniola downwards, this might not mean much on its own but it assumes monumental importance after his careful review of the primary source evidence of the conquest of Hispaniola. That large island is home now the two nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic but at the time of Columbus's arrival it was likely the third largest population center in the Americas. It is likely that between two-to-three hundred thousand people lived within a patchwork of 600 sleepy villages and towns; it was perhaps an unlikely place to find such a large and dense population in the New World. The strong archaeological remnants left indigenous peoples of Hispanola, in spite of everything, was one reason why the High Counters' put forth the massive number of ten million. One popular book that took the High Counters' numbers and narratives at face value, often merely regurgitating them in a more radical form, is David Stannard's American Holocaust (published in 1992) which put forth the widely circulating 100 million number for pre-contact populations as well as the claim that over 100 million indigenous people were killed by Europeans. The book haphazardly aimed to plug the decimation of the Indians into the received moralistic discourses of the Holocaust and the gulag, the latter still very much on the mind of people after the freshly ended Cold War. It's notable that when reading the book that Stannard accepts the disease narrative at face-value and describes act after act of genocidal violence without referring much to economic systems or broader power relations, as if the Europeans killed Indians simply because they were insane religious fanatics with untemperable hatred. The truth of the conquest is the opposite for Reséndez of what is is for scholars, even well-meaning ones, still thinking in mainstream paradigms: slavery was the prime cause of Indian population decline.

      Reséndez draws attention to the fact that the year before the arrival of small-pox on Hispanola in 1518 the islands population had been slashed to a mere 11,000 people. Likewise, no major lethal disease outbreaks are recorded and Europeans of the age were intensely aware of the spectre of disease. The likelihood smallpox or most other communicable diseases would survive the months journey aboard a ship is low--making the late outbreak exactly what we would expect. The historical record based on the documents, diaries, and records of the time overwhelmingly place the emphasis on overwork as the primary cause of death for the inhabitants of Hispanola. If anything the small-pox outbreak merely delivered the final blow to a people already hurtling towards extinction after experiencing extreme demographic collapse in the face of the work-loads and violence of the Spanish colonizers. Reséndez presents other grounds for questioning the virgin soil narrative: mainly, such a population collapse of that magnitude on account of disease is unprecedented. The Black Death was perhaps the perfect virgin soil event in Reséndez eyes and it wiped out between 1/3 to 1/2 of the European population but importantly, Europeans recovered relatively quickly and not only surpassed their pre-plague height but even began living better on average. Reséndez argues that the primacy of the virgin soil narrative goes against what we know about the durability of human beings and human society. When left to themselves Indian communities recovered. I would point out that not even the Black Death occurred in a vacuum it coincided with massive famines and a European peasantry that was experiencing declining physical health as result of increasing feudal exploitation; the Hundreds Years war was also ongoing. Likewise, from 1700 to 1820 West Africa experienced a 25% population decline from 25 to 20 million as a result of the acceleration of the slave trade and wars fought over procuring slaves. Since Africans controlled the trade up until the point that slaves were packed into European ships  the majority of slaves traded--from the start of the trade until its finish, were adult men. That West Africa still experienced a major population decline in the face of pseudo-scientific pop biology theories like "the disposable male" is surprising. The Other Slavery though had a very different character its slaves were primarily composed of women and children--the foundational reproductive stock of any human society. Reséndez puts forward 2.5-5 million as a tentative number for  all the Indian slaves traded from Columbus's arrival till the early 20th century. To my mind, that is certainly not an underestimate. Reséndez takes the position that if he had to guess he would say slavery, overwork, and famine, killed more Indians in the Caribbean from 1492-1550.  I think that's conservative given the qualitatively different makeup of the other slavery and the addition of addition of wars, deaths incurred from expulsion or flight,  land theft, wanton murder, and outright genocide.  And the other slavery was a hemispheric trend where much of the pattern was repeated not merely confined to the Caribbean. Of course, slavery also spread disease as we shall see but its somewhat doubtful that any population could survive the travails of slavery and wanton massacre alongside the super-mortality rates of the super-bugs that circulated the New World. And new super-bug seem to be be "discovered" all the time,  such as Charles Mann's assertion that the Indian population of New England was wiped out by a lethal form of hepatitis before it was subsequently slammed again later on by small pox. That Indian nations survived and in great numbers, considering everything, is a testimony to their cultural ingenuity and the human will to survive.
     
                                         The First Middle Passage         
     
     Long before the first slave ship set sail directly from Africa likely in in the year 1526 ships with hulls stuffed full of slaves were disembarking in ramshackle Caribbean ports. Although they mostly moved between islands that were often just a few weeks apart unbelievably the slaves packed in hull suffered a 25-50% mortality rate--as bad or worse than the average mortality rate for the transatlantic African slave trade at its worst point. Loaded down in dilapidated boats too small for the human cargoes they were carrying these ships often ran out of water, food, and suffered all the other ailments of associated with a transatlantic slave ship at its height. Initially, Columbus finding little of value on Hispaniola planned to bring Indian slaves to market in Spain where they would fetch the best price. Like many businessmen, especially established ones, he was too focused on selling to an established market to see the new one opening up before his eyes, but the hesitancy with which the Spanish monarchy tolerated the sale of Indian slaves to Spain put cold water on those plans. After rebelling against his "leadership" gold miners on the island began to put major strains on the available labor force--a Spanish commander was later sent to get the message across that Indian slavery would be frowned upon to prospective colonists,  the Crown desperately attempted to impose something like a European feudal system in the encomienda policy. But such a policy only encouraged the newly minted "Lords"to more intensely exploit and enslave their new"vassals" and to flout, shuffle around and retitle the slaves and slave-system that already existed. The system was designed to fit into the hierarchies already established in indigenous Tainos themselves by working with and through their elites but that was another factor that made it open for abuse. A culture of raw brutality and slavery had already been in place for ten years when the monarchy sent a new commander to enforce the change in policy in 1502.  One guesses that most of the damage had already been done as the islands population crashed to about 60,000 in 1508 a mere 6 years after commander Ovando's arrival. Along with De Las Casas it seems he had been perfectly happy to play the role of good cop which wasn't hard to do; it certainly helped that he was no fan of Columbus or his son personally. Taking new slaves was still sanctioned against the Canib people of the Lesser Antilles and Orinoco basin--a fierce tribe feared by the Spanish for their lethal poison darts and demonized for the practice of ritual practice of eating human flesh. Slaving licenses had been quietly issued before 1518 because the surviving labor force was unable to meet the labor needs of the Spanish colonists and I suspect that the colonists couldn't be controlled and hence the Spanish crown looked on this as a necessary evil that could only really be regulated if it was out in the open--almost like an alcohol tax.

         But the demographic collapse that ensued with the arrival of small pox also led to an explosion of slaving licenses as Ovando in a panic gave up his good cop role in a desperate attempt to preserve what was left of the indigenous population of Hispaniola (spoiler: it did not work). But this colonial attempt to save the Indians of Hispaniola lead to a similar fate for the Indians scattered across the vast Caribbean archipelagos and most of its big islands too. This fits with late 17th and 18th century depictions of the Caribbean that I had come across both fictional and historical that depict it as veritable goldmine for European empires but virtually unpopulated devil's paradises except for their settlers, proletarian sailors, white indentured servants, and their African slaves. There is truth to it, take the Bahamas as an example: a vast archipelago composed of 700 small islands in waters so difficult to navigate that only a crew and captain experienced could navigate its waters without running a ground and/or sinking. This was the reason why Blackbeard and the other great pirates of the Golden Age established their bases there because it was formidable enough geographically to deter and provide sanctuary from the great royal navies of the day but there was another reason too: it was unpopulated.  I found this description hard to believe but it fit with what I knew about the islands which according to wikipedia are 85% Afro-Bahamian and even today 15% "white" but Indians had survived and populated much harder environments and much harder to reach geographical locations. Spanish slavers found these islands a veritable treasure trove of human cargo they would come upon isolated islands in the Bahamas by night and literally carry away whole communities in the hull of their ships. Paradoxically, the small populations and geographic populations of small "useless islands" littered across the Caribbean made the indigenous people who inhabited them easy and attractive prey for slavers. Regions with high-population densities like Mexico and Peru, while attractive in overall numeric terms put limits on the ability of slavers to wantonly take slaves without regard to indigenous and class structures.

       The cost of overland transport was higher and its speed slower; in Reséndez's words it was almost as if the Caribbean had been perfectly designed geographically to accommodate slavery. By the 1520s smallpox outbreaks on the Bahamas began wracking the indigenous Lucayo peoples; I would guess that being trapped on their small islands with nowhere to hide and dozens of slave ships bearing down on them they had been considerably depopulated already. But as mentioned before the transmission of smallpox and other diseases via slavery makes perfect sense. The virgin soil thesis is conceivable in the urbanized and highly-populated centers of Mexico and Peru but the Bahamas presents an altogether different challenge: only accessible by sea, difficult to navigate even still, spread out over 700 on small islands that are far apart especially for peoples who travelled via canoes with island populations in the hundreds and low thousands--this was not the place for a "matchstrike" to set off a smallpox blaze. The virgin soil thesis presents smallpox of taking on a life of its own and spreading rapidly through the Americas, independent of European actions. This certainly can win limited credibility when it comes to the continental landmasses but the Bahamas would've been a poor conductor for such an event and yet highly populated areas like Mexico, Central America and Peru boast some of the largest intact indigenous populations in the Western hemisphere and the Bahamas along with other Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Hispaniola either have no surviving identifiable indigenous populations. Many other islands either experienced the same thing or boast very small-indigenously descended populations. For all-intensive purposes, regardless of Spanish intent, these islands experienced some of the most complete genocides in world history. Another point that should be made is that sick people don't like to move and smallpox pustules are only contagious for two weeks. Cramming into small boats and braving Ocean channels to seek trade and pleasant intercourse with neighboring islanders for days or weeks on it make the Indians of the Bahamas unlikely transmitters of the disease even when introduced. Spanish slavers on densely-packed and much faster caravels in a hurry to make as much money as possible are much more likely carriers. I think that even in the case of land travel over the continent its far-fetched as in Charles Mann's rendering of events in his book 1491 where the smallpox (and/or some other diseases) match was dropped in Central Mexico and burned all the way to New England in the course of a couple years or a few decades. Spanish slavers and slaver-discoverers on the other hand made trips to Florida and as far north as South Carolina. The pre-contact population had no horses or wheel-based contraption for land movement, in my opinion, even assuming the high population densities of North America on the part of the High Counters' it would almost be like every sick Indian was in a hurry to spread the disease to the next Indian or handful of Indians in the next square mile over.

      This open network of labor capture and transport would endure until the passage of the New Laws by the Spanish crown in 1542. By that time, much like the change of regime on Hispaniola, much of the damage had been done and the slaving grounds of the Caribbean had largely been exhausted.  The laws held that it was against the law to make an Indian a slave for any reason and despite resistance to it by Spanish slaveholders the law was implemented but it continued to lack proper enforcement. But this point for Reséndez marks off the divergence point of the other slavery from its African cousin because for the majority of its existence it was not legal. In practice, slavery in the Americas continued and even thrived but with the difference being that Indian slaves were rebranded as captive prisoners of "just wars",  slaves were rebranded as criminals serving terms of legal punishment, child slaves were rebranded as adopted orphans or wards of the state/church, adult female slaves passed off as wives or domestic workers, slaves were passed off as debtors or free workers/peasants, and corruption and criminal stealth enabled it to operate in some regions in broad daylight. Reséndez is not wrong or imposing an anachronism to compare the other slavery to the illicit under-the-table slavery that helps power the global economy in the 21st century.  By the mid-to-late 17th century as the labor-trafficking and catching networks expanded geographically the Spanish crown acted belatedly to pass even broader and far-reaching laws but by this time the other slavery had become so ingrained that it would endure in various forms into the 20th century. While the enforcement of the letter and spirit of the law remained elusive in Spanish America in Spain itself the first victims of the first middle passage, the reverse middle passage to Spain were largely liberated after a lengthy struggle in Spanish courts. The victory of 2,000 or so Indian slaves in Spain put both slave and slavemaster on watch throughout the Spanish Empire.

                                     The Other Slavery And Capital
   
       A criticism that I would make of Reséndez's book is that while it has a keen historian's eye when it comes to primary sources, narrative, demography, social contradiction and power relations it lacks a political economist's eye for major economic trends, economic theory, and history. This is somewhat understandable after 1542 broadly speaking the Indian trade in an open form was not legal in any sense which means that records of sale, taxation, litigation, openly published newspaper and journal articles start trailing off the historical landscape. A business that makes a profit off the labor of Indian slaves generally does not sue over its illegal property or even make public boasts about its profits. But in trying to move this story literally out of the closet and the shadows there should've been more focus on trying to establish its economic importance. This had long been done with African slavery and new historical works aiming to restore the link between modern capitalism and slavery have broken new ground. Spanish America has all-too often been given the image of hopeless backwardness in the Anglosphere and given that Spain did not industrialize itself until the late 19th century the attempt to make the connection may seem like a fools errand. But it still should be made, and not merely for a moral revision to make a more inclusive history, but because as Inikori and Williams are want to point out that Britain (and the other more advanced Western nations) still had to trade with someone. We should also aim to move beyond the strange form of orientalism that Blaut dubbed "Iberiantalism"that seeks to decouple Spain and Portugal from the general sweep of Western European or European history and present them as exceptions. It is not for nothing that the historians who do this are usually Anglo-American or insanely anglophilic. The colonization of Hispaniola holds special interest for Marxist political economy and theory but suffice it to say it is to in-depth to be incorporated into this review and will be incorporated into an aforementioned post on economic history and Enlightenment economics.

        What is fascinating to me about the initial colonization of Hispaniola and the Iberian Americas is how it matches some of the models from Volume II of Capital exactly. European societies of the time can be added to simple reproduction phase of economy outlined in Volume II. Now that is a little vulgar both historically and theoretically, since in the first place traditional societies weren't stagnant, they did innovate and they experienced wax and wane over long-periods and sometimes impressive growth in short-terms in the first place and secondly Marx created the simple reproduction model of a capitalist economy in volume II not a pre-capitalist one. But as Hudson pointed out the long-term growth rate of the European economy since the year of Christ's birth is .2% a year and that includes the take-off period of modern times which adds much more weight to the measure then it would have.  The most theoretically interesting thing for comparison here is a moment in Volume II in the model of expanded reproduction has an expansion in the production of the money commodity (i.e. Gold) essentially drive the expanded reproduction of the rest of sector I and II. Sector I is the production of the means of production it is the most essential sector in an economic system and Sector II encompasses the production of commodities for consumption. When the producer of the money-commodity increases output then it exchanges its product for commodities directly in the model since it is the money commodity itself. Therefore, that enterprise's profit merely entails that it get more money out of the ground then it put into it, it has no need to trade its product for money to complete the process of capitalist reproduction. It exchanges its product directly for use-values. And in such a schema, if I recall correctly, no new technological innovation or increase in the size of the labor force is necessary to expand Sector I & II.  The money in circulation increases and on account of the fact that there is now more money in circulation and more value is being injected from the gold production industry. There are now more buyers and potential buyers in this schema so producers of means of production and means of consumption can increase their output. The personal consumption of the capitalists plays a key part in the schema of Volume II and here we can substitute the extravagant consumption of the Spanish merchants and aristocracy into the schema. So even if no productive investments of the surplus are made we can imagine artisans and well-positioned peasant farmers producing more in response to the increase in buying power and money supply. We do not tackle the issue of the separation of workers from the means of production here either in Spain or elsewhere.

         In the case of the Hispaniola gold rush which was the island's first profitable enterprise after the one-off exports of slaves we can dispense with Westra's emphasis on capitalist pricing because the money commodity is the money commodity.  Out of any commodity of the age it was the one least likely to vary from place to place and thus represented a known quality and crucially it isn't bought but rather buys commodities. This character of being a stand-in universal commodity allows it to circumvent regulation and unite disparate markets for whom international trade makes up a small part of their totality. Even in such cases as when a region is "oversupplied" with gold it is a matter of a radical divergence between the production of other commodities and the relative ease of acquiring and producing more gold, as was the case when West Africans used gold for dog collars or traded it to muslim merchants for salt which was life saving in their environment. Later Europeans took over this trade and Cope drew on some literature that the Portuguese had pillaged a great deal of gold from the intermediary muslims of Cetua and modern Morocco. In this time, it has been argued that silver was far more valuable and a far more global means of exchange,  which leaves open the question of whether the money commodity can change as Marx assumed it was gold in his writings. The relationship of between bullion and fiat money, the latter often manifests itself as a symbol of bullion  being held in reserve or partially contained in a coin and state/private banking debts that are allowed to circulate. The relationship between bullion, credit money, fiat money, public and private theory and their integration into Marxist theory is too complex to handle here.  But I think two questions should be studied: 1. How did the Hispaniola gold boom effect the value of gold as a commodity in Europe if at all 2. did the gold boom allow the Spaniards to create new credit and fiat monies either public or private that helped fund further colonization. The first decade of colonial rule had produced about a ton of gold according to Reséndez which I imagine was quite substantial for the time or at least for the effort that the colonizers put into it.

       The immediate effect of the Hispaniola gold boom in Europe itself aside we know that the gold boom did stimulate productive investment in one place: the New World. Entrepreneurs profited from activities as diverse as selling dyewood from the Haitian coast, to trading pigs and cows to passing ships, to resupplying outgoing ships and specializing in the pearl trade from the coast of Venezuela and perhaps most ominously,  from the first sugar plantations and refineries in the New World. The sale of enslaved labor itself has been known to have been a most profitable endeavor in history with Venice selling other Europeans to muslim masters and English/Dutch dominance over the slave trade arguably yielding more profit then their own plantations at certain points. In the start of the colonization Conquistadors merely took slaves as they pleased paying nothing for them since they were instantly available; the encomienda system romantic and well-intentioned as it was disguised the fact that they got their labor for free, and having got it for nothing, without a real limit on its exploitation, worked it to death. The cost of mounting an expedition and catching slaves it would seem to at least have forced Spanish slavers to consider the cost of transport and the available supply of potential slaves. But such a happy movement towards "market-equilibrium" between supply and demand did nothing to stop the extermination of the Taino, it merely drug more communities into Hispaniola's net.

       Despite Columbus's background as a Genoan businessman it would be far-fetched to assume that medieval Europeans, especially European authorities, would conduct themselves rationally from the standpoint of the modern capitalist mode of production that was only slowly being born. Early Modern colonialism was often a mix of contradictory forms of business/state practices and antique forms of economic production. For example, Reséndez thinks that the encomienda system was far from being just another veil for slavery, as far as my limited knowledge of Mexico goes it seems to have akin to a feudal system though I am sure it had its own indigenous characteristics. In that case, the Spanish crown had a strong precedent to draw on and could impose European-style feudal order in a colonial dominion. But in Mexico, slavery also thrived and it had its place not in the antique production of an exotic agricultural product but in its most modern, global, and industrial sector--silver. The slave-trade from Mexico to the Caribbean and slavery on the ranches themselves also built up the cattle-herds of Northern Mexico, a formation of wealth that brought prosperity to both Mexico and the United States over the long-term. It would've been interesting if Reséndez delved into this subject to determine if the great cattle herds and cowboy culture of Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil had a similar relationship to Indian slavery, I would bet that they do. The Other Slavery was a perverse synthesis it dwelled within and arose out of all the  explosive contradictions of European invasion:  between neo-European feudal interests and institutions in the New World and modern capitalism; between the legal and the illicit; between colonial monarchial protectionism and (neo)colonial free-trade; between chartered monopoly and competition; between slavery and wage labor; and within slavery itself, between the localized tempered systems of slavery inherited from antiquity and indigenous societies themselves and the emerging modern slavery, or "the factory in the fields" to use one descriptive phrase.

       It has been argued by one scholar that the re-export of African slaves, or the "other passages" as they've been called in the Caribbean, between the colonies of various Empires was the original material incentive and proof of the viability of free-trade. But before African slaves were shipped from port to port it was Indian slaves that were being shipped all across the Caribbean-Gulf region from colony to colony. It taught European colonizers to properly value labor in the face of the scarce workforces that it found around it. Before the African slave became the symbol of unfreedom in the European mind it was the starving and ragged Indian in the Spanish mine that held sway. Slavery researcher Kevin Bales argues that aside from the three notorious users of black slavery in the 19th century (the United States, Brazil and Cuba.) most slave-societies or slavery both in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere weren't globalized.  Slavery, horrific though it was, mostly served the needs and demands of local economies, whereas today most slavery is incorporated into the world economy. But the other slavery wasn't just incorporated into the global economy, it was the founding block of its very formation: the silver mines of Mexico and Peru made the Peso the first world currency and linked the Chinese and Indian economies to Europe and its American colonies together on a greater scale and in a fundamentally new way.  Nothing about this point is new but the presence of Indian slavery whether in the form of the mitá conscription practice of the Incas appropriated for state-run Spanish silver mines or the punishment of native "vagrants", "criminals", and captives helped make the transition to free-labor in these mines and the New World itself possible. Broadly speaking,  Indians were not in the habit of working for people other then themselves, of lacking control over the tools to produce for themselves; it was still a slowly evolving process in Europe itself.  Indians may have entered the mines of their own volition but that was after the spectre of slavery and wars had caused them to seek "productive" employment or the fear of the theft of wife and children. It was after slavery and its corollary diseases (metaphorical and literal) had diminished their populations often leading to displacement from the better lands by European colonists. In the nations of Mexico and Peru, but elsewhere too, slavery had been a tool for entrenching the existing class system and accelerating the development of inequality.
   
       This is not to say that in all cases Indians availed themselves of wage-labor in all cases merely out of fear or want, or that they only traded with Europeans and pursued enrichment for similar reasons (slavery being a major factor revolutionizing Indian trade networks) but it formed the backdrop against which so much colonial economic activity played out; it formed the bottom. As Michael Hudson pithily said every economy is planned and with this in mind it should not be a surprise to us if the "free-market" in labor was by design as both Marx and Kalecki argued. To head-off any confusion on this point, it should be noted that Marx and Engels theory of class development and dialectical economic progression still applies in the Indian case, just as the Europeans discovered societies all over the Americas with bondage and some highly-stratified urbanized societies in certain locations, left to themselves some indigenous society would inevitably have developed capitalism as a mode of production at some point. We can confidently say, that ironically they did--it was just for the Europeans! A startling exercise is to look at Reséndez's first appendix laying out the total estimates for Indian slavery from 1492 to 1900 side-by-side with a chart with a chart on the number of African slaves imported to the Americas by year. In the first 60 years of post-Columbian pan-American history, African slaves arrived in the Americas at a glacial pace, usually coming as servants with masters and from slave-markets in Iberian Europe and disembarking in the New World.  During those firsts sixty years the native slavery was at its all-time height and legal sanction was open or very loose and real regulation almost non-existent. Around 1555 African slaves begin trickling into the Western hemisphere at a slightly faster rate but even here its total is low, African slaves are expensive and importation hit or miss as the Portuguese African-turned-Indian slaver depicted in the book learned to his disappointment when he tried to secure a large contract to import African slaves to Spanish America with the Spanish crown around this same period of time, which fell through; he found a more profitable and lucrative career slaving in Mexico despite having insider-familial connections at the Portuguese monarchy and its slaving operations.  The importation of African slaves increases through the 17th relatively slowly but takes a more rapid up-turn post-1650 and absolutely explodes after 1700. Correlating with a relatively slow decline of Indian slaves. The most rapid growth in the transatlantic slave trade,  the period when the great majority of slaves were actually imported, correlates exactly with the 1750-1850 period--the period with the lowest estimate of Indian slaves over the time surveyed. The perplexing upswing in the estimated number of Indian slaves to the highest level seen since the 17th century correlates exactly too with the liberation of African slaves and the final elimination of illicit trans-atlantic slave-trafficking in the second half of the 19th century.

      Before the liberalization of the African slave-trade in Spanish America in the late 18th century, there was a period much like it in the first half of the 17th century. In a reverse of the initial period of Spanish colonization, where slaves were made either in the most densely populated regions of the Americas or brought in from the islands and coastlines easiest to access by ship, slaves in this period were trafficked into European-controlled coastal regions and high-density centers controlled by Europeans from the deep interiors of the American continents. Philip III rescission of imperial protection of Manupache Indians in 1608, effectively turning Chile into free-slaving zone gave new impetuous to the other slavery. The same paths that took African slaves up into Chile from Buenos Aires to be sold there at some point in the 18th century at some point coincide with the paths used used to take Indian slaves from the South American plateau into Buenos Aires. The holds of ships used to transport African slaves from Chilean ships, often after being already marched across the Andes, were at one time filled with Indian slaves who from the same port-of-exit and reached the same destinations: Lima and Quito. Indian slaves were bought from native and blackmarket procurers from the north of Latin America and ended up serving as the fertilizer for Dutch, British, French and Portuguese sugar-tobbaco colonial experiments, all desperately angling to deprive the Spanish of their American monopoly while making a fat profit in the process. Before there was free trade in blacks, there was free-trade in Indians, thought it was largely under the table. Pathways blazed by Spanish slavers in Northern and New Mexico to bring slaves to silver mines and Mexico city would help power the 18th century silver renaissance; along with 19th and early 20th century Mexican development. The slow decline of this era was brought about by renewed abolitionist effort on the part of the Spanish crown in the mid-to-late 19th centuries but with consequence being that African slavery also picked up.

    The Spanish had never litigated against African slavery and deliberately left it open as a loop-hole, even if it was tightly-controlled and regulated--part economic policy of the crown, part fear of the muslim other in the New World garden. But the Spanish crown never really needed African slavery as much as the other colonial powers because they held the largest populations of Indian slaves in their grasp, even if it was illicit and not a mere dead letter in terms of enforcement, there were still benefits from unseen slavery in dark corners. Correlation does not equal causation, of course, but I do not believe it was a coincidence that declining Indian slave populations in the early 18th century and the license granted by the Spanish crown to the British to transport slaves to their colonies is an accident. That was a milestone for British American and British economic history but British territories too exported Indian slaves to the Caribbean;  more Indian slaves were exported out of Charleston than African slaves  imported into it during the cusp of the 17th-18th centuries. The French settlers of Arcadia also took Indian slaves and it is a disappointment that Reséndez did not tell more of the Canadian story, as it is a country with considerable economic power and now a great national reconciliation is ongoing over the Indian schools there that even a government report called cultural genocide.

       The other slavery is a part of moments that even the pickiest economic historian couldn't deny were part of modern capitalism and had important benefits. Like the textile-factories of Mexico and New Mexico for instance, while the latter is fairly small it undoubtedly has some importance to the industrial history of the American West. The former is of great importance as debt-peons and trafficked slaves were locked up in textile factories along with free workers in what was perhaps Mexico's most important industry; the very reason that it holds a somewhat unique and contradictory position as a poor-rich country. Mexico's ruined silver mines during its revolution is perhaps the primary reason for the divergence of the US and Mexico prior to 1848,  that and a Spanish edict banning immigrants from coming to seek their fortunes in the 18th century mining boom. The profits of the other slavery were so zealously guarded that it prevented measures that might aid in replacing it with a free-labor force. The Indian slavery phenomenon itself was a testimony to how little control over things the Spanish crown really had on the ground. The profits and surpluses created by the other slavery helped create in the Americas their schizophrenic character torn between neo-feudal and non-capitalistic legacies of bondage (containing both indigenous, European, and African legacies) on the one hand and modernity on the other. Perhaps the 18th century Mexican mines are the clearest case of capitalist expansion and management of the other slavery during the colonial era. The application of explosives in this period raised output by a factor of two and likely raised labor productivity more then that, since fewer slaves were available and arguably less free labor as well. I am not saying that there are no other examples beyond the Mexican silver mines, but so far it seems a lot like Baptist's observation about  many early modern slaveries, that their expansion was mainly the result of developing more virgin land and adding more laborers--not more efficient exploitation of labor-power itself. The relationship of this phenomenon to capitalism needs to be more clearly worked out as prices of commodities internationally were wildly divergent until the early19th century, Westra argues that European nations prior to 1776 simply wracked their own colonial pillage and being mostly feudal regimes were not motivated to introduce rational pricing and trade policy from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production. In the case of sugar prior to its mass cultivation in the Americas it was more valuable than gold due to the monopoly hold that its producers and merchants had on its export in Europe it is rare for a nation dominated by mercantile capital to embrace free trade as Marx noted, but they almost always have a corollary system of slavery and colonialism. But mercantile nations do not always progress to the stage of industrial dominance that follows this period, sometimes they even regress.

      More work needs to be done theoretically on the relationship of American colonization prior to 1776 and capitalism itself. Blaut argued that capitalism emerged from the colonies to come "home" to Europe and worm its way securely to power there. Blaut in his book The Colonizer's Model Of the World estimated a figure of two million Indian slaves as a minimum figure for the 1492-1550 period and Reséndez presents figures whose high range is half that of Blaut's minimum. But such relatively low numbers would make sense for explaining why capitalism took so long to take hold in Europe itself, the number of slaves that were working in a productive capitalist context is smaller than some of the High Counters' might have anticipated and it slowly declined as the centuries went on thanks to the effects of slavery and disease. Then more of the beneficiaries of that slavery probably spent their wealth in the colonies than most models allow but enough of them sent it back to make a difference. Much like the thriving of the coolie trade after the effective abolition of Atlantic slavery the elite gave up labor compulsion in Latin America very reluctantly. It is a great irony that the legacy of forced labor created the very depopulation that Latin American elites constantly used as a justification for enslavement. European immigrants flooded into Latin America after the 1870s solving many of their labor problems and driving production and innovation but by then a silent economic revolution that Lenin described in Imperialism was already occurring. Only the United States found a solution to this problem in the realm of African slavery in the decoupling of slave-producing states from slave-importing states, so that some states like Virginia and South Carolina primarily produced slaves while the others consumed them. It did not solve the problem that slave-owning capitalists worked the labor-force to early death but merely the matter of home supply. This was not the case with the other slavery because if anything the Indian populations of the Mexican territories collapsed at a far more rapid rate under US rule then had occurred under Spanish or Mexican rule.

                       Addendum: The Post-Colonial Moment 

      Some aspects of the other slavery I left aside such as the widespread use of Indian slaves in domestic roles either as servants such as those who served the Mexican aristocracy or those who served Mormon and New Mexican settlers in the Southwestern territories. That is because productive labor is the main origin of surplus-value, although non-productive labor can help realize the surplus-value of commodities sooner or provide other vital roles. I'm not in the habit of changing of this point to make people happy but perhaps Reséndez could have taken a look at this issue from a marxist-feminist view because the use of Indian slaves either as domestic laborers or for the bearing of children qualifies as "reproductive labor" to use a Marxist feminist term. Slavery in the realm of unproductive labor can leave more free labor available to do productive work at a price suitable to owners under the right conditions and its something worth looking into. The use of Indian slaves as prostitutes does not get much attention unfortunately although it was widely assumed that slaves should provide sexual services to a master in those times even if stems were taken to guard against it. The transfer of women and children to European colonizers through the mechanism of the other slavery was one unspoken source of the demographic primacy that European settlers and so-called "mestizo" populations gained over Indian nations. The other slavery added demographic strength to the process of colonization and was one method through which Indians began to think of themselves as Spaniards.  One imagines that contrary to idyllic depictions of Indian civilization, patriarchy was probably evolving and hardening in many Indian societies if class hierarchies and bondage were relatively common but certainly the European model of it was a highly-developed and sophisticated form that colonists felt they needed to impose. Ward Churchill proposed, and took some pointed flak from other Indian radicals for it, that one reason US racial laws were invented to separate "pure" Indians from individuals with mixed heritage so they would not identify as being Indian as obviously there are so many more people with mixed Indian heritage who think they are "white" or even "Latino" to be provocative. If you think about it this pattern was repeated in other "white" settler-states in the Americas from the United States, to Canada, to Argentina, to Chile, to Uruguay and Southern Brazil. But at this point I'm starting to think that more emphasis should be put on slavery aspect then on the settlement or even land theft aspect, because really all societies in the Americas since 1492 are really settler-societies. And that history can't just be undone at one stroke.

        I'm not in the habit of using the term "reproductive labor" since taken to its furthest logical conclusion it can be argued that a rich housewife is exploited if she has to clean her own house and care for her own kids. Some domestic functions like cooking and sewing can be considered productive even if they are not traded for anything, cleaning a house or watching over another human being is not necessarily productive even if its necessary. The former set of duties would fit the bill for Mexican and Indian slaves of the comanche who were usually female and employed in domestic work like cleaning Buffalo carcasses. This would provide meat and fur that the tribe could trade or use directly but it seems clear that it did add something to their powerful horseback Empire outside of the mere trafficking of human beings. Slavery also seems to have been feature for the Navajo nation who were mostly victims of slavery but possessed a rich class that possessed slaves, orchards, farms, and herds. The key post-colonial moment as far as the other slavery is concerned is the repulsion of the Spanish from the New Mexico territory during the uprising of 1680. They didn't return for 12 years. Long before 1776 and a few decades before the precocious declaration of the pirate republic of the Bahamas, the Indians of New Mexico stood up won. When the Spanish returned they found the rules of the game had changed, Indians now controlled the slave-trade and they executed prisoners in front of them to force them to begin buying slaves again.

       Thus the Apache and Comanche arose as the two most powerful indigenous Empires of North America. The image of the Indian on horseback defines the image of the Indian experience and the American West when it was such a new innovation and drastic change in life style for the Plains and Southwestern Indians. With the onset of the Mexican Revolution control over the Mexican frontier collapsed leading to a historic reversal in the direction of the other slavery, Apaches and Comanches bore down on Mexican frontier towns stealing thousands of Mexican citizens and carrying them deep into the North American interior to be sold. Mexico became in-turn both a victim and a victimizer. Mexico's efforts to combat Apache slave-raiding earned Geronimo's undying hatred an aspect that makes the activity of the Indian guerrilla who spent a lifetime fighting both Mexico and the United States all the more fascinating.

      How the Catholic Church used and profited from the exploitation of Indian slaves should've been treated with greater depth. The closure of the Indian mission of California coming from pressure stemming from post-revolutionary pressure to treat the other slavery like black slavery had the effect of effectively privatizing the Church's Indian slaves. The other slavery passed from the hands of the Catholic Church to that of the private Mexican and Anglo ranch-barons who played a key part in the boom of this Pacific industrial economy before the connection of the country in 1869 by railroad. More then New Mexico which Reséndez spends so much time on, due to its real importance in the slave trade, California has a bigger role in American history and development. The extermination of California's indigenous population is considered by some scholars to be one of histories great genocides as it fell from 150,000 to 30,000 in a mere 17 years; the Spanish-Mexican occupation had halved it before that. If the author had presented a clearer picture of the economic motivation and relationship of the other slavery to the California Indian genocide I believe it would have improved the sections on US history on the other slavery greatly. Likewise, since one of the big traffickers of Indian slaves in the book used his returns to pay credit to the Russian state for a fort he bought from Russia it would have been interesting to learn about the role Russia played in the other slavery, if at all. The present Russian government has done outreach to Alaskan natives and have gotten some warm responses in return but it would be interesting to know if that matches actual Russian colonial history in Alaska and the pacific region.

         Reséndez mentions that debt peonage in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest continued into the 20th century but did not fully explicate this claim which would've made a fascinating chapter to the book by itself. As an aside, to refute those who argue that slavery could not have expanded into the southwest Baptist points out that the southwestern agricultural workforce was "barely free" in the 20th century and it was one of the most dynamic agricultural regions in the world. One thing that Reséndez did not mention is that at the same time that several hundred thousand Indian slaves lived in Mexico in the early 20th century is that between one third and one half of US overseas investment was concentrated in Mexico. They may have had Mexican masters but they made US corporations profits. I'm surprised that Guatemala does not get an in-depth treatment thought it is mentioned. Maybe Reséndez thinks that the Guatemalan landlord class was more like a feudal aristocracy then a slaveowning class but in some respects that strains the imagination as Guatemalan landlords published detailed newspaper accounts of their peons in the exact same language as antebellum US slaveowners. The Guatemalan coffee boom of the late 19th century may have pushed a vulnerable peasantry into the other slavery in my view. The Guatemalan elite has a reputation for being rabidly reactionary and anti-Indian and during the contras it is estimated that 200,000 Maya Indian peasants were killed by Guatemalan death squads. The Guatemalan military distinguished itself to the point of being the only military in the Western hemisphere accused of genocide.  Although the subject was concerned primarily with North America I feel that the Amazonian rubber boom could've gotten a plug especially because of the undisputed genocidal treatment of Peruvian Indians during it. This is an excellent book and I am sure more research will arise to fill the gap about this most important subject which is essential to understand the fight against slavery in the 21st century as Reséndez rightly points out.

Radical Shakespeare

        Chris Fitter's Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career presents impressive evidence and argumentation to back the rarely argued thesis, nowadays at least, that Shakespeare was a radical dramatist. Rather then the typical portrait of Shakespeare as the stalwart young conservative providing a beauteous contra-melody in dialogue with the radical noises of the mob or a uniquely ambitious and elusive playwright whose mastery of nuance and ambiguity allows him to subsume the whole world within his drama, Shakespeare emerges here as something he's never accused of being--an iconoclastic firebrand. For Fitter, unlike Woolf, Shakespeare intervenes violently, and personally, in his drama to make it match the political concerns and the material necessities of the day, leading at times to quite a bit of awkwardness in plot (not to mention deviation from the source material). That is quite the opposite of the image of Shakespeare proffered to radical dramatists whose very conservative visage and mythology seems tailor-made to critique their own aesthetic shortcomings.

          The root of the matter is that textuality and performance is of very different though related qualities when putting a play on; there is what is read on the page and there is what is performed. Fitter takes us here to illustrate the overwhelming presence of the groundlings, the common artisans, apprentices, peasants, thieves and citizens that made up the bulk of the Globe audience, whose eyes bore down upon the actors in performance. Remarks addressed to the audience as well as remarks about the lower-classes in the casual conversation of the gentry were addressed mostly to a rowdy, drunken and surprisingly sophisticated audience of commoners. Aristocratic disdain, anger and abuse served to alienate the audience from the nobles that on the page the playwright formally identifies with; in other words, there were ways of denying sympathy even for noble characters that the audience is urged to maintain sympathy with through words or through importance of plot on the text. For instance, in the opening scene of As You Like It, Orlando complains about receiving a only 1,000 crowns for his inheritance a sum that Fitter estimates to be worth about $200,000 today, to see a character spurn such a large sum of money gained sheerly through an accident of birth could not have been endearing to the commoners who made up the overwhelming majority of the Globe's audience. There are many more examples where distance and contradiction is injected through the context (or "deicitic" as Fitter terms it) of the stage-craft.

      This might sound to the reader like Brecht's verfremdungseffect or alienation effect, and there is a good chance that this impression is not mistaken. Brecht himself in his final notes argued that Shakespeare could be performed that way with no changes as long as there was good direction.  The de jure adherence to monarchial, feudal and patriarchal prejudices demanded by the Tudor state is undermined by the de facto performance of it, in this way seemingly unaware nobility out their class prejudices by openly hurling abuse at common audiences and acting as spoilers on the carnivalesque fun of the Early Modern theatre. When this is kept in mind one is reminded of when Brecht would have characters openly proclaim themselves to be the villain in front of the other characters or audience or to out their crass class-based allegiances or plots for all to see thereby spoiling the fun and sympathy that comes with unraveling secret plot or motivation. The abuse hurled at groundlings and less noble characters could not have failed to stimulate an us vs. them class consciousness against audience members. It is arguable too, that by forcing the spectator via the circular orientation of the Globe theatre that Shakespeare even forced Noble theatergoers to assume this consciousness unwillingly. One is reminded by some of the stage cartographies and performance notes drawn by Fitter of the staging and performance of Odets  Waiting For Lefty where the mostly middle-class audience was placed within a theatre designed to imitate a Union hall and drawn into sympathy and false-class solidarity and allegiance with the worker characters of the play.  The potential to emphasize class-division amongst the audience also existed as when actors referred to the heavens, grand nobility, wealth or kings they only had to point up to the gallery where the affluent paid for the privilege for either VIP comfort or to not rub shoulders with the common audience that the theatre troupes depended on so much. Fitter's emphasis on class illuminates several classic works of the Shakespeare's early works in new ways and makes a conservative or purely gain-seeking William Shakespeare increasingly untenable as we shall see.

                         The Politics of Rebellion in King Henry VI Part II 
     
            For Fitter, the foremost challenge to the notion of a conservative early Shakespeare is King Henry VI and particularly the character of Jack Cade, the outlandish and mentally deranged peasant rebel who proclaims himself to be a King. Shakespeare's Jack Cade was modeled on William Hackett a peasant rebel who declared himself to be the King of Europe, whose 1591 "rebellion" attracted few genuine  followers but earned him a death sentence and resulted in the torture of two gentleman, one of which was driven to insanity. The disproportionate use of violence against a mostly harmless eccentric by the monarchial state repressive apparatus earned Hackett more sympathy in death then he had as a political actor in life before he was finally immortalized in a  roundabout way by Shakespeare.  Fitter argues that rather then satirizing and pouring spite upon Cade (or Hackett more properly) for being an emblem of populist idiocy, Shakespeare  subtly criticizes Cade for leading a rebellion or revolution without the support of the people. If this holds true then it is not an exaggeration to claim that Shakespeare is criticizing Cade for not being radical enough as he attempts to rally the people with pseudo-religious nonsense and bogus claims to royal heritage, rather then disputing those tools of aristocratic class control in general. To be sure, Cade's rebellion also plays the role of foil to the aristocratic power politics and in-fighting over monarchial legitimacy and succession by being so transparently fallacious it de-legitimizes the more serious contenders to power by proxy.

        Likewise, Shakespeare's transformation of Cade into a starving English veteran, out of step with what we know about the historical Cade and Hackett, was an act of deliberate sympathy for the character he had created not typical of a strawman that he had invented to mock. It was deliberate provocation too as the de-mobilization of the common military men who had been pressed into service to defend England from the Spanish Armada was a bitterly contentious source of lower-class complaint and retaliatory violence. The same heroes who fought to stave off the collapse of the Tudor monarchy at the hands of the numerically superior Spanish armada and qualitatively superior Spanish army were cast into the streets and deprived of their equipment and wages as soon as the conflagrations as over. The campaign ended, as one scholar notes, with: "the victorious English dying in the gutter; the defeated Spaniards going home to hospital beds and embroidered counterpanes." In this atmosphere, court and other literary records indicated a great many poor hoped that the Spanish would successfully conquer England and bring about the ruin of the native-born aristocracy. Far from being an invention or exaggeration by modern historians the language of class-war was bitter and real  in the deluge of what was called the "black nineties" and many commoners expected, even hoped for, a final apocalyptic class war that would extirpate the class enemy.

      Soldiers who had been celebrated as national heroes were hung when they were caught stealing to alleviate hunger; add this to the thousands of poor hung for trifling petty crimes during the Tudor era and the horrendous tortures and arbitrary arrests carried out against even mild criticism of the Tudor monarchy. Cade's seemingly inexplicable transformation into a hungry former soldier who had loyally served his country murdered by a nobleman in cold blood with five servants in toe all the more illustrates this class divide and could not have been anything other then to create sympathy for a man that was to all extents and purposes a rebel and a traitor according to official narratives. The murder of an eclectic, if good-willed rebel, is an interesting contrast to the murders, violence, "rebellion" and astounding mismanagement perpetuated by the nobility. That Cade's execution follows upon the collapse of English military efforts in France and the descent of the nation into civil war and anarchy is no coincidence. It is as if to say that the bloodshed, military failure, rebellion and irreligion that the ruling class feared would be inflicted upon society by someone like Jack Cade was actually something that they brought upon themselves.  Shakespeare seems to be saying here that adherence to the status quo can be a thing just as traumatic as rebellion itself--not a message that literary critics often argue was the message behind his works.

      Like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Julius Caesar, 2 Henry VII is also intimately concerned with the "politics of rebellion" as well as the attempt to establish some legitimacy for popular resistance in the culture at large. When it came to the question of when it was right for a social subordinate to resist a social superior the agents and beneficiaries of the Tudor monarchy were fairly unanimous--it did not exist.  This contrasts graphically with the discourse around "tyrants" and "tyrant-killing" that runs through Shakespeare's body of work that does indeed establish this right whatever the textual ambiguity. There are times that this ambiguity towards rebellion can be read as an assertion of militant class politics rather then mild adherence to abstract discourses of tyrant-killing developed thousands of years ago.  Such is the case in Julius Caesar when Shakespeare correctly exposes the anti-populist and plutocratic motivations of several of the plotters against Caesar.  Whether Shakespeare agreed with  actions of the plotters or not, it could not have escaped the audience that the stark class inequalities of Rome and Caesar's populist and redistributive nature made it easy for Antony to turn Rome against the plotters and bring the Empire into civil war. It's easy to see the portrayal of the crowd's reaction to Antony's  graveside speech as Shakespeare's latent anti-populism and fear of rebellion/revolution coming loose, but it should also be remembered that without earlier citizen-endorsement of the patrician coup against Caesar they would likely have been arrested, punished for their crimes, and Rome could have retained its liberties.

     Fitter argues that Shakespeare alternatively sets the characters of Gloucester and York in competition for the sympathies of the audience, and in turn exposes them both. Gloucester really did have some reputation for being a populist in his time and it comes out in some of his defensive rhetoric of England's "commonweal" or commonwealth. York finishes the play with a troupe of Irish soldiers at his back which Fitter argues would likely have been positioned around the theatre to give the audience the impression that they had been literally surrounded and confined by force of arms. Fitter contrasts the naive and folkish rebellion of Cade that was savagely repressed with the vicious force now surrounding the audience led by a gentleman ostensibly a member of the forces of order.

    It is surprising that Fitter does not see in the scene itself as constituting a limit to Shakespeare's radicality,  which Fitter is always at pains to portray as perennially sensitive to the counter-hegemonic discourses of the lower-orders and the outcasts of society.  Whether the fears that the Habsburg monarchy would use Irish forces to subordinate England were legitimate, the 1590s were an era of increasing English colonial control and dispossession in Ireland. The play portrays the English ruling class in an unsympathetic light and bumbling though they maybe, English rebels as upright lawful citizens and in this context the dissolute nature of the English aristocracy in the play which leads York to bring in an Irish army can be read as a fear of the collapse of colonial control or fear of retaliation upon the common citizens of the nation. And while it may have impeded the ruling class messages of aristocratic class domination the notion that the English nation needed to do less fighting amongst itself in order to protect its national greatness isn't a message that the shoe-string colonialist Elizabethan monarchy would have disliked being heard. The monarchy did charter the Kingsmen and allow a theatre limited independence as a social safety-valve. For this reason I don't think the conservative currents of his work can be called complete exaggeration whatever startling radically exists within it. Whether hidden in performance or not it seems unlikely that the Elizabethan regime could have failed to catch onto Shakespeare's radical performative or literary sweeps so it seems incredibly unlikely that he would be permitted to continue his work if there wasn't some aspect of it appealing to the ruling class. We will return to this and the question of "populism" later.

                                           Shakespeare And The Pirates
      An interesting scene in  2 King Henry VI that Fitter draws attention to is the arrest and execution of Suffolk by a band of patriotic pirates who arraign him on the charge on treason. This scene where a  gang of pirates, the very emblem of ne'er do-wells take a lord hostage and summarily execute him under their own martial law. It is has interesting parallels with the later execution of King Charles II, those in the audience could not have forgotten or failed to draw a parallel with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots which was largely forced onto the Tudor regime  by parliament.  In this scene it would seem, like other scenes in Shakespeare, the common lot become a responsible, good-willed and patriotic force for order against the anarchy unleashed by the nobility. It helps that piracy was not only historically accurate to the period that Shakespeare wrote about but also was a pastime of disgraced gentleman as well as at times being a chartered endeavor of the monarchy itself. The performance aspect of the execution, as lower-class pirates catch, exercise authority and execute a nobleman in front of a sea of drunken commoners could not have failed to draw electricity from the audience.

       Fitter contextualizes the pirates as agents by pointing out what he dubs the incipient democracy in practice aboard their ships. This can be judged as an exaggeration on Fitter's part as both private and naval vessels were notoriously hierarchal with crews kept in line with the threat of brutal corporal punishments. But privateers did have looser hierarchies and regulations to some degree as officers found it necessary to pry the crew and involve them in order to get them to endeavor to brave combat and to take the risks of operating outside the laws of the sea and to keep them from mutinying to take the loot. Generally, privateer captains were either disgraced aristocrats/aristocratic younger brothers or hailed from outside the noble sphere altogether. It follows in some ways the romance of the gentry-led commoners rebellion or criminal gang which goes outside the law to restore traditional rights or to get back what was stolen. An example of such land piracy in Shakespeare would be Jacques leadership in the matter of poaching a deer on noble lands, a widely celebrated peasant practice that entailed brutal punishments for anyone caught poaching. Like pirate ships, gangs of poachers often had a pseudo-democratic structure even if disaffected nobility, like those of As You Like It,  played a disproportionate role in such gangs.

      In the opening of The Tempest Shakespeare critiques the absurdity of aristocratic hierarchies and obsessions onboard naval vessels as the gentleman onboard the ship hassle, harass, and insult the crewmen as they desperately try to stop the ship from sinking. The obsession of the gentleman onboard with class hierarchy as the ship literally sinks and the lives of all hang in the balance is perhaps one of the most stark visual critique of class-based ignorance, privilege and impunity in Shakespeare. It doesn't take much to view the sinking ship as England itself and to extend the logic that not only is a more democratic order desirable for the peculiarities of a naval environment but for the whole of England itself. Perhaps the fear that pirates might actually change something wasn't just an idle fear of the authorities, in the early 1710s a group of sailors discharged from service the wars of Spanish succession or fleeing the Jacobite wars actually established the New World's first democratic Republic in the Bahamas. They even freed slaves and ran their ships democratically. Fitter argues that Shakespeare was in-tune with the subaltern proletarian order of the pirate ship and the latent desire for democracy and equality that prevailed onboard merchant ships and port-cities. It is possible that he could perceive this and sympathize with the agency of the sailors and mariners without endorsing their furthest articulated aims. Certainly, the word "proletarian" matches the description and outlook of sailors and pirates far closer then other lower-class strata in the Early Modern world that are often liberally given that description. The activity of privateers and merchant vessels also better approximates "capitalism" or "primitive accumulation" then other economic activities of that age given those titles. The humor of Caliban's interaction with the sailors in itself is interesting but also suggests a common lot as, textually at least, both the Caliban the slave and the crew of sailors who were either impressed or wage-slaves seem equally ridiculous.
   
   Another interesting naval scene in Shakespeare is Act I Scene II of Twelfth Night where Viola merrily asserts that she will make her own way in Ilyria amidst the beached shipwreck among the surviving crew. She gives the Captain gold just for saying that he had seen her brother holding tightly onto some debris with their best man; such actions were almost always visual displays of privilege when done by noble characters in Shakespeare. One might think that after a shipwreck the first impulse would be to pool resources and help other survivors but Viola, secure in her class privilege, endeavors to go her own way as if she were a common sailor who had disembarked in a port after serving his term. Indeed, although Viola claims she wishes to make her own way in the world she insists that the Captain introduce her in disguise to Duke Orsino. It should be noted that Sebastian betrays his friend and rescuer Antonio, a common sailor who only desired Sebastian's love. We might see Viola and Sebastian as petulant spoiled rich children who violently intrude into commoner-dominated pathways of the Sea and later into the social world of a foreign nation. Was Shakespeare reflecting  here the complaint of the common sailor against the gentleman? It is surprising that Fitter did not do an in-depth reading of this play in this book on the early career.

                       Shakespeare And Gatsby: Young, Rich, and Out of Control 
       
       The story of Romeo and Juliet is at bottom, a story about two well-off families whose violence and sense of impunity bred by hereditary social privilege sets about their own downfall.  Fitzgerald through the pen of the protagonist Nick famously described  blue-blooded Tom and Daisy as "careless people" and the Montagues and Capulets match that characterization exactly. Fitter reads the confrontation initiated by Sampson and Gregory as the result of a common tactic of English nobility of the time which was to try to incite their servants against the servants of the masters they are quarreling against. Gregory tries to disabuse Sampson of his visions of martial glory and irrational hatred of the Montague servants by arguing: "The quarrel is between our masters and us, their men." Gregory emphasizes that the real war is between the masters and the servants (some of which were undoubtedly slaves) and Sampson acts here a lot like a dumb gullible slave disregarding his own interests and his class interests for those of his masters. It is a lot like Malcolm X's famous dichotomy about field slaves vs. house slaves in that as a servant of the house of Capulet Sampson identifies with his masters; that puts aside the question of the actual historical veracity of X's narrative about such a dichotomy among US slaves.

     Tybalt chooses to view Benvolio's attempt to quell the violence as heartless bullying of a social superior against the servants of his house but it is likely that the situation merely presented an ample opportunity to strike. The patriarchs of the houses leap into the violence at whim suggesting that perhaps they had been anticipating this moment or they had even orchestrated it. They are  like Gatsby's Daisy and Tom in that they seem to be destructive and angry middle-aged children rather then individuals with the moral capacities and social values that society expects out of people in that age range. Nick's description of the wealthy as "careless people" indicates more then just a devil-may-care attitude that society may find eccentric and out of place in older individuals but intones that they live without care for the consequences of their actions, much like children before a mature level of socialization. It isn't surprising then that Daisy and Tom act a lot like children because society is their caretaker since they have been wealthy all their lives. Lady Capulet leaves the rearing of Juliet to her Nurse and maintains an odd coldness towards her that doesn't seem quite like mother and child, this resembles the distance and rarity of the presence of Daisy's own child in the Great Gatsby who is likewise left to a servant. The Nurse had a child about Juliet's age who had died and it seems highly-suggested by Shakespeare that poverty was the reason for the divergence in the fates of the two girls. A perverse and unnatural parallel is presented in the relationship between Nurse and Juliet with Nurse playing surrogate mother to a child whose mother is living under the same roof and Juliet doing likewise in the role of daughter. Juliet then is like the egg of an invasive cuckoo bird laid in the nest of another bird species. Could Shakespeare have failed to consider that and its implications? The images and actions of the cuckoo bird and a near-obsession with cuckolding and marital infidelity that pervades the ribald humor of the plays make that seem unlikely.

     It should be noted that the Citizens attempt to break-up the fighting of the Montagues and Capulets in the opening scene and that one citizen actually makes a Citizen's arrest of Benvolio after the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio.  Romeo flees as the Citizens move to take action to enforce the laws of Verona. Again, it is the common citizens who act responsibly and the aristocracy who bring about chaos, anarchy, law-breaking and wanton-violence without regard for the consequences to the lives of others. Fitter argues that Romeo is deliberately an unsympathetic character because he whines and whines seemingly unaware of his own class privilege even in the face of so much suffering around him. He is never at a loss for gold and, crucially, his actions revolve a great deal around food and his dialogue is littered with references to food. This has some import during the black nineties when England experienced some of its worst harvests on record and the Tudor government moved to fix the wages of laborers while rampant inflation wracked the country. The brutal punishments meted out for violating these statutes even went so far to punish masters who decided to grant higher wages of their own volition these acts received special treatment in volume one of Capital. Food riots wracked London in the 1590s and gangs of apprentices roamed the street attempting to enforce just-price doctrine, a form of incipient labor-theory of value developed in medieval church, which had de jure recognition in English law but often lacked enforcement in practice. At Juliet's tomb  Romeo characterizes death as being: "Gorged with the dearest morsel of the Earth" he is here referring to the practice of engorgement which was to buy up essential items during scarcity or otherwise attain a monopoly on consumer goods, usually food, in order to resell it at a much higher profit. Common apprentices had been murdered by the state not long before the writing of the play for merely attempting to enforce the laws against food speculation and monopoly-pricing. Not too long after the play was initially performed there were riots circa 1600 calling specifically for the abolition of monopolies. It is hard not to see a parallel in Shakespeare's virtuous Verona citizens enforcing the laws against feuding with the London citizens who merely demanded the enforcement of the law about market-pricing which the authorities "winked on" much in the same way that the Prince winks on fighting of the two families.

    The parallels drawn by the play were literal as well as allegorical and metaphorical; dueling was a common sport and practice of English nobility at the time and the rising popularity of the deadly rapier was leading to skyrocketing mortality in noble feuding. Martial skill and a willingness to inflict  direct interpersonal violence had long been a hallmark of the outlook of the European nobility as well as its class dominance. Fitter is correct that the class-nature of the violence of the play has long-gotten the short-shift in comparison to the "macho" or gender-based aspect of it. New weaponry associated with the fire-arms age was making the nobility increasingly antiquated as necessity in actual combat and the extension of bourgeois republican strictures and discourses concerning violence and the rule of law increasingly left less room for aristocrats to enforce their dominance against each other or against subordinated classes via direct interpersonal violence. Ironically, the invention of the rapier made noble training and violence more effective while paradoxically making the practice of dueling less tolerable to the mass of European society. Fitter argues that the introduction of the rapier led to an explosion of noble inter-personal deaths in England which better allows us to understand the surprise that Lady Capulet after the death of Tybalt when she exclaims that no one had died in the last brawl. It should be noted that the older gentlemen brandished their heavier and less lethal broadswords and the fray had involved mostly the simple weapons one would imagine would be carried by citizens and servants. The rapier was also by no means a noble monopoly as Mercutio dialogues to Benvolio about the newfangled nature of the weapon and how it was favorite weapon of upstarts. That makes sense too because fighting with one required neither horse, nor armor like the knights of medieval battles were known to employ; one imagines it took less physical training and conditioning to use because of its weight too.

       The railing of established nobility against "upstarts" whether new gentry-men, merchants, or rich peasants/artisans seems to be endemic in Shakespeare's plays. There is a good historical-economic reason for this: gold and silver from the New World poured in introducing massive monetary inflation  into traditional European societies. Inflation tends to devalue certain asset-categories like land prices and rents a category of economic power  which the aristocracy had a near-monopoly, if not complete control. The effect of 16th century inflation was to devalue set rents and long-term leases, reduce the purchase price of land for prospective buyers and provide much needed amelioration for debtors. Money usurers too had been a fixed, even if officially condemned, component and feature of pre-capitalist ruling classes and economies. Inflation both corroded the power of the traditional ruling class and made money easier for commoners to acquire therefore also increasing the convenience of acquiring goods produced for market. From the perspective of the English ruling class then it is not surprising that it sees itself inundated with "upstarts" both in the form of new gentrymen and outright untitled commoners. The divide between new and old money is one of the central themes of Fitzgerald's work as outsiders of sturdy relatively common stock struggle to gain acceptance and entry into plutocratic worlds that they neither fully-understand, nor can ever fully attain acceptance in. It is significant that the first real threat that Tom receives to his private world of privilege does not come from a  Negro or from any insurrection of the colored races in the vein of Stoddard whose work he is obsessed with but rather from a poor country boy turned wealthy bootlegger whose rise to prominence is assisted by a Jewish gangster.  The skill with which Gatsby passes his illegitimacy as legitimacy makes Tom's "legitimacy" seem all the more ridiculous prompting something like an identity crisis for him. Similarly, as Mercutio berates a new generation of upstarts that he compares to flies (perhaps in both number and perceived danger) he finds this complaint personified in the person of Tybalt who is a master of the new style of rapier combat and the fashionable politesse of manners that he derides. Tybalt's obsessive quest to fully adhere to his preconceptions of what it means to be a lord which is itself determined by new fashions and trends render his authenticity as a nobleman false to Mercutio. It is as if Tybalt is too much of a gentleman to  really be a gentleman.

     The irony is reciprocated when Nurse demands of Romeo that he reveal the identity of the "saucy merchant"( i.e. Mercutio) who humiliated and harangued her. Mercutio understands that his position gives him a certain amount of license and as perhaps the most powerful young noble in Verona and he exercises it boldly and liberally, testing both the patience of others and social convention. Nurse mistakes this royal perogative for a nouveau riche merchant's ambition, vulgarity, and skepticism towards established social mores. The princes of Italian city-states often had real limits on their power and it might've been inevitable that at some point that Mercurio's gallantry became the mirror image of a swashbuckling riotous under the constraints of the law. In spite of himself, his own culture and conduct is being conditioned and dictated by the fashions and ideas of the nouveau riche,  as evidenced in the Queen Mab speech where wondrously articulate literary and religious education is used to express brash, defiant skepticism of Romeo's superstition that dreams provide omens of warning in the real world. This can be read as the result of an outpouring of revolutionary new modes of scientific epistemology produced by Francis Bacon and other renaissance thinkers who often were bourgeois or sympathetic to the bourgeoisie and republican ideologies as well as rediscovered ancient religious skepticism. Mercutio implicitly places this dynamic new scientific culture against the sensuous, colorful, intricate conceits of medieval aristocratic literary culture and the echoes of popular peasant mythology recorded in it. He makes Romeo seem a fool by comparing his belief in the forecasting power of dreams with extravagant folk fantasies that neither modern science, scholarship, or even the modern church itself could subscribe to. Implicit in this is that if Mercutio accepts this  bleeding edge of Early Modern science, and his general irreverence makes it seem like he does, then his social position cannot be justified using traditional conceits of religious ideology.

       The unconvinced may observe Mercurio's stance towards Tybalt which is a harshly confrontational one that seeks to prove once and for all who is the better man. But notably this takes place in the realm of a rapier-duel which Mercutio proves himself knowledgeable of but not skilled enough to win. It would seem that Mercutio knows the scientific theory of the rapier's use but is not a skilled user of the weapon as indicated by Benvolio's retort to Mercutio that if he had Mercurio's aptitude for fighting he would have long since passed on. That such hot-tempered brawlers as Tybalt and Peter shy away from conflict with Mercutio is due to their keen knowledge of their social inferiority and desire not to end up on the wrong side of the law, even when a technically legal opportunity has presented itself. It is possible that Mercutio has been sheltered from the consequences of his actions for so long that he has never fought a real duel or experienced real combat and to a degree that might explain why he so glibly involves himself in gang-like street feuding that he has no real direct stake in.

      Which brings us back to the gang-like behavior of the young nobles of both houses and the meaning of their rebellious actions and spirit. Perhaps the most important thing to observe is how liberally they spurn the law of Verona and there is good reason for this besides ancient rivalry and youthful angst. That is they despise modern republican law which is designed to have a universal hold on all citizens not merely legislate privileges, nor provide a simple rubber stamp for their class rule. The opening scene with the citizens is telling in which they yell: "Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!" as an expression of clear directed class anger. Common citizens in Italian renaissance city-states often acted in concert to drive the nobility out of their republics. One favorite tactic was to focus on a particularly hated faction of it in order to deal a blow to its power as a whole in the name of law & legitimacy, but it often did not end there. No wonder the Prince mentions more than once that he had tolerated and winked on the feuding between the two families. His benign neglect constitutes a form of covert class solidarity that aims to uphold aristocratic unity even if it comes at the cost of prudence, law, the good of the city, and even the broader interests of the ruling class itself. The frequently misunderstood republican theorist Machiavelli gave voice to this popular Italian urban struggle against aristocracy by defending the actions of German burghers who violently assassinated noblemen, drove them from their towns, and even barred them from entry. Of course it is not true that the nobility of both houses hate the law and law enforcement rather they hate the part of it that entails their own compliance to popular will. They have use enough for it when it comes to putting the poor and servile in their place. They are at perfect liberty to fashionably roam the streets late at night and put on lavish balls while visible signs of hunger stalk the play. Fitter argues that the case of the servant asking another servant to save a piece of pie during the famous ballroom scene is basically one of hunger amidst plenty. The musicians at Juliet's wedding to Paris talk of hanging around the party to get their hands on food. Capulet threatens Juliet not just with disinheritance but also to throw her into the streets to starve and die. An allusion to the fact that there was starvation and paupers dying daily in London's streets in the year the play was written.

      It is notable that the nobility play both sides of the law and this includes even the younger generation such as Romeo himself.  Fitter argues that Romeo plays the role of the hated Elizabethan government informant by fingering the starving apothecary in the letter to his father that he hands Balthazar. It is notable that he bullies the apothecary into selling him poison before disclosing to him a radical opinion on the truth of the law's nature: "The world is not thy friend nor the world's law. The world affords no way to make thee rich. Then be not poor, break it, and take this." The apothecary finally consents after a great deal of bullying, sweet-talking and bribery in other words, Romeo does act in much the same way as a government informant seeking to entrap a suspect. The necessity of mentioning his deal with the apothecary in print is questionable and seems to overlap with his overarching goal of getting back to Verona in this case by winning himself back into the Prince's good graces.  The Prince receives the letter and mentions the apothecary and on looking at the scene declares that all are punished. Then the prince later declares that some will be punished and some will be pardoned and Fitter argues that given the pattern of elite impunity it will be the poor characters such as the apothecary and nurse who will actually be punished. Montague and Capulet finish the play by bragging about who will build a larger statue of the other's child suggesting that the rivalry has not disappeared despite the destruction of their family lines. Fitter argues that dysresolution is an important and overlooked aspect of Shakespeare's work and that it is a thing less apparent in the text then it would have been in performance. The plays generally end with the restoration of social order and harmony in order to pass the censor but clues in the text and what we know about its environment and performance suggest that the author himself does not believe in the formal ending. In the ending of Romeo and Juliet formal reconciliation hides yawning divisions.

   As a final note Romeo's careless violence parallels that of Daisy's reckless driving in the Great Gatsby. Fitter treats us to two parallel lovers: Paris, holding flowers at the sepulcher of the Capulet family for his beloved "wife" and Romeo who comes with tools in hand ready to pry open and defile the tomb. References to necrophilia are rife in Romeo's dialogue and his descent into the tomb seems much like a descent into hell. Much like the charming Daisy of Fitzgerald's novel by the end of the play the natural reaction of a critical audience would be to move from sympathy for the character to horror and revulsion as the simultaneously pathetic and monstrous characteristics of the character comes more and more out into the open.

                                          Shakespeare And The Puritans 

       The final part of this post will tackle some of Fitter's interpretation of "puritan" characters in Shakespeare's work but also the assertion of what he deems an essentially puritan set of "vestry values" that Shakespeare was in opposition to. In doing so it will briefly attempt to handle the question of what is "radical" and "conservative" in this time, what is "populist" and what is "elitist" as  well as the question of Shakespeare's own relation to the State and what that means for the position that he was a radical. Fitter's interpretation of As You Like It has a lot to do with what he calls "vestry values" which represents the unholy marriage between the gentry and the rich country bourgeois in a incestuous oligarchical opposition to the ruined peasantry and nascent rural proletariat on the basis of enclosure and bad new-fashioned "puritanical" protestant work ethic. The transition debate surfaces here yet again because unsurprisingly how you view history affects how you view the bleed-through of history in Drama. Fitter, following the Brenner thesis, believes it to be the case that as much as 25% of the peasantry in Shakespeare's time were rural proletarians which leads to some awkward questions that I've addressed elsewhere like: why do land surveys in later centuries make small-scale farming a much larger percentage of population? why is there also historical evidence that the wage earning population only reached such a large figure in later centuries? why did economic growth and industrialization precede so slowly if the process started in earnest so early? Why did it take so long for English and French agriculture to diverge in output as Blaut showed if British agriculture was the leading edge of capitalist development etc...

     Now this isn't just a theoretical axe of mine to grind coming out but it actually interprets how you see the plays. Here's an example: Fitter sees Adam in As You Like It as a Puritan character much like Malvolio and therefore sees Orlando and Adam's relationship as much like the vestry values he sees Shakespeare decrying: an unsavory marriage between an unnaturally thrifty and miserly servant who is startlingly wealthy for his position and the younger-brother gentleman turned highway robber. He describes them as forming an anti-populist partnership in the "heaven of early capitalist accumulation" that was the English countryside. I am not sure that Adam is such a bad character as Fitter makes him even from the point of view of an alienated audience, the fact that he has accumulated 100 crowns through thrift and loyal service: as much money as Orlando was supposed to get for merely existing.  Fitter's interpretation of Adam is essentially just like Malvolio which unfortunately itself pretty standard: Shakespeare basically used Malvolio as a Puritan whipping boy. But notably Malvolio does not fall from grace until he dreams that he will have a young noblewoman's hand in marriage this can be read as a conservative message of not to try to reach or marry above your station but it also can be read radically--Malvolio falls because he forgets that the nobility are the class enemy of the Third Estate and desires to be like them. If read this way, the humorless, sober and capable Malvolio donned in black was not such a bad guy but merely was meted out such harsh treatment because he forgot where he came from. The lame single line of Countess Olivia that much harm had been done to Malvolio has to be one of Drama's all-time understatements after he was imprisoned in the cellar as a nutcase it could not have failed to stick with common audience members. Malvolio's vow to get revenge is another excellent example of Shakespearean dysresolution. Perhaps much like the ease and callousness that Oliver dispenses with his loyal and aged servant Adam is meant to show how the rich  repay the loyalty of their servants. The more traditional view that Shakespeare these were characters he created to satirize puritanism could be true too.

    But a lot of this assumes we all agree on what "puritanism" is since if it is anything it was a catch-all term of abuse thrown around by the Anglican church that liked to demonize anything not Anglican to uphold its tenuous stake on legitimacy--then Puritanism actually encompasses some of the most progressive strains of Christianity in the 17th century (See Hill's The World Turned Upside Down for a more in-depth view). And assuming Shakespeare takes special delight in thrashing it does that make him a conservative, some early opponent of capitalist values before it truly came of age, or merely self-interested? Fitter argues that Shakespeare has special sympathy for the religious dissidents of his time both Catholic and Protestant but stresses that it has hard to read the plays and believe him to be a religious man. That is very possible but its hard to know the religious beliefs of a man who left no surviving correspondence or journal entries; his will suggests he died a conforming Anglican. Puritanism was the type of religious ideology that was gaining followers and adherents amongst the very people who came to the globe theatre middle class people of various types, young artisans/apprentices, sailors and a slim population of nascent proletarian textile workers. It expressed a demand for democracy, social mobility and was well-suited for the language of class war. If Shakespeare was sensitive to all the oppositional discourses of his time as Fitter argues why does he pivot against this one (assuming he really does)?

       It seems for Fitter that Shakespeare was post-bourgeois in the sense that he had rejected the money-hungry misery of the middle classes in favor of a pro-peasant, pro-artisan, and pro-proletarian perspective. At this time, however, the bourgeoisie and the working classes had not fully emerged disentangled as separate classes pursuing separate class interests. Spengler once said that the bourgeoisie was the "class that isn't a class" referring to its own assertions that it represents all the people, that membership in it is based on merit, as well as its seemingly invisible but very real class firewall. This perspective gives us some inkling of how Shakespeare could seem to be all things to all men in the centuries to come. Since both the proletariat and bourgeoisie were in primitive states in England at the time it wasn't much of a contradiction to fight on behalf of sailors and Elizabethan galley slaves and well-to-do artisans and untitled farmers. Even the new gentrymen and cast-off younger brothers can be treated to some sympathy as they run into either the barriers of entry to the aristocratic social world or they are a discarded symptom of its decay. As You Like It itself is an attack and critique of the English system of primogeniture (i.e. the dominance of the older brother in inheritance) and it is possible to see how it can be attacked from a self-interested radical bourgeois perspective: the further division of noble estates would make land-markets more competitive and easier to buy into for the untitled. The English primogeniture system was the most strict in Europe serving as a mechanism for maintaining noble power and property but at the cost of casting out its membership and promoting in-fighting. According to Hill and some other sources great many of the urban artisans and apprentices in London were cast-off younger sons and grandsons of noble families. Orlando's descent from unaware wealth and privilege into misery and crime perhaps struck a chord in groundling audiences that we might not expect. It may have also gained the sympathy of the young students and nobles of the Globe theatre as well. In As You Like It Shakespeare appears to take the side of all those who have no or are not secure in their power (mainly the Duke and Oliver) and in the medieval Carnivalesque comedic tradition turns the world upside down. The precondition of such revelry is that the world ends right-side up which Fitter argues is undermined by another quiet Shakespearean dysresolution with the blasphemous marriage performed by Hymen and the return of the other de Boys brother from school after all the lands and titles had been shared out--laying the ground for future conflict.

         In Early Modern England the broad liminal intersection between cast-off sons, nouveau riche merchants, lawyers, hard working master-artisans, rich peasants, apprentices, wage-workers and even bonded laborers could be subsumed within radical bourgeois activism. If the "vestry" values of the English province was the expression of early bourgeois hegemony then it does pose some awkward questions about Fitter's assertion that England was an "undeclared Republic" and the issue of Shakespeare's radicalism. Shakespeare's republicanism, which Andrew Hadfield documents, does not seem all that radical if 1. an undeclared republic already existed in Tudor-Stuart England 2. the provincial voting practices and local governance of said undeclared republic was merely an excuse for oligarchy and anti-popular repression in the pursuit of early capitalist accumulation. Then we go right back to seeing Shakespeare as a conservative again or perhaps argue he was ambiguous or changed his mind about republicanism. The truth is that England in 1600 was not a modern republic undeclared or otherwise, parliaments and limited voting franchise had long been utilized by feudal regimes when it suited them such as in Poland where the aristocracy elected the monarch. Enclosure, or perhaps to put in a more modern terms: privatization, was not uniquely or primarily a bourgeois weapon as it had been a weapon of the aristocracy utilized for sometime from Ancient Rome to the concentration, fragmentation, and privatization of monarchial lands that occurred during the Baronial Revolt that birthed the Magna Carta.  English enclosure did not follow a uniquely capitalist pathway, nor was it as radically extensive in this time period as commonly portrayed. If anything as Albritton  argued the commons were seedbeds of early capitalism where early manufacturers set up shop in order to avoid rent, taxes, and aristocratic interference. They also often preferred the countryside due to the availability of waterpower and other resources. So if Shakespeare takes the side of the peasantry and romanticizes the commons in As You Like It it is not necessarily because he is criticizing the bourgeoisie through his critique of "vestry values" or because he is opposed to capitalism.  Puritanism did not uphold aristocratic enclosure either if anything its oppositional elements sanctified commons and small peasant and artisanal property. I believe it was Albritton who argued that ironically traditional long-term lease relationships worked better for the bourgeoisie in this period because monetary inflation substantially devalued the real value of ground-rent. The people who benefited the most from enclosure were the aristocracy who could get rid of long-term tenants, seize common lands improved by efforts not their own and raise rents/withhold production or sale of their property to raise land or corn prices.

      The English gentry were not the capitalist rationalizers dispensing with "extra-economic" coercion in favor of the market as imagined by Brenner. They retained traditional power-relations where possible such as the semi-serfdom of Northern England or the widespread practice of bonded labor--a type of temporary slave-labor far more common and long-lasting than most traditional histories allow. As alluded to earlier, gentry-controlled parliament fixed English wages during record inflation and crop failure to cheaply maintain their serving classes and push away the problem of unemployment caused by enclosure. They did not leave the fate of wages of the nascent urban working class to be determined by the will of the market but relied on brutal extra-economic coercion. And this reaction was spawned more by the decay of feudalism then the birth of capitalism specifically as English wages rose in the face of inflation, diminishing de facto aristocratic dominance and income of the nobility and growing demand and demands by labor. Robert C. Allen argues that high-wages of English workers both in European and global comparison was a key-factor in the Industrial Revolution. This a matter of sorting out correct cause effect and dialectic: 1. Enclosure was pursued by British nobles precisely because they were losing power 2. labor combination, a legally fixed maximum wage and minimum hourly day and punishment of "vagrancy" was pursued because the cost of labor was already so high. If we confuse the popular bourgeois revolutionary impulse with that of reaction to it then we lose sight of what was revolutionary about the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the first place. In the case of capitalism itself, it is the transition away from an economic system based on rent and "tribute" in Amin's words towards a system based on profit. Why there was a revolution in England less then 30 years after Shakespeare wrote his last play is incomprehensible otherwise. Why the revolutionaries cited Jonson and Shakespeare in their propaganda to a far greater extent then their royalist opponents is also a mystery then. Why the bourgeoisie continued to hate and struggle against the British aristocracy long after gaining de facto hegemony would also be a mystery if they were the beneficiaries of enclosure and had no serious conflict with it. Well into the 19th century it was a program of bourgeois democrats in England to nationalize all land in England and put rent from it towards the benefit of the public welfare. It didn't happen obviously, but the hatred for inherited privilege and the proliferation of a wide variety of similar less radical proposals suggest that this contradiction continued for some time.

     Given this it is conceivable how Shakespeare could support capitalism and popular struggles and traditional common-rights. In As You Like It characters commonly praise "these woods" referring to the Globe Theatre itself given the audience-interactive acting of the time. The Kingsmen had built the Theatre just outside the London city limits to avoid harassment and regulation by busybodies like the Lord Mayor of London. It would seem much like the early textile-manufacturers (men like Shakespeare's father)  who found a sanctuary in the commons and woods outside the reach of noblemen the Kingsmen found a sanctuary on the outside of London. It is interesting that there is still hunger in the woods that where the "good" Duke and his entourage keep council and as Fitter notes  the exiled Rosalind restores the land and wages of the commoners she comes into conflict. It maybe traditional noblesse oblige but it also pays deference to the nature of the woods where "masterless men" formed new relationships and pursued their self-interest as Hill argues.  It is also key that Rosalind is also a subversive figure and Shakespeare's most verbose heroine. Fitter sees in Rosalind a moment where Shakespeare not only transcends populism in form of "progressive conservatism" in the sense of adopting traditional forms to progressive ends but becomes radical in a modern sense.  Fitter acknowledges the problematization of traditional patriarchy in puritan discourses that promoted male chastity and monogamy as well as the primacy of female choice in marriage as being radical and progressive. Fitter does not question whether alleged Shakespeare's negative portrayal of puritanism in other realms is a sign of conservatism. Fitter's emphasis on Shakespeare's "populism" which is often bent or contains tendencies that serve conservative ends unfortunately obscures and dilutes his attempt to prove that Shakespeare was fundamentally radical, that he sought to position on the side of modernity in seeking fundamental change to the hierarchal feudal society he was born into.

     Unfortunately, no attempt is made to interrogate Shakespeare's own relationship to the Tudor State but is is noted that he never attended a royal function or wrote a letter of congratulations directly to an incoming or sitting monarch.  Something contemporaries noticed. But antipathy towards the state is not fundamentally progressive as Shakespeare draws out in plays like Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar etc. Why Shakespeare agreed to ostensibly serve the agenda of the absolutist Tudor state that he criticized could possibly be found in greater hatred of the private civil power of the nobility and their tendency conservative rebellion. Even some Enlightenment reformers opposed the restoration of parliament at the cost of reinvigorating the private power of the nobility. Fitter notes that the laws punishing workers and vagrants passed by parliament were more brutal then what Tudor bureaucrats were willing to enforce. Perhaps Shakespeare's republicanism was not of his time or of the Kingdom but that of an implicit future republic, the old dream of a commonwealth without gentry.

    Lastly, it should be noted that Antonio provides a cogent critique of usury in The Merchant of Venice a goldmine of class conflict that unfortunately is not treated to an-depth reading by Fitter. Antonio's practice of lending out money gratis is closer to the program of Enlightenment economics and business ethics then Shylock's vicious creditor ideology. While Shylock's loan is zero-interest the punishment for breaking is designed to bring about the death of his competitor.  Shylock's obsession with making sterile money breed more money to paraphrase Antonio leads him to seek a man's life to please a creditor's whim. The creditor's drive to seek more and more of his debtors property and labor until he bleeds both the debtor and society at large is critiqued as Shylock seeks Antonio's life in place of greater monetary compensation as punishment for breaking the bond. Shylock comes to embody the inhuman nature of the creditor as the simple mathematics of compound interest inevitably grows beyond the ability of society and the individual to pay.  Unswayed by reason and emotion Shylock acts almost as if he himself is the slave of the legal trapping of his bond replying to all counter-offers merely with: "it isn't in the bond." In reply to Antonio's critique of usury in the opening of the play Shylock tells a fallacious story about two rams coming of age--a common metaphor and echo of babylonian ideas about debt. Antonio's counter-reply that money isn't like sheep that it doesn't produce any product other then itself is hotly though again fallaciously met with the charge that dogs do not have money. As a sidenote, usury is also condemned in  Judaism itself if not as strongly as in Christianity. While Antonio clearly comes closer to Shakespeare's idea of proper business ethics as he aims to enhance the wealth of venice with his fleets and generous zero-interest loans to fellow entrepreneurs it is only the fact that he is a Christian and therefore allowed to own property that permits him to be so generous and follow proper business ethics. Shylock's defense of his absolute property-rights as a creditor is justified by the widespread practice of chattel slavery in Venice and thus by seeing the slaveholder and the creditor in symbiosis and alliance as it was in the Ancient world and in biblical pro-debtor discourses thus offers an implicit critique of slavery as an institution to the audience. Shylock draws out the comparison so clearly between the rights of the creditor and the rights of the slaveowner that the audience cannot find Shylock to be acting unjustly while condoning chattel slavery at the same time. It is a mistake to see Shylock as a noble character as some critics seem to but he is rendered as a human one who is driven to such extremes partly by the discrimination he suffers from. That Shakespeare can condemn usury, chattel slavery, and anti-semitism all at the same time indicates a startling radicality to my mind.

     A burning question to consider now is: was Shakespeare more radical then his contemporaries? Or was he one radical dramatist among a coterie of radical dramatists of his generation? The former proposition seems unlikely to me as he never drew the ire of the censors and authorities in the way Jonson, whom Fitter sees embodied in the bi-polar Jaques, nor did he pay the ultimate price as Kyd did. Of course lack of repression is not proof of lack of radicalism. But I personally have not so far seen anything in Shakespeare's canon like Johnson's play The Alchemist which is made up almost entirely of common characters. That is understandable too since Jonson's father was bricklayer and not a wool merchant like Shakespeare's father. The question of who was the most radical playwright in renaissance England is personally more interesting to me then the question of who was aesthetically superior.  Hopefully Fitter will seek to resolve this and other questions in the second volume.