Problem: Can you please help me summarize this.
Author Luisa Farah Schwartzman argues that historians have normalized racial group membership and skewed histories of early European governments. According to her, actions like this undermine efforts to eradicate prejudice. Schwartzman argues that "decolonial research" has enabled indigenous and African peoples to regain their autonomy by reinvigorating traditional social and political institutions. The vast army, large staff, and large number of slaves that Nzinga Mbandi brought to the Portuguese colonial capital of Luanda in 1621 are all still there. She fought against the conquerors' efforts to generalize about Africans and advocated for equality between the Portuguese and Africans.
Structuralist perspectives on race, prevalent in contemporary sociology and other disciplines, attribute contemporary racial inequalities to historical events like slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism. In doing so, they tend to overemphasize European influence and underrepresent the contributions of African, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic peoples via their own networks of institutions and organizations. How the social linkages that had connected precolonial governments and societies together were unmade and altered is crucial to understanding the processes that led to the establishment of colonial states and racially split communities. Discover how Indigenous, African, and European peoples overcame internal and external social and political divides to attain complicated political objectives in this article. All of the initiative in Winant's and Feagin's resistance stories comes from Europeans and white descendants in the Americas.
These writers assert that non-Europeans are unable to stop the oppression they face and have no choice but to resort to futile armed resistance. Since group identification is so common, the word "confusing" has become fashionable for describing differences among people from various communities. Consideration of the underlying social and political structures in Africa, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and Europe is necessary for comprehending the role that colonialism and slavery had in constructing racial hierarchies in the Atlantic World. Because of this, our conception of the past has to be revised. African, European, Indigenous, White, Black, Indian, etc. are all names that might have been used as a basis for classifying people.
By looking at how different civilizations were reformed throughout time, we can see how slavery and colonialism contributed to the modern world as we know it. Historian sociologists have noted shifts in the institutional underpinnings of political and military power. Dynastic families act as heads of state in their portrayals of prenational nations, with the support of religious and family logics. The first modern nation-states emerged during the period when classical and modern methods of government were being applied. It has been suggested that Weber's concept of modernization entails the replacement of traditional forms of social control with a system based only on economic and rational bureaucratic links.
This, however, would imply that he thought market and rational forms were very unstable and only seldom existed on their own. Business and government leaders now instead sort the population into various classes based on subjective criteria and arbitrary classifications. Du Bois (1947) and Rodney (1972/2018) both provide pan-Africanist takes on the development of capitalism and contemporary nation-states. They claim that while Europe and its exiles gained from the system, Africa and its displaced people suffered. I zero in on a time when racial and colonial social structures hadn't yet taken root on both sides of the Atlantic.
While I still have the chance, I want to "unsee" the effects of colonial, national, and racial classifications and institutions. This in no way suggests that we see colonialism and slavery as occurring "without groups" (Brubaker, 2002). The Mexica (Aztec) Empire's capital of Tenochtitla was attacked by Spanish conquistadors as early as 1519. The majority of slaves sent to the Americas originated from West Central Africa. I shall focus only on the Anglo-American colonial experience when talking about slavery and colonialism.
The leader of the Spanish expedition, Herna Corte, dismounted as soon as he saw Montezuma coming. The Aztec ruler received several gifts from his court, including bouquets of flowers and gold jewelry. The Spanish conqueror Cortes invaded Mexico accompanied by a strong army that comprised natives and African slaves. So far, it seems that strong communication skills were just as important as sheer physical power. Even before violence breaks out in the city, there is a magnificent show of force, riches, and power on both sides.
When the Spanish arrived in what is now known as Mesoamerica, a bloody civil war was already underway in what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Montezuma needed to formulate a political strategy that accounted for not just the Spanish but also other potential challenges to his rule. While waiting for support from the Spanish and other Nahua, Cortes intended to treat Montezuma with respect and then challenge him militarily. The Spanish, who had been guests in Tenochtitlan for some time, sent an army of 900 troops to punish Corte for his disobedience. As the Spanish fought back with rifles and crossed the river on homemade bridges, Corte and his men were able to get away.
The Spanish didn't triumph over the Aztecs in the Battle of Tenochtitlan because they were inherently better than their opponents. Tlaxcala's armed citizenry flooded the streets to meet the oncoming Spanish invaders. A large number of Africans were enslaved and used as soldiers in the conquest.
As early as 1483, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Có reached the mouth of the Congo River. The Kongo king was very interested in Portuguese culture, particularly the religion and technology. After making his faith transition, he had a chapel constructed in the ornate Portuguese style. The tropical environment made it clear that traditional European agricultural methods wouldn't be effective. Both societies initially formed independently from one another, and their responses to European invaders and slavers varied.
A total of around 350,000 people were under the direct control of the Kongo kingdom in 1535, with a greater territory under its less absolute sovereignty. Initially, the kings and queens of these countries condoned slavery for prisoners of war and other criminals. Once kings began engaging in the Atlantic slave trade in the late sixteenth century, slavery quickly expanded. Bondage was at the bottom of Ndongo's social hierarchy, while dominance was at the top. Like Kongo, Ndongo limited who may be enslaved in order to protect free people and kikijos from being captured and forced into servitude.
With more people being sold into slavery across the globe, there was a corresponding rise in the population of mubikas. Colonization of S. Tomé Island in the Gulf of Guinea began under Portuguese rule in 1485. Historians use the term "Luso-Africans" to refer to many of their offspring and cultural allies. Within and beyond the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms, new and mixed-race peoples developed. New Christians were targeted by inquisitors in the sixteenth century because of a false belief that they were hiding Jews.
It's possible that new Christians in Africa may clash with European missionaries and the current church leadership. The Imbangalas were a people that originated in West Central Africa about the seventeenth century. Several times during the 1600s, Portuguese officials and missionaries tried to convert Ndongo monarchs to Christianity and then conquer them. Slave traffickers and slaveholding lords from So Tomé and Brazil posed a threat to the Portuguese crowns' ambitions to establish a powerful colonial power structure in Angola throughout the seventeenth century. Slave traders trailed troops and nabbed civilians attempting to flee the conflict.
Before the conflicts of the 17th century, slave dealers were reaping the rewards of the Atlantic slave trade. Slave trade, foreign invasion, and internal strife combined to wreak havoc on Angola in the seventeenth century. A number of African countries fought with officials from Portuguese and Dutch possessions. As mining in the Andes and the Mesoamerican Empire expanded, the Spanish recruited African slaves to complement Indigenous labor. Kings and queens of Africa sowed unrest in Europe to further their own interests.
King Pedro II of Kongo sought a military alliance with the Dutch in 1623. In order to make a nonaggression pact with the Portuguese, the Dutch betrayed their African friends. The Portuguese and the Dutch asked for help from Brazil while their armies battled in Africa. By 1656, Nzinga had abandoned his Imbangala roots and embraced Christianity. The Portuguese were successful in seizing many sobas, notably Matamba and Ndongo.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, regional monarchs began exchanging convicts for slaves, a sign of the demise of the Kongo monarchy. It is possible that the European colonial experience in Africa and the Americas, which gave rise to such institutions as slavery and colonialism, is responsible for many of the disparities that persist today. The anti-racism movement cannot progress until this past is confronted. False histories that downplay or completely erase the contributions of people of non-European origin are the foundation of racist ideas. The political and social institutions of early modern Europe, Mesoamerica, and West Central Africa's Indigenous and African peoples are often overlooked or oversimplified by historians.
By contrasting and comparing the two time periods, I am able to demonstrate their similarities, which are typically overlooked in standard accounts. Comparable caste systems existed in Europe, Mesoamerica, and West Central Africa. The transatlantic slave trade dramatically transformed the scale and nature of slavery. Terms like "black" and "Indian" were often employed by Europeans when writing about their interactions with people from Africa and the Americas. What evidence can we find in the development of transatlantic colonial and slavery systems that points to the genesis of social distinctions that we now call "racial?" The story's comparison of the lives of criminals and other social misfits in Europe and Africa highlights the growing commonalities between the two continents.