Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

350 DEBT
to the Peruvian company that had commissioned them, which was ultimately
receiving its own credit from London financiers. These agents
had certainly arrived with every intention of extending that web of
credit to include the Indians, but discovering the Huitoto to have no
interest in the cloth, machetes, and coins they had brought to trade
with them, they'd finally given up and just started rounding Indians
up and forcing them to accept loans at gunpoint, then tabulating the
amount of rubber they owed.95 Many of the Indians massacred, in turn,
had simply been trying to run away.
In reality, then, the Indians had been reduced to slavery; it's just
that, by 1907, no one could openly admit this. A legitimate enterprise
had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company
knew was debt. When it became clear that the Huitoto rejected the
premise, everything went haywire, and the company ended up, like Casimir,
caught in a spiral of indignant terror that ultimately threatened
to wipe out its very economic basis.
I I I I I
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized
primarily around free labor.96 The conquest of the Americas
began with mass enslavement, then gradually settled into various forms
of debt peonage, African slavery, and "indentured service"-that is,
the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance
and were thus bound for five-, seven-, or ten-year terms to pay it
back. Needless to say, indentured servants were recruited largely from
among people who were already debtors. In the 16oos there were at
times almost as many white debtors as African slaves working in
southern plantations, and legally they were at first in almost the same
situation, since in the beginning, plantation societies were working
within a European legal tradition that assumed slavery did not exist,
so even Africans in the Carolinas were classified, as contract laborers.97
Of course this later changed when the idea of "race" was introduced.
When African slaves were freed, they were replaced, on plantations
from Barbados to Mauritius, with contract laborers again: though now
ones recruited mainly in India or China. Chinese contract laborers
built the North American railroad system, and Indian "coolies" built
the South African mines. The peasants of Russia and Poland, who had
been free landholders in the Middle Ages, were only made serfs at the
dawn of capitalism, when their lords began to sell grain on the new
world market to feed the new industrial cities to the west.98 Colonial
regimes in Africa and Southeast Asia regularly demanded forced labor