american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 223ing the indigenous people. The English and later the Americans, in fact,destroyed at least as high a percentage of the Indians they encountered asearlier had the Spanish, probably higher; it was only their means and motivationthat contrasted with those of the conquistadors. To understandboth the savagery of the Anglo-American genocide against the NorthAmerican natives, and the characteristics that made it different from theearlier Spanish genocide, requires a brief glance at the political economyof Britain when its first New World explorations and settlements werebeing launched, then a look at Anglo-American religious and racial attitudes,and finally a return to the economic realities not of England, but ofthe colonies themselves.While Spain in the sixteenth century was overextending its primitive economywith expensive imperial adventures, thereby driving itself to financialruin, England was developing into one of what Immanuel Wallerstein hascalled "the strong core states" of northwest Europe that in time wouldbecome "the economic heartland of the European world-economy." UnlikeSpain, England during this time had a strong export trade in manufacturedgoods, and although it ran a net deficit in its economic relationshipwith France, this was more than made up for by a favorable balance oftrade elsewhere.7 4 It was a time of relative political stability and low taxation,including no personal taxes at all. One historian has made clear thecontrast between late sixteenth-century Spain and England with a singletelling statistic: "While in Spain Philip II may have absorbed 10 percent ofCastile's national income to pay for his wars in the 1580s and 1590s,"Ralph Davis writes, "it is doubtful whether in the same years Elizabeth I,at her wits' end to meet war expenses, took more than 3 percent of thenational income for them." 75For better or for worse-and it was both-England's population wasgrowing rapidly at this time as well. From approximately 2,500,000 at thetime of Columbus's birth in the mid-1400s, it had doubled to about5,000,000 by 1620, when the first permanent British colony was beingfounded in New England. Although the overall economy was comparativelyhealthy, the nation contained large masses of desperately poor andpotentially dangerous people. The government's response included the passageof poor laws-which drove the poor out of the towns and cities andinto marginal rural areas-and the encouragement of migration out of thecountry altogether. Private individuals, like the famous advocate of explorationRichard Hakluyt, joined in the call to settle England's poor andcriminal classes outside the realm, where their conditions and habits mightfind "hope of amendement." 76The first significant move of imperial expansion by the British at thistime was into Ireland. Here, the intent of the English was in some wayssimilar-if on a far smaller scale-to that of the Spanish in the Indies: to