World War Two
Published 21 Aug 2021The Axis advance in the Caucasus takes Mt. Elbrus, and the one on Stalingrad continues, and there are several raids of note this week- a Japanese one on Guadalcanal is destroyed, an Allied one on Dieppe is badly savaged, and an American one at Makin Atoll is successful in the short term, but with bad long term ramifications.
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August 23, 2021
Swastika Raised on Highest Point in Europe – WW2 – 156 – August 21, 1942
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August 21, 2021
In this matter Canada apes the US rather than following the great example provided by France
In The Line, Kevin Newman highlights the stark difference between what France has been doing to rescue their own citizens and Afghani civilians with ties to France with the utterly feckless Canadian government’s “effort”:
On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.
Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off.
And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.
On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground.
There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.
Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.
It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada” and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.
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August 20, 2021
“They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought”
The British government recalls Parliament to debate the situation in Afghanistan (not that there’s much to be done at this late stage, but formalities are at least being observed in a perfunctory manner):
The House of Commons was full, for the first time since last March. Members of Parliament had been brought back from their holidays, from West Country campsites and from Greek resorts, in a repatriation operation that puts the Foreign Office to shame.
They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought. It was only last month that Boris Johnson was assuring MPs that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”, although we now know that path was straight along the road to Kabul, as fast as their trucks could carry them.
Now Johnson was back to explain that things had turned out to be a bit more complicated than he thought. Or perhaps a bit simpler: we’ve gone, they’re back. Parliament was getting eight hours to discuss this, although it was too late to do very much about it. It wasn’t so much shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted as holding a long discussion about the history of equine care as the stallion in question disappeared over the horizon.
Still, the atmosphere was jolly. Many of these MPs haven’t seen each other in over a year. There was a first-day-of-term feel to things. With Parliament’s Covid restrictions lapsed, the Conservatives were wedged in together in the small, windowless chamber, barely a facemask in sight. The government’s instructions are still to wear masks in crowded places, but the Conservatives view Covid as some sort of socialist conspiracy that will go away if they ignore it. Or maybe they just feel that rules are for the little people.
Labour MPs had at least nodded to social distancing, sitting about 18 inches apart from each other. This is, admittedly, easier when there aren’t very many of you. The opposition benches were a sea of masks. Only the Democratic Unionists, who like the Tories see illness as a sign of moral failure, were a lone island of uncovered faces.
Johnson’s statement was, as ever, a masterpiece of bare adequacy. It eloquently just about dealt with the matter in question, magisterially pretty much covering the bases. The speechwriters, one sensed, must have been working on the words late into the previous afternoon. They had gone through as many as one draft as they tried to come up with something that, if it didn’t deal with every complex nuance of the Afghan tragedy, at least asked the question that Johnson lives by: “Will this do?”
The situation in Afghanistan was a “concern”, the prime minister explained, with what might, in another context, have been a brilliantly comic understatement. Over the past 20 years, the British had worked for a better future for the people of Afghanistan. “Some of this progress,” the prime minister said, “is fragile”, which is certainly one way of putting it.
What had gone wrong with our intelligence services, several people asked, that they had so comprehensively failed to see this coming? Be fair, replied Johnson, even the Taliban had been surprised by the speed of their own advance.
On the US Naval Institute Blog, CDRSalamander notes the only speech in the House of Commons during that debate that grabbed and held the attention of the entire body:
Let’s back away from the problem at hand a bit … and then back up further. I mentioned it earlier, but let’s bring it up again; national humiliation. There are different aspects of this growing humiliation that are already manifesting itself, the first of which is how others look at us.
Let’s start with our closest friend and take a moment to listen to a speech earlier today in the British House of Commons by Tom Tugendhat, MP.
The mission in Afghanistan wasn’t a British mission, it was a Nato mission. … And so it is with great sadness that I now criticise one of them. … To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with — to claim that they ran. It is shameful. … this is a harsh lesson for all of us and if we are not careful it could be a very, very difficult lesson for our allies. … to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we can work together with Japan and Australia, with France and Germany, with partners large and small, and make sure we hold the line together.
That is our closest friend outlining a loss of confidence. That is just one datapoint from a friend, but it is safe to say that it is probably somewhere in the center of opinion.
What are those nations who are not our friends thinking? I don’t think I need to spend all that much time on discussing how emboldened they are. It is self-evident to anyone who reads USNIBlog.
On the ground, troops of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment are actively involved in escorting British and Afghani civilians from safe houses to Kabul airport for evacuation:
At least one NATO country hasn’t forgotten the civilians who have been left behind during the precipitate withdrawal by US troops.
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August 18, 2021
Historically, empires have fallen over decades or centuries …
… today, however, everything seems to move much faster than it used to:
The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).
America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:
State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government
The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”
Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:
Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’
Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality. Here is their Kabul correspondent, Clarissa Ward, reporting on Sunday:
And here is the same Miss Ward reporting on Monday:
Gee, did anyone back at the anchor desk ask her what’s with the wardrobe switcheroo?
Just for the record, the Kingdom of Afghanistan introduced votes for women in 1964 – whereas Switzerland did not get even a very limited female franchise until 1971, and full suffrage not until the Nineties.
Yet, oddly, every Pushtun warlord prefers to keep his retirement account in Zurich.
Maybe, after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, you State Department arses might have enough humility to recognize that that that big messy world is subtler than your one-size-fits-all clichés.
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August 17, 2021
Mark Steyn – “The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it”
The collapse of western — specifically American — control in Afghanistan got put on fast forward and the US dying media can’t be bothered to give it much attention. Mark Steyn didn’t explicitly predict this particular high-speed collapse, but he’s been warning about the Afghan situation for over a decade:
A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com
To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:
Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.
That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:
Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise
You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?
But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:
Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns
Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours — which is close enough for US intelligence work.
Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election — and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?
Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency — most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.
To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?
Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.
So what’s the point?
Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!
The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network — the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese — is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians … as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).
On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.
Of course, retreating from Kabul is kind of a western military tradition:
Remnants of an Army (1879) by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The remnants of an army, Jellalabad (sic), January 13, 1842, better known as Remnants of an Army, is an 1879 oil-on-canvas painting by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler. It depicts William Brydon, assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, arriving at the gates of Jalalabad in January 1842. The walls of Jalalabad loom over a desolate plain and riders from the garrison gallop from the gate to reach the solitary figure bringing the first word of the fate of the “Army of Afghanistan”.
Supposedly Brydon was the last survivor of the approximately 16,000 soldiers and camp followers from the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and is shown toiling the last few miles to safety on an exhausted and dying horse. In fact a few other stragglers from the Army eventually arrived, and larger numbers were eventually released or rescued after spending time as captives of Afghan forces.
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August 15, 2021
No Soviet Oil for Hitler – WW2 – 155 – August 14, 1942
World War Two
Published 14 Aug 2021The Axis advance into the Caucasus is going great … except the oil towns they take have no oil, and wasn’t that the whole purpose? Meanwhile in the Pacific, the US Navy is suffering perhaps its greatest defeat ever off Savo Island, even as the Marines take Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo.
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August 14, 2021
Infantry Weapons at Guadalcanal – WW2 Special
Update: The folks at the World War Two channel have taken down this video due to technical errors in the script. Here’s their explanation.
World War Two
21 hours ago
Video on Infantry Arms at Guadalcanal retracted. Indy explains why:Hi everyone. Indy here. As most of you know, I do the research and writing for all of the regular weekly episodes here. I host many of the specials as well, though I do not do the research for most of them- occasionally so, if it’s something that’s really in my field of expertise, like geopolitics, strategy, personal stories, communications, and international relations. The research for the other specials is done by a variety of specialists in their fields or historians, so we can maintain the quality you’ve come to expect from us. I understand, though, that many of you have serious issues with the research for the Guadalcanal infantry special. Our apologies for that- the research was done by an historian, a PhD [student], actually, and we also ensured it was double fact-checked, but obviously some serious mistakes slipped through. Live and learn. I will say that I think it is important that you continue to tell us when you take issue with something we present, since we strive to make the most complete and accurate documentary series possible, so although some of them are hard to read we appreciate such feedback from our community.
And this is from the researcher who worked on the script:
Marlon Londoño
18 hours ago
Hey guys! This is Marlon, the PhD student in question who helped with the researching and writing of the episode. Just to give a little background, I’m a volunteer researcher who helps with the channel over the summer while I’m not teaching/researching/taking coursework. I’m a military historian and my main academic focus is on social and cultural military history (i.e. what people’s wartime experiences were like and why. I’m especially interested in how people justify wartime violence and oftentimes the types of weapons they use play a role in that mental process, so that’s the context in which I usually think about weapons on the battlefield).I’m sorry that I let a lot of you down with the mistakes about the Garand and Arisaka, among others. To be honest, I was surprised to learn they were myths. But I certainly know now, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting any time soon 😅 One thing that I firmly believe as a researcher and educator is that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, least of all me. I tell that to my students on the first day of class each semester. I certainly don’t presume that the degree I’m pursuing makes me infallible or instantly qualified for anything. And this was a classic example of just how wrong I can be sometimes!
For what it’s worth, I love war history just as much as anyone else in the community, and I’m sorry that my research wasn’t as rigorous as it might otherwise have been. I hope you all might be willing to give any future episodes of mine a second chance, and of course I’m all ears for any mistakes that you want to point out!
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August 12, 2021
QotD: Ignoring the warnings
… on Dec. 7, 1941, a U.S. Army Air Force lieutenant was spending his first-ever shift with a radar unit atop some Hawaiian high ground. Radar was brand new technology, and the U.S. was still figuring out how to best use it. The poor lieutenant watched on a scope as a big blob of something approached the naval base. He assumed it was a bunch of friendly planes coming in from the U.S. — what else would it be, right? Besides, even if he had been worried, there was no established protocol to sound an alarm. Forty-some-odd years before the release of Ghostbusters, the poor lieutenant was living the iconic tagline — when there’s a big mass of planes flying toward your base, who ya gonna call? And so the lieutenant and his men could only watch Japan’s massively successful attack on the U.S. fleet, an attack that caught the American defenders totally unprepared, with sailors asleep in their racks and senior officers golfing or breakfasting. There had been some intelligence warnings that Japan was up to something, but no one guessed that an attack on Hawaii was imminent. Not even the guys who quite literally saw it coming.
Let’s jump forward a few decades: in 1973, Israeli military intelligence was fully aware of a huge build-up of men and weapons on its borders with Syria and Egypt. The mobilizations were impossible to hide — tens of thousands of troops, tanks, artillery, the whole apparatus of modern warfare was lining up across Israel’s borders. But Israel’s top military intelligence officer concluded that the build-up was intended to apply political pressure ahead of negotiations, not actually to prepare for an assault. Israel was militarily superior, after all, and had handily defeated the combined Arab armies before, including just six years prior. The Arabs simply wouldn’t dare try again. Right?
Wrong. They dared, Israel was caught totally by surprise, and the Jewish state came shockingly close to defeat and likely destruction.
Ideally, these kinds of mistakes — mistakes of preparedness, mistakes of erroneous conclusion — are studied, learned from and then never repeated. In the real world, of course, we tend to make the same mistakes over and over.
Matt Gurney, “How the COVID crisis broke our leaders’ minds”, The Line, 2021-04-23.
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August 11, 2021
The Symphony That Defeated the Wehrmacht – WAH 040 – August 1942, Pt .1
World War Two
Pubished 10 Aug 2021The Big Action at the Warsaw Ghetto continues, while The Japanese carry out retaliations against the Chinese for aiding American airmen. Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony no. 7” premieres in the besieged city of Leningrad.
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August 9, 2021
1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 6 May 2020In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies erupted in the most explosive volcanic eruption in human history. The explosion affected the world’s climate, changing history in surprising ways. The History Guy recalls the forgotten history of the year without a summer.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
You can purchase the “offshore” bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
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teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyScript by THG
#volcano #thehistoryguy #history
From the comments:
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
11 months ago
A viewer complained that much of the footage of volcanoes were volcanoes dissimilar to Tambora. Notably, Tambora is a stratovolcano. Lava from stratovolcano eruptions tends to be very viscous and cools quickly, whereas much of the footage in the episode is from shield volcanos in Hawaii, which produce free-flowing lava. Please understand that I can only use media in the Public Domain. I did not mean to misinform the audience by using the available footage and photographs.
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QotD: Leonid Brezhnev and his mother
It’s not really a paradox. Communism is just a con. When the true believers get in the way of the con, they have to be shut up.
The old Soviet joke went like this: General Secretary Brezhnev shows his mother his palatial apartment in Moscow, his fancy dacha in the countryside, his chauffer-driven limousine, his personal helicopter, etc. and says “See mom, I’ve really made it. Aren’t you proud?”
“Very much so,” she says. “But I’m worried, too.”
“What are you worried about?” asks Brezhnev.
“Well, Leonid — what if the communists come back?”
Glenn Reynolds, “This Reminds Me Of The Old Soviet Joke About Leonid Brezhnev And His Mother”, Instapundit, 2018-11-24.
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August 8, 2021
Guadalcanal – Allies Take the Initiative – WW2 – 154 – August 7, 1942
World War Two
Published 7 Aug 2021The Axis Forces are on the move on the Eastern Front and in the Caucasus, but this week the Allies begin an offensive of their own: this week come Allied landings and attacks on Guadalcanal and nearby islands, the first American offensive against the Japanese.
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August 1, 2021
Not a Step Back! – Wehrmacht Closes in on Stalingrad – WW2 – 153 – July 31, 1942
World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2021Operation Edelweiss opens with a blast, and as the Wehrmacht closes in on Stalingrad, Stalin issues that famous order. There aren’t just big actions in the East, the Japanese have landed in New Guinea, the Allies try one more offensive at El Alamein, and the Americans have locked in on Guadalcanal.
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Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell
DailyHitchens
Published 22 Jan 2010Aug 7, 2009. Christopher Hitchens talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talks about Orwell’s opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens makes the case for why Orwell matters. For more videos, updates and info on Christopher Hitchens, please visit http://www.dailyhitchens.com
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July 31, 2021
English sea-borne trade in the early 17th century
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes reviews a book on English trade … a very old book:
I’ve become engrossed this week by a book written in 1638 by the merchant Lewes Roberts — The Marchant’s Mappe of Commerce. It is, in effect, a guide to how to be a merchant, and an extremely comprehensive one too. For every trading centre he could gather information about, Roberts noted the coins that were current, their exchange rates, and the precise weights and measures in use. He set down the various customs duties, down even to the precise bribes you’d be expected to pay to various officials. In Smyrna, for example, Roberts recommended you offer the local qadi some cloth and coney-skins for a vest, the qadi‘s servant some English-made cloth, and their janissary guard a few gold coins.
Unusually for so many books of the period, Roberts was also careful to be accurate. He often noted whether his information came from personal experience, giving the dates of his time in a place, or whether it came second-hand. When he was unsure of details, he recommended consulting with better experts. And myths — like the rumour he heard that the Prophet Muhammad’s remains at Mecca were in an iron casket suspended from the ceiling by a gigantic diamond-like magnet called an adamant — were thoroughly busted. Given his accuracy and care, it’s no wonder that the book, in various revised editions, was in print for almost sixty years after his death. (He died just three years after publication.)
What’s most interesting about it to me, however, is Roberts’s single-minded view of English commerce. The entire world is viewed through the lens of opportunities for trade, taking note of the commodities and manufactures of every region, as well as their principal ports and emporia. A place’s antiquarian or religious tourist sites, which generally make up the bulk of so many other geographical works, are given (mercifully) short shrift. Indeed, because the book was not written with an international audience in mind, it also passes over many trades with which the English were not involved, or from which they were even excluded. It thus provides a remarkably detailed snapshot of what exactly English merchants were interested in and up to on the eve of civil war; and right at the tail end of a century of unprecedented growth in London’s population, itself seemingly led by its expansion of English commerce.
So, what did English merchants consider important? It’s especially illuminating about England’s trade in the Atlantic — or rather, the lack thereof.
Roberts spends remarkably little time on the Americas, which he refers to as the continents of Mexicana (North America) and Peruana (South America). Most of his mentions of English involvement are about which privateers had once raided which Spanish-owned colonies, and he gives especial attention to the seasonal fishing for cod off the coast of Newfoundland — a major export trade to the Mediterranean, and a source of employment to many English West Country farmers, who he refers to as being like otters for spending half their lives on land and the other half on sea.
But as for the recently-established English colonies on the mainland, which Roberts refers to collectively as Virginia, he writes barely a few sentences. Although he reproduces some of the propaganda about what is to be found there — no mention yet of tobacco by the way, with the list consisting largely of foodstuffs, forest products, tar, pitch, and a few ores — the entirety of New England is summarised only as a place “said to be” resorted to by religious dissenters. The island colonies on Barbados and Bermuda were also either too small or too recently established to merit much attention. To the worldly London merchant then, the New World was still peripheral — barely an afterthought, with the two continents meriting a mere 11 pages, versus Africa’s 45, Asia’s 108, and Europe’s 262.
The reason for this was that the English were excluded from trading directly with the New World by the Spanish. It was, as Roberts jealously put it, “shut up from the eyes of all strangers”. The Spanish were not only profiting from the continent’s mines of gold and silver, but he also complained of their monopoly over the export of European manufactures to its colonies there. It’s a striking foreshadowing of what was, in the eighteenth century, to become one of the most important features of the Atlantic economy — the market that the growing colonies would one day provide for British goods. Indeed, Roberts’s most common condemnation of the Spanish was for having killed so many natives, thereby extinguishing the major market that had already been there: “had not the sword of these bloodsuckers ended so many millions of lives in so short a time, trade might have seen a larger harvest”. The genocide had, in Roberts’s view, not only been horrific, but impoverished Europe too (he was similarly upset that the Spanish had slaughtered so many of the natives of the Bahamas, known for the “matchless beauty of their women”).
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