The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

whatever we want.’ During his second expedition, this time with seventeen ships and 1,200 men, Columbus travelled around the Caribbean capturing thousands of indigenous Americans to be sent back and sold in Spain as slaves. But this time his real objective was gold. He had noticed the indigenous people wearing gold ornaments and assumed that the metal must be abundant in the region. Yet he was having a difficult time finding the source, so he resorted to coercive measures. From his base on Hispaniola, the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the Arawaks – to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Men were forced to spend their lives in mines, stripping the mountains in search of gold. Up to a third of workers died every six months. Within two years of the Spanish invasion, some 125,000 people had been killed – half the island’s population. Most of the remaining inhabitants of Hispaniola were forced into slave labour on plantations. A few decades later, only a few hundred Arawaks remained alive.