# Quote — Jason Hickel, The Divide

> From his base on , the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the – 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.

- Author: [Jason Hickel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel.md)
- Book: [The Divide](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel/the-divide.md)
- Page: 70
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel#The_Divide:_Global_Inequality_from_Conquest_to_Free_Markets_(2018)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel/the-divide/from-his-base

## More from this book

> If we dig behind the rhetoric, it becomes clear that Western support for right-wing coups had little to do with Cold War ideology, and certainly nothing to do with promoting democracy (quite the opposite!); the goal, rather, was to defend Western economic interests. The veil of the Cold War has obscured this blunt fact from view.

p. 140 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel/the-divide/if-we-dig.md)

> To get a sense of how extreme is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths.

p. 281 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel/the-divide/to-get-a-sense.md)

> People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of . The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral s – with reams of new laws, backed up by the of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the has known ever since the in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's , free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and .

p. 218 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jason-hickel/the-divide/people-commonly-think.md)