Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2828754
AutoresJohn Tutino (Georgetown University, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume99
Fascículo2
Páginas372-374
Data de publicação2019-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7370478
OpenAlexW2942933885
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas14

This volume makes important contributions to the search for a new, more integrated history of the Americas. It explores the expansion and intensification during the industrial revolution of production grounded in slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the US South—what Dale Tomich long ago labeled the second slavery, emphasizing its distinct characteristics and pivotal ties to the industrial power rising in northwest Europe and northeast North America. The authors make it clear that while local, regional, national, and industrial studies remain essential, ultimately there can be no separate histories of the United States and Latin America, of industrial transformations and expansions of slavery—if our goal is to understand the changing lives of the hemisphere's peoples as they faced the rise of industrial capitalism.Five chapters take diverse approaches toward a common goal. Robin Blackburn, arguably the leading historian of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, sketches a new synthesis of New World slavery's role in the origins and transformation of the world economy. He long saw plantation slavery as essential to the rise of early modern trade, arguing that slavery thus contributed to the rise of capitalism but ultimately was not capitalist due to its forced, nonmarket labor relations. In Blackburn's chapter here, plantation slavery remains essential to the first global economy, transformed after 1800 to become a second slavery pivotal to early industrial capitalism. The question emerges: If slavery was essential to the early modern world economy (for many, an original commercial capitalism) and inextricably bound to the rise of industrial capitalism, should we continue to see slavery as distinct from capitalism, or should we recognize it as a foundational means of production, labor, and trade pivotal to capitalism as it evolved through centuries? It is a conversation worth engaging.Dale Tomich follows with a conceptual analysis focused on the contributions and limits of the new economic history of slavery energized decades ago by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Tomich emphasizes the constraints imposed by economic assumptions that focus on individuals, markets, and productivity and that rely primarily on quantitative data to analyze slavery as a way of work and production. (The new economic historians thus implicitly recognized slave-based production as capitalist—applying ways of analysis built to understand and promote capitalism.) Tomich resists the presumption of an economic domain separate from politics, social relations, and culture. He notes that the analytical separation of the economic domain facilitated the rise of countervisions presuming separate cultural domains, together driving a fragmentation of historical studies. Tomich argues for a history of capitalism that reintegrates history: production and politics, labor and social relations, and culture (and I would add gender).Three chapters then engage the histories and historiographies of the second slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. José Antonio Piqueras traces the long tradition of studies of Cuban slavery by Cuban and international scholars. He details evolving questions and conversations, noting the limiting impact of the revolutionary regime on research and debates after 1959. He emphasizes the revival in recent decades of innovative approaches focused on slavery's centrality to Cuba's historical foundations, leading to new debates. Rafael Marquese and Ricardo Salles take a parallel approach to Brazil, where political constraints came from the military regime that took power in 1964. These authors also emphasize a vibrant emergence of innovative studies of slavery in recent decades—laden with debates deriving from distinct approaches, economic and cultural.The concluding chapter, by Anthony Kaye, integrates the volume. While focused on new histories of the second slavery in the US South and their innovative integration of economic, social, and cultural developments in the context of transatlantic industrialism's rise, he places the United States in a comparative framework with Cuba and Brazil. Cuba emerges as the most technologically innovative, its sugar boom tying slavery to industrial engines; Brazil led in sustaining slavery across diverse economic and social sectors as the country built a newly dominant coffee economy on the backs of enslaved workers. Kaye argues for a less exceptional nineteenth-century US slavery. Still, it remained exceptionally contradictory—expanding demographically and geographically in a nation adamantly proclaiming a republic of liberty while its slave-grown cotton sustained the rise of industrial England, where so many ideologues and policymakers proudly proclaimed opposition to slavery as they took profit and power from its expansion.Tomich and his colleagues work to integrate economic and sociocultural understandings of slavery after 1800 across the hemisphere in the context of the rise of industrial capitalism. These are conversations worth joining and expanding. The volume explores Atlantic America—in a hemisphere where since the sixteenth century Spanish American societies from the Andes to California mobilized diverse ways of production and social relations (including slavery) tied to a changing global capitalism. As conversations reach to include all the Americas, a new history and new debates will emerge

Capitalism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Industrial Revolution · Latin Americans · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law