Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century

217 Pages·2017·0.934 MB·English

by  Dale Tomich

i
Slavery and Historical
Capitalism during
the Nineteenth Century

Slavery and Historical
Capitalism during
the Nineteenth Century
Edited by
Dale Tomich
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-4985-6583-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4985-6584-4 (electronic)
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Anthony E. Kaye (1962–2017), our friend and colleague.

Contents
Introduction ix
Dale Tomich
1 Why the Second Slavery? 1
Robin Blackburn
2 Slavery in Historical Capitalism: Toward a Theoretical History
of the Second Slavery 37
Dale Tomich
3 Historical Slavery and Capitalism in Cuban Historiography 67
José Antonio Piqueras
4 Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: History
and Historiography 123
Rafael Marquese and Ricardo Salles
5 The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century
South and the Atlantic World 171
Anthony E. Kaye
Index 197
About the Contributors 201
vii

Introduction
This book contributes to the renewal of the debate over slavery and capital-
ism. The concept of the second slavery provides a perspective through which
various historiographical traditions are brought are brought into relation to
one another in the framework of Atlantic and world history. This approach
at once recuperates older historiographies and proposes new problems and
perspectives for future research and interpretation.
The concept of the “second slavery” (see Tomich 2004) represents the
attempt to account for the spatial and temporal specificity of the new frontiers
of slave commodity production—cotton in the US South, sugar in Cuba and
coffee in Brazil—during the period between the 1820s and 1888 when slav-
ery was abolished in Brazil. These zones of the second slavery are of special
interest because their development runs counter to prevailing interpretations
of slavery in the Americas. They were formed as parts of a distinct cycle of
economic and geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy that
transformed the Atlantic world. This cycle was a part of the world-economic
processes of industrialization, urbanization and the restructuring of world
markets. These three zones, which had been relatively marginal during the
eighteenth century, turned into dynamic poles of the expansion of slavery to
meet the growing world demand for cotton as an industrial raw material, and
sugar and coffee for consumption by working and middle classes concen-
trated in the urban centers of the North Atlantic. Their emergence established
new commodity circuits that were firmly integrated into the emergent indus-
trial division of labor.
Thus, in contrast to colonial slavery, the new zones of the second slavery
presupposed the existence of productive capital and competitive world mar-
kets and were a condition for the reproduction of the latter. However, the
formation of this new Atlantic division of labor was not just the result of
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