Slavery and the new history of capitalism

Trevor Burnard,Giorgio Riello

doi:10.1017/s1740022820000029

Trevor Burnard, Giorgio Riello

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s1740022820000029

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Abstract

AbstractThe new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production

Highlights

The study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism by mainstream historians has exploded in the last decade, celebrating what has been termed by its proponents the ‘new history of capitalism’ movement (NHC).1 The NHC has been trying to find its shared agenda
Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South
The NHC methodological orientation – seldom expressed directly – is mostly derived from Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, not from debates on the Great Divergence.14. It stresses the transformative role of American raw cotton in British industrialization after the invention of the cotton gin, but provides a narrow view of economic change, in which slavery and the plantation economy are taken as the sole motor of early modern global economic change

Summary

Introduction

The study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism by mainstream historians has exploded in the last decade, celebrating what has been termed by its proponents the ‘new history of capitalism’ movement (NHC). The NHC has been trying to find its shared agenda. The NHC methodological orientation – seldom expressed directly – is mostly derived from Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, not from debates on the Great Divergence.14 It stresses the transformative role of American raw cotton in British industrialization after the invention of the cotton gin, but provides a narrow view of economic change, in which slavery and the plantation economy are taken as the sole motor of early modern global economic change. The NHC has critically revised the analytical categories that organized previous work, leading to a subtle shift in the storyline from proletarianization to commodification.16 It resists debates over origins and transitions from earlier forms of economic organization to industrial capitalism, a movement in which traditionally nineteenth-century slavery is presented as both pre-capitalist and an anachronism..

Slavery and capitalism revisited

The chronology of slavery and cotton

The power of consumption

Findings

Conclusion