Abstract
Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and periphery. Namely, we challenge the notion that these zones consist of geographical spaces that, since very early in the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production of raw materials (periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have been trans-historically relatively free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in peripheral ones. We argue that, prior to the nineteenth century, the world-economy is not only characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various forms of labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but also one in which core-like and peripheral activities (that is, those providing access to relatively greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly bounded geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that a longue-durée analysis of sugar production by enslaved labor illustrates not merely processes of peripheralization, but of what we call coreification.
Highlights
This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
The narrative presented in this contribution belies the idea that nodes in a commodity chain are, by virtue of their location in a hierarchical network, “core” or “peripheral.” Instead, we emphasize that a better understanding of these commodity chains requires a focus on substance over formalism, or how various dimensions of creative destruction are manifested in particular times and places
As indicated in this paper, the expansion of the sugar commodity chain can be understood as driven by successive innovations in overlapping spheres, including technological changes in the organization of production from field to refinery, in forms of labor control, in geographical expansion and relocation, in the organization of consumption markets, and in the networks involved in trade
Summary
This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. It is problematic to a priori or retrospectively assume which economic activities have been “core” or “peripheral”—from a more world-historical perspective, whether activities are core or peripheral (i.e., the profits they yield), is contingent upon constantly changing forces of production and competition (Arrighi 1990; Arrighi and Drangel 1986; Karatasli 2017).2 This is why Giovanni Arrighi (1999: 125) indicates that world-system analysts, must be prepared to unthink what many...have come to regard as the quintessence of world-systems theory. This is the idea that, in spite of their extraordinary geographical expansion, the structures of the world capitalist system have remained more or less the same ever since they first came into existence in the ‘long’ sixteenth century... [This] hypothesis does not stand up to historico-empirical scrutiny, and even worse, it prevents us from getting at the heart of the capitalist dynamics, both past and present.
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