The Slave Economies in Political Perspective

Abstract

The economic interpretations of the slave economies of the New World, as well as those social interpretations which adopt the neoclassical economic model but leave the economics out, assume everything they must prove. By retreating from the political economy from which their own methods derive, they ignore the extent to which the economic process permeates the society. They ignore, that is, the interaction between economics, narrowly defined, and the social relations of production on the one hand and state power on the other. For any economic system remains not merely a method of allocating scarce resources, but a system that, at least on the margin and frequently more pervasively, commands those scarce resources. Even an international market such as that which prevailed in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depends heavily on the state formations that guarantee the ultimate command of economic goods. Neoclassical economists achieve their theoretical sophistication by falling silent on the social relations of production that ultimately determine the prices of commodities in the market. In other words, these economists mystify reality by abstracting prices from the social relations of production and then blithely assuming that their abstraction provides an effective analytic substitute for those social relations. Even in a society such as our own where most facets of human life pass through the market, there remain pockets of nonpriced labor-for example, the household work of many women and the early reproduction of human capital. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, commercial capital organized the market and fed off it, but it did not evenly penetrate all productive sectors. Typically, commercial capital organized the surplus production of larger or smaller domestic units of labor before the transformation of labor-power into a commodity. In this respect, the slave plan-