Atlantic Capitalism Research Articles

:Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

:<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>

Escaping Slavery by Sea in Antebellum America: A Labor History

This article explores a relatively neglected topic in the histories of slavery and abolitionism in the antebellum United States: how enslaved people escaped by sea and more specifically how the waterfront was a zone of struggle over slavery from roughly 1820 to 1865. The article treats four main themes: ships, trade, and port cities within the rise of Atlantic capitalism; life and work on the waterfront; efforts to control the docks from above; and the routes and destinations devised by escapees and their allies. Sailors, dockworkers, artisans, porters, market women, and seagoing fugitives cooperated and conspired in an alternative “public sphere,” using connections within the maritime working class to unleash a powerful though little understood force of abolitionism from below.

Trump, Zuma, Brexit: anti-Black racism and the truth of the world

ABSTRACT “Trump, Zuma, Brexit” aims to articulate a new theory of the “world historical” reversing the relationship of north and south – of “universal knowledge” and “raw fact” – instead establishing a theoretical ground from the southern hemisphere and toward the north. The echoes and parallels of the current political, economic, and social moment across the distinct national geographies of South Africa, the US, and the UK, suggest two things: one, that white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and extreme inequality are foundational to the current world order; and two, that South Africa offers a very particular perspective. The paradox of anti-Black racism in South Africa – the fact that Black people remain the primary extractive targets of racial capitalism despite the country’s democratic transition – begins to show how intractable the problem of racial capitalism is both in its geographical extent and given its historical reach from the moment of the rise of Atlantic capitalism into the present.

The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, by Trevor Burnard &amp; John Garrigus

The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, by Trevor Burnard &amp; John Garrigus

Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica.

Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica.

The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. By Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 350. $45.00, cloth.

The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. By Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 350. $45.00, cloth. - Volume 77 Issue 3

The origins of coastal ecological decline and the Great Atlantic Oyster Collapse

Changes to Earth systems threaten human and non-human sustainability because these changes undermine critical life support systems such as estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs), which are in systematic ecological decline. This article investigates the root social causes of coastal decline through the case of serial collapses of the Atlantic oyster (C. virginica), starting in New York in 1810. The research triangulates two methods, inductive historical political economy, and a reading of archival newspapers from 1607 to 1900 interpreted through a framework informed by Marxian attention to the flow of capital and the stages of capitalist development. The historical research indicates that the community-oriented classical republicanism of Jefferson, lost to the rise of a liberal republicanism in the period after the Revolutionary War and the early 19th century. This shift initiated the first stages of American capitalism, called “original accumulation,” that caused the first collapse of the native oyster beds. As capitalism matured into the “production” phase, industrial harvesting and development in the ECE destroyed the cultivated beds. In the archives, oysters are consistently framed as a commodity, not a part of a living seashore with needs. Recurring discourses of an “inexhaustible” industry, competition between states, and even “oyster wars” highlight the importance of the oyster as a commodity. In stories about depletion, the narratives are limited to the source of oysters seed to New York, or micro-depletions that complain of a lost favored brand and the search for its replacement. The origins of Atlantic ECE decline are found in the development of Atlantic capitalism.

John Locke and Colonial Capitalism: Money, Possession, and Dispossession

This paper offers a fresh perspective on possession and dispossession in Locke’s theory of property by focusing on his arguments on money and monetization. The long-standing (and presently dormant) debate on Locke’s ideas on private appropriation and capitalist accumulation has recently been compounded by revisionist scholarship that discloses his justifications of early-modern English colonialism and Amerindian dispossession. These controversies on possession and dispossession pivot mainly on how to interpret Locke’s labor theory of property. In contrast, I designate monetization and commercialization, rather than laboring, as the principal vector of both appropriation and expropriation in Locke’s theory. I contend that the adequate context for reconstructing Locke’s arguments on possession and dispossession is neither seventeenth-century England nor settler colonies in America, but the early-modern Atlantic economy as a network of intercontinental commodity chains that articulate different moments and modalities of expropriation, appropriation, and accumulation, and different regimes of free and unfree labor. Against this context, I concentrate on the crucial relationship between “non-consensual private appropriation” and “universally consensual monetization” as the intersection point of appropriation and expropriation in Locke’s theory. The optic of money, I conclude, reveals that “possessive individuals” (C. B. Macpherson) and “utilizable individuals” (James Tully) are not antithetical, but instead configure, together with “discardable individuals,” within the same analytic field of Atlantic colonial capitalism.

Trevor Burnard / John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine. Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2016

Trevor Burnard / John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine. Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2016

Numbers for the Innumerate: Everyday Arithmetic and Atlantic Capitalism.

In nineteenth-century America and the Atlantic world, the "rule of three" was usually regarded as the endpoint of a basic mathematics education. This essay considers the importance of the rule as a technology that enabled broader access to the calculations necessary to participate in the increasingly global market economy. Used by workmen, women, and even the enslaved, the rule and related tools translated basic literacy into practical numeracy. By doing so, it offered a diverse range of people the ability to negotiate more effectively. At the same time, however, the rule's spread helped to legitimate particular types of exchange and commensuration, and with them the emerging capitalist economy.

Hercules, the Hydra, and the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture

This article considers the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue, which was promulgated by Toussaint Louverture. It argues that this complex and contradictory constitution can be productively considered in the light of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's canonical work of Atlantic history, The Many-Headed Hydra. By this method, the presence of both radical emancipatory and anti-democratic currents within the Haitian Revolution is revealed. While the 1801 Constitution bears the influence of the “proletarian hydra” – its unequivocal abolition of slavery codified in law the revolutionary masses’ key demand – it also bears the interests of colonial Atlantic World capital. Finally, it is argued that the 1801 Constitution casts light on two profoundly different conceptions of freedom: a conservative conception emerging from “practical politics”, and the other, a more radical vision borne of the highly contingent experience of the African slave trade and the plantation system in the Americas.

Neoliberal Entrenchment of North Atlantic Capital. From Corporate Self-Regulation to State Capture

After the financial crisis of 2007–8, neoliberal capitalism by all appearances has entrenched instead of being displaced. Its political–economic programme or ‘comprehensive concept of control’ continues to hold society in thrall. This was different in the crisis of 1974–5 when the corporate liberalism of the postwar years and its industry-centred class compromise were beginning to be replaced by finance-led neoliberalism and a compromise with asset-owning middle classes. Under corporate liberalism, real capital accumulation was protected from the ‘rentier’/‘money-dealing’ fraction of capital associated with speculative investment; neoliberalism has allowed its resurgence. Large corporations in the first phase of the transition (‘systemic neoliberalism’) embarked on a strategy of transnational restructuring no longer dependent on 1960s-style state support. In the process, financial group formation, here measured by dense director interlocks (≥2) amongst the largest corporations in the North Atlantic economy (where this type of corporate governance obtains), was intensified. The resurgence of money-dealing capital and rentier incomes in the 1990s led to a decline in real accumulation (‘predatory neoliberalism’), and after the crisis of 2007–8, to a demise of the financial group structure of Atlantic capital as the network of dense interlocks radically thins out and capital comes to rely on states again, this time to protect it from a democratic correction of the neoliberal regime and with state autonomy greatly reduced by public debt.

Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. by John Tutino (review)

Reviewed by: Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. by John Tutino Nathaniel Millett Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. By John Tutino. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 712 pp. $99.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). John Tutino’s Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America is a richly detailed and impressively researched history of the rise of capitalism between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Bajío region, which is located northwest of Mexico City. Primarily focusing on the silver mining industry, Tutino argues that the development of capitalism in the Bajío and the region’s silver were central in the creation of a global economy that linked China, the Americas, Europe, and Africa during the early modern era. In the process of making this broad economic argument, Tutino admirably engages with social and cultural historical perspectives to produce a book that makes an important contribution to the fields of Latin American and world history. Making a New World is a large and dense book that, remarkably, is the first of two planned volumes. A prologue, introduction, eight chapters divided evenly into two four-chapter parts (“Making a New World,” which covers the period between 1500 and 1770, and “Forging Atlantic Capitalism,” which focuses on the years from 1770 to 1810 respectively), a conclusion, and epilogue span the first 492 pages. This is followed by seven appendices over 117 pages that present an array of statistical data. Forty-seven pages of notes, an eighteen-page bibliography, and a thirteen-page index round out a 698-page monograph. This is a lot and may well put off the reading public and even some scholars whose research interests do not directly intersect with Making a New World. However, others will appreciate Tutino’s tight and descriptive prose, which makes assessable topics as diverse as Fernand Braudel, Karl Marx, race in early modern New Spain, and globalization as the author deftly weaves between theory and narrative. Making a New World is organized chronologically in its attempt [End Page 210] to illustrate the centrality of Bajío silver in the global economy and the role that individuals and communities played in this process. The introduction lays out important topics such as early modern capitalism, Atlantic empires, trade, global history, patriarchy, ethnicity, and religion. These concepts provide the book with its theoretical underpinnings and serve, throughout the text, to provide the robust narrative with analytical life. The first four chapters cover the period between 1500 and 1770. Chapter 1 looks at Querétaro until 1660, with particular attention paid to the Chichimeca wars, the rise of a commercial economy, the coming of Christianity, and the role of silver in each of these developments. The second chapter examines the development of silver mining in the Bajío while paying close attention to the lives and shifting identities of the region’s increasingly diverse population. Chapter 3 explores the boom era between 1680 and the Seven Years War in which the Bajío’s cities and countryside developed a thriving production- and consumption-based economy. On the eve of the Seven Years War, as the result of this economic growth, the Bajío had developed clear social, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies as an array of people contributed to a dynamic regional economy that had continental and global repercussions. The fourth chapter shifts gears and examines the period between 1760 and 1767, when the Bajío was rocked by a series of uprisings that were born from decades of mounting tensions and triggered by the fallout from the Seven Years War. Unlike in the Anglo colonies to the north, these movements were largely quashed and, when combined with imperial reform, did not set the scene for later revolutions. Part 2 examines the period between 1770 and 1810. This was a particularly dynamic period in global history that was marked by political revolutions, imperial wars, and tremendous social and economic turbulence. In the Bajío this would prove to be a period of economic boom coupled with intense social and cultural pressures that...

The Prehistory of Possessive Individualism

One of the central tenets of liberal individualism holds that property rights and citizenship rights are based in self-possession, which is often defined as an original ownership of one's own labor potential. In this short essay I propose that the concept of self-possession rests on a prior assumption that selves are possessable objects—an assumption that was generated, before and alongside liberal political theory, in the practice of Atlantic slave capitalism. I will first consider how John Locke formulates the theory of possessive individualism in one of the most-cited passages of hisSecond Treatise of Government(1690). To shed light on that theory's implications, I will turn toA Narrative of the Life and Adventures ofventure, a Native of Africa(1798), which recounts how Venture Smith, an eighteenth-century man enslaved as a child, came to possess himself, quite literally, by purchasing himself. Smith's account illuminates the tacit precondition of Locke's self-possessing individual: to be owned, the self must first be alienated, entered into the market, “thingified.” Juxtaposing Locke and Smith provides a snapshot of a larger project, in which I argue that Enlightenment thought was founded on—not merely proximal to—the Atlantic imperial context out of which it arose.

A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil

A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil

East African Literature and the Politics of Global Reading

This article uses M. G. Vassanji's first novel, The Gunny Sack, to consider the compatibility of postcolonial theory and academic treatments of globalization. The first section of the essay suggests that recent accounts of globalization do not employ a sufficiently complex historical narrative of international exchange, especially with respect to East Africa and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean trade. As a reading of The Gunny Sack reveals, European imperialism and North Atlantic capitalism were not the only, not even the primary, means of facilitating a transcontinental cultural milieu in East Africa. Postcolonial theory's attention to historical nuance and narrative ambivalence may offer tangible benefits to accounts of globalization. The second part of the essay turns the tables, arguing that globalization theory may help postcolonial literary studies better understand its position as an academic enterprise with transnational affiliations. In particular, postcolonial theorists need a greater awareness of how we produce and circulate knowledge in a global academic context. The Gunny Sack's clear marking as a text about a marginal community speaks to some of the contradictions embedded in the field of postcolonial studies, conditions that are directly related to the emergence of a global publishing industry.

The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. By Jay Kinsbrunner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 198 pp. $40.00 cloth $18.95 paper

<i>The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i>. By Jay Kinsbrunner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 198 pp. $40.00 cloth $18.95 paper

Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xvi + 182pp. 2 line drawings. 4 maps. 1 table. $18.95 pbk

<b>Jay Kinsbruner</b>, <i>The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i>. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xvi + 182pp. 2 line drawings. 4 maps. 1 table. $18.95 pbk

The Colonial Spanish‐American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism

Acknowledgments Introduction A Note about the Terms Town Council, Stores, and Shops Chapter 1. The Colonial City by Definition and Origin Chapter 2. The Pre-Columbian City Chapter 3. The Colonial City Ordained and Structured Chapter 4. The Administration of the Colonial City Chapter 5. The City Visualized Chapter 6. The Urban Economy Chapter 7. Urban Society Chapter 8. Caste and Class in the Urban Context Chapter 9. The Urban Family Chapter 10. The Urban Dialogue Chapter 11. Conclusion: The Paradox Epilogue Appendix. A Comparison of Key Elements in the Ordenanzas of 1573 and in Vitruvius Notes Glossary Selected Bibliography Index

The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism

As Jay Kinsbruner’s title and subtitle suggest, the focus of his study is colonial Spanish American “urban life” in what he calls the “Age of Atlantic Capitalism.” According to the author’s implicit definition of this time period and the themes on which he concentrates, it seems that this age begins in the mid – eighteenth century, running up to and beyond the late colonial period. This period also coincides with the great majority of the author’s previous research on urban themes, including pulperos (small retail grocers), petty capitalism, and race relations in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico.In the opening chapters Kinsbruner briefly discusses the Iberian origins of Spanish American colonial cities, as well as pre-Columbian urbanism. He also provides some background on the founding of colonial cities and suggests (as with the founding of cities in the Iberian reconquista) that the conquistadors founded many Spanish American cities where they would be most useful to control particular regions, populations, or valuable natural resources. They were not spontaneous urban settlements established solely as a result of economic factors. Many survived over time and gradually evolved over the next two centuries into the eighteenth-century cities that Kinsbruner examines more closely.The author throws down the gauntlet to potential adversaries who may disagree with his assertion that “the colonial Spanish-American city evolved during the Age of Atlantic capitalism and was itself a circumstance of that capitalism.” This apparently “implies challenges to those who believe that the colonial economy was not essentially capitalist but one in which very few people owned the means of production” (p. xi). He states that it is wrong to believe “the rest of the people were the immiserated plebeians” (p. xi) and that there was almost nobody in between the elite and the plebe or underclass. The author is particularly incensed by the use of the term plebeian in colonial sources and its continued use among modern historians citing these same sources. He argues that, due to market forces and capitalism at work, “[i]n fact, if not in perception, many if not all of the people of urban colonial Spanish America were precisely in a lower-middle or a middle class” (pp. 96 – 97). The author thus appears to impose on late colonial Spanish American cities the misguided contemporary North American belief that almost everyone is part of a large, all-inclusive middle class. His belief, though certainly heartfelt, has not been convincingly demonstrated in this study.Leaving aside his opinions regarding the use of “plebeians” and the demographic dominance of the urban middle class, the author does marshal very illuminating examples of urban middle-sector and upper-class entrepreneurial activity. Especially noteworthy are the brief case studies of small-scale urban shopkeepers in the late colonial period. If these petty capitalists were as numerous as Kinsbruner shows them to have been, however, it raises one’s curiosity as to how this full-blown phenomenon evolved from the earlier centuries of Latin America’s colonial urban experience. What were the socioeconomic and political changes that created this fertile ground for the “age of Atlantic capitalism” to develop and become so prevalent in the late stages of the colonial period? The author relates the end of the story in detail and we are left wondering about the antecedents.Class is the prime focus of this study, while the importance of socio-racial differences in the urban setting is given relatively little attention. For example, the author discusses colonial urban centers’ relationships with their hinterlands from a Spanish-centric perspective, where “[i]n terms of political and social influence the lines between urban and rural early became indistinct” (p. 31). Regarding the Spanish elite, this is indeed valid, but what of the influence of Indian tribute, forced delivery by Indians of specific items to Spanish urban elites, and the varieties of forced native labor that inevitably flowed from rural areas to cities? Elsewhere Kinsbruner does consider regatones (Spaniards and their black slaves or free castas). Although he labels them “resourceful entrepreneurs” (p. 76), my experience with colonial Guatemalan sources suggests their role was more one of interloper and middleman. They often used force to shake down indigenous vendors bringing products to market.While this study might have benefited from looking more at class structure and the early and midcolonial antecedents of urban capitalism that evolved into the urban society depicted, there is much to praise. Kinsbruner is an assiduous collector of useful bibliography and makes excellent use of published late-colonial travel accounts and diaries. This work will be most useful to undergraduates, as they will find the author’s often controversial opinions thought-provoking.