E

Enslaved African Labour: the costs of purchase and maintenance. Moreover

Violent Racial Capitalism the cost of slave purchase relied on the supply of
Africans seized from their home continent. This
Andrew Higginbottom approach suggests continuities as well as changes
University of Kingston, London, UK from colonial forms of sugar plantation slavery in
Latin America and the Caribbean into the “second
slavery” of the nineteenth century, epitomized by
Synonyms cotton plantations in the US South.

African enslavement; Manufacturing; Mode

of exploitation; Primitive accumulation; Racial Introduction
capitalism; Slavery
Even though not based on wage labour, in what
sense did slavery and other forms of coerced
Definition labour in the colonies nonetheless constitute an
early form of capitalist production? This paper
This entry reconsiders the relation between early considers African enslavement in the Americas
colonial capitalism and European enslavement as an instance of the general condition of labour
of Africans. The paper addresses two standard in the colonized world and reflects on what this
Marxist readings: the first positions slavery as means for the closely related debates on the birth
part of the primitive accumulation of capital; the of capitalism and the nature of the capital-labour
second reading sees capitalism as exclusively the relation in categorical-theoretical terms. It pro-
exploitation of “free” wage labour. In contrast, vides an interpretation that sees capitalism’s slav-
this article argues colonial plantation slavery as ery as a racialized mode of exploitation, a parallel
a mode of exploitation within mercantile capital- form to manufacture which was the prevalent
ism. This approach extends Marx’s value theory form of the labour process of emergent capitalism
to include slavery as a racialized mode of labour in Europe. The plantation was an early form of
exploitation, an early phase of colonial capitalism specifically capitalist enterprise, in that the
with its own especially oppressive characteristics, enslaved African’s labour power was purchased
and an early form of racial capitalism. The violent in order to create surplus-value through the pro-
working to death of enslaved Africans on the duction of commodities, in a process that relied on
sugar plantation was a matter of calculation by the continual European looting of other continents
the slave owner, weighing value produced against to provide that labour power. The article connects
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
I. Ness, Z. Cope (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_168-2
2 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

with related literature on “racial capitalism” and intermediary, as expressed by the notation M-C-
the “second slavery.” Not only was this “first M0 , where M0 is greater than M. The derivation of
slavery” strongly linked with merchants and value that starts from the commodity ends with a
banking capital through circulation, but there flip in the sequence of exchanges, transitioning
were aspects of the production process that were from the simple commodity form of value to
identifiably capitalist. The interpretation offered money capital as value, a flip that appears to be
here views the plantation as a division of labour just formal but in historical terms is immense. The
similar to manufacture, with violence as a lever of significance of Marx’s chosen opening is that it
production. proves the necessity of surplus-value as the essen-
In what follows, Sects. II, III, IV, and V survey tial internal mainspring of the capitalist mode of
and critique various aspects of Marx’s Capital production, independent of any particular form.
insofar as colonized labour is concerned; so Surplus-value is both the means by which money
equipped, Sects. VI and VII consider the origins capital expands itself and the product of a social
and theorization of the colonial plantation slavery; relation of exploitation of labour power that has
and Sect. VIII offers concluding remarks. been purchased as a commodity.
Contrast this with the second beginning which
Marx puts toward the end of Vol. 1, in Part 8;
Surplus-Value as an Entry Point to the where he picks out the main elements of a broad
Problematic historical narrative from the fourteenth to the
eighteenth century and beyond under the heading
The study of the capitalist mode of production has the so-called primitive accumulation, so-called
many entry points, and they need not coincide because Marx disagrees with the legend of
with a genealogy of its historical origins. Marx Adam Smith that this was in any way a benign
in Capital Vol. 1 gives us at least four entry points process and emphasizes the violence involved in
to the capitalist mode of production. The first is to the birth of the capitalist mode of production.
begin at the beginning, the analysis of the simplest Magdoff (2013) rightly suggests that Marx’s
value-form as the commodity and then money meaning in the original German is better trans-
in Part 1, Chapters 1–3. There is a well-rehearsed lated as “primary accumulation” or, suggesting a
debate over the role of the logical and the histor- theoretical content that is distinct again, “original
ical in this difficult opening, especially on the accumulation,” to emphasize this was the original
issue of simple commodity production. Did sim- accumulation of capital. The last chapters of
ple commodity production exist as a historical Vol. 1 are written in the historical narrative
stage, or is it simply a layer of abstraction, the mode, synthesizing the genesis of capitalism.
simple commodity form, within the developed Marx here resists classical political economy’s
capitalist mode of production that is already pre- universalistic paradigm on the grounds of history,
sent? The weight of argument has tilted against by insisting on the historical and hence transitory
Engels’ historical stage view. Yet Marx’s nature of capitalism as a mode of production that
unfolding of the concepts through a series of came into being and will be superseded, whose
determinations leaves a major problem at the end fetters must and will be cast asunder. Marx pro-
of the beginning, Part 2 on the transformation of vides here a clarion call and a suggestive outline,
money into capital. The movement is from the but not yet a full history.
simple commodity form of exchange that starts Sandwiched between the above two starting
with one commodity that is sold and ends with points, the logical and the historical, there is
another that is purchased, with money as the inter- a third, which is more internal and starts from
mediary, as expressed by the notation C-M-C; to the production of surplus-value, which takes
the capitalist form of exchange that starts with shape in the sequence in the middle parts of Cap-
money and ends up with more money through ital Vol. 1. According to Marx’s headings, Parts 3
the purchase and sale of a commodity as the and 4 are about first absolute surplus-value and
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 3

then relative surplus-value. These are explained interacting dialectically in various combinations
succinctly as: with labour intensity; all three must be present.
The production of absolute surplus-value turns Even as Marx isolates one aspect of surplus-
exclusively on the length of the working day, value and then another, we have highlighted
whereas the production of relative surplus-value here the totality that is present as an undercurrent.
completely revolutionizes the technical processes All labour processes in whatever mode of produc-
of labour and the groupings into which society is
divided. (Marx 1976, p. 645) tion entail both duration of labour effort and a
degree of labour productivity; there cannot be
While Marx’s focus is on conceptual develop- one without the other. Beyond this, Marx points
ment, Parts 3 and 4 relay a transition narrative out the necessary connection between labour
within the capitalist mode of production. This duration and productivity within the capitalist
order of exposition has led many Marxists to mode of production (1976, p. 646), labour
believe that absolute surplus-value came before exploited by capital must be sufficiently produc-
relative surplus-value in a linear fashion, and there tive to create more commodities than the equiva-
are indeed textual grounds from Marx himself lent required for the labourers own consumption,
for this reading. Marx’s apparently linear presen- and at the same time, the surplus labour, and from
tation brings to the fore the turn that took place that surplus-value, can be increased by extending
in England around 1850 from “machinofacture” the working day.
to “Modern Industry,” an important point of There is a fourth angle on the emergence of
inflection in its own right and certainly the dom- capitalism in Vol. 1, another underlying theme,
inant economic change in Marx’s adult lifetime. which is the idea of capital subsuming the labour
Marx of course presents a complex argument process. Subsumption is introduced in Chapter 16
that through the power of abstraction begins to and developed in the appendix Results (1976, pp.
approximate to the multifaceted complexity of 949–1066). Marx looks at the social forms
his subject. The notion of simple sequence from of labour before capitalist production and their
absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value transition through a conceptual lens that distin-
has a counterpoint that punctuates the linear guishes between the “formal subsumption” and
narrative interpretation at three points. Firstly, “real subsumption” of labour to capital, which
Chapters 7–9 which, despite falling under the he connects to absolute and relative surplus-
heading “The Production of Absolute Surplus- value, respectively. In formal subsumption capital
Value” are rather an introduction to the concept lays hold of the labour process without yet chang-
of surplus-value as such, in outline prior to its ing its material technical foundation, whereas in
breakdown into particularities. The second dis- real subsumption, the labour process is
ruption to the sequential narrative, that first came restructured, recast, and revolutionized.
absolute surplus-value and then came relative sur- Summing up this section, capital can increase
plus-value, occurs in Chapter 13 on Cooperation, its surplus-value by applying the lever on absolute
where it is explained that both absolute and rela- surplus-value or relative surplus-value, but these
tive surplus-value arose together in the form of categories should not be reified; both must be
the labour process that Marx terms “manufac- present as co-determining dimensions of surplus-
ture,” a collective workshop production but with value.
a division of labour under the command of a
capitalist owner-manager. The manufacturing
capitalist increases relative surplus-value by tak- Marx on Wakefield and the Theory of
ing advantage of cooperative labour, by Colonization
reorganizing the labour process to increase output.
The idea of historical sequence is thirdly coun- So far we have considered Marx’s presentation
tered in Part 5, Chapter 16 where Marx considers of surplus-value as an interaction of theory and
absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value history. Now we question the fullness of Marx’s
4 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

articulation from the perspective of social than another if it is to oversee the continuing
geography, and here we identify gaps in Marx’s accumulation of capital. Wakefield recommends
theory of surplus-value. a prohibitive land policy to ensure the reproduc-
The violent colonial phenomena Marx high- tion in a colonial setting of capitalist social rela-
lights in Vol. 1, Part 8, and that he recognizes in tions that the state set an artificial high price on
several other places, are nonetheless not brought land because if immigrants were to have free
into sustained theoretical focus in Capital. There access to that land, they would set up a small
are many scattered insights into plantation slavery farm and not volunteer as workers, and they
but not a substantive analysis of it. The slave would produce for themselves and not for capital,
plantation needs to receive a parallel theoretical so the question for Wakefield becomes free land or
treatment in terms of its specific social relations free labour? His answer is that white immigrants
of commodity production as did domestic must be prevented from settling on the land.
manufacturing production in Parts 3, 4, and 5. Marx turns this discussion of colonial policy
If we are to reach a more inclusive theoretical into a matter of essence; he says that in Wakefield
account of the capitalist mode of production in the truth of the capital labour relation is revealed.
Marx’s own time, this analysis is required, as are More pertinently, Marx says the essence of the
plantation slavery’s colonial trade and finance capital labour relation at home in England is
relations with the parallel development of industry revealed by Wakefield’s discussion:
in the colonial centers. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have
Let us now consider how far the colonial discovered, not anything new about the colonies,
dimension comes into Marx’s theory of capitalist but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist rela-
exploitation. To unravel the tangle of knots tions in the mother country. (1976, p. 932)
that awaits, we pick up a thread that begins at For Marx that truth is the separation of the
the end, or at least at an apparent ending, which immediate producer from the means of production
is the final chapter of Capital Vol. 1. In this chap- as the presupposition of the capitalist mode of
ter Marx discusses “the modern theory of coloni- production. Marx leaves this as the capstone on
zation” put forward in his day by E. G. Wakefield the analysis already presented in the previous six
writing about Western Australia. The subject of chapters. But something new did need to be said
Wakefield’s concern is not colonized labour, the about the colonies.
aboriginal first nations; indeed for him the colo- As we have noted, the historical mode of Part 8
nized people are invisible. The problem that contrasts to the dialectic of system-logic
Wakefield addresses is the procurement of white unfolding from the commodity which is the pre-
settler labour. The subject is colonies settled by sentation form Marx takes in the opening parts of
Europeans, as Marx makes clear “we are dealing Vol. 1. The end chapter of Capital Vol. 1 is not
here of true colonies, i.e. virgin soil colonized by a neat and symmetrical response to the book’s
free immigrants” (1976, p. 931). opening; rather than a conclusion, it is more an
Wakefield’s preoccupation is how to draw sur- alternative opening that poses new questions.
plus labour from the influx of white colonizers in a Some of these are partially answered in the draft
capitalist fashion. For capitalism to flourish in materials assembled as Vol. 3 of Capital that Marx
Australia, the mass of white colonizers must be had already worked on but were destined not to be
prevented by the state from settling on the newly published until 1894, under Engel’s editorship,
taken land, for if they are allowed to do so, they more than a decade after Marx’s death and nearly
would prefer working on their “own” plot rather 30 years after the first edition of Vol. 1. The way
than labouring for a capitalist (assumed to be Marx puts the problem of white immigrant labour
another class of white settler). Here the reproduc- in the colony in Chapter 33, shows he anticipates
tion of capitalist social relations appears as a pol- answers already prepared for Vol. 3. Of these the
icy choice that the English colonial state in most elaborated but difficult is his surplus profit
Australia should create one type of regime rather
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 5

theory of rent, how capitalism works in agricul- independence movement (Marx 1976, pp.
ture and associated sectors of operation such as 854–870; Higginbottom 2014).
mining and logging, a theory that in turn depends Harvey rightly notes that occasionally in
on the modification of the law of value to take Capital Marx refers to national differences, but
account of its specifically capitalist character, does not make this the focus of sustained analysis.
wherein simple value is converted into prices of In short, Harvey poses anew the problem we seek
production. Wakefield’s policy is that the colonial to address, suggesting a turn toward systematic
state should impose a land tax that would operate theorization of capitalism’s colonial policy.
like an absolute rent (in Marx’s Vol. 3 terminol- Harvey’s approach is still for many reasons unsat-
ogy) to prevent the movement onto the land isfactory to our purpose; he persists in framing
of poorer whites. colonization as an external relation of capitalism,
Returning to the closing of Vol. 1, Marx’s stressing that the frontier is an outer transforma-
concluding paragraph is: tion resulting from an inner dialectic, a “spatial
However, we are not concerned here with the con- fix” in his terms. But this manner of spatial
ditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests framing is itself one sided, insofar as its shifts
us is the secret discovered in the New World by the attention away from the internal transformation
political economy of the Old World, and loudly to the social relations of the capitalist mode of
proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and accumulation, and therefore capitalist pri- production that is inherent in this very drive to
vate property as well, have for their fundamental colonial expansion. Colonialism is not an external
condition the annihilation of that private property bolt-on to capitalism, it is part of it; and the theory
which rests on the labour of the individual himself; of colonial capitalism must therefore affect the
in other words, the expropriation of the worker.
(1976, p. 940) central social categories of what we understand
capitalism to be, specifically the concept of sur-
Turning to the “fundamental condition” of the plus-value. Moreover, capitalism’s colonial “spa-
capitalist mode of production in “the Old World,” tial fix” does not resolve its inner contradictions,
Marx deliberately switches the argument away but reproduces them differently and at a higher
from the specific character of the colonial capi- level.
talist relation. But then, what of the “New World,” We now come to the strategic debate within
the colonies where the expropriation of the Marxism concerning the domestic and overseas
labourer also takes place? colonial faces of accumulation. To argue, as
David Harvey (2016) seeks to pick up Brenner (1977, 1985) does, that not only the ori-
the journey again from this fork in the trail. gins but also the essence of the capitalist mode
According to Harvey, from this point Marx returns of production is uniquely found in the social
in Vol. 2 to the internal contradictions of the relations and class struggles of its emergence
capitalist mode of production rather than giving and early stages in England (and by extension in
systematic treatment to capitalism in its external Western Europe and the global North) reduces the
relations. Marx writes elsewhere on Britain’s epistemological role of the colony to no more than
unfolding colonial relations with India, Ireland, an illumination or reflection back on this essence,
and so on, but not in a systematic and theoretical to assist in its revelation. Are not colonial con-
way. Marx does begin to do this in his analysis quest, the modes of labour exploitation and the
of social relations in Ireland as a distinct illustra- oppressed nation and class struggles of resistance
tion of the general law of accumulation that was that it involves also constitutive of the essence of
different to England. Despite the famine and the capitalist mode of production? Pace Brenner,
mass emigration, in Ireland the immediate we argue that colonialism is not external to the
producers had not yet been forced off the land capitalist mode of production but part of its
entirely; they were exploited in situ through very conditions of existence. Accordingly critical
colonial land rents. These conditions of colonial political economy has to put colonized labour at
occupation gave rise to the Fenian national the center of its theoretical project. What is
6 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

considered as the totality of the capitalist mode of which the expanding capitalist world economy
production has to be reconceived to take colonial- both incorporated and rendered internal processes
ism into account, not only as an external relation such as the “proletarianization of labour and com-
or limit but as an expanding internal relation that mercialization of land” (1976, p. 278).
includes the occupation of colonized territories Wallerstein’s work founded the world system
and the coercive expropriation of the colonized approach, which was largely coincident with
labourer. many Latin American authors of the dependency
In an excellent introduction to the topic, school that crystallized independently in the late
Barbara Solow posits the central question for the 1960s and 1970s.
colonial powers was “by what methods did Euro- In direct critical contrast, Robert Brenner
peans solve the problem of exploiting overseas insists that the birth of capitalist production took
conquests in regions with abundant land?” place specifically in the English agriculture
(1991, p. 38). She argues that colonial occupation around the sixteenth century (Brenner 1985).
was necessarily a different setting for the origins Basing his argument on a selective reading of
capitalism, as the state had to set up the conditions Marx’s primitive accumulation chapters, Brenner
of private ownership of the means of production emphasizes class structure, power relations, and
on which capitalist accumulation depended. class struggle as the explanation over the alterna-
She identifies two routes that the colonial power tive demographic model (population changes) and
could take in ensuring a labour supply, free labour the commercialization model (increased trade).
and coerced labour. So, from the colonial capital- He sees “surplus-extraction relations” as conflic-
ist perspective, slavery offered another solution to tive property relations in a declining serfdom.
Wakefield’s problem, but Marx does not follow up Peasant resistance to feudal landowners resulted
this line of thought. Taking another direction in some being expelled from ties to the landed
again, both to the turn taken by Marx from estates; they became free labourers. Thus there
Wakefield and by Harvey: capitalism’s coloniza- arose an agrarian capitalism, involving a tripartite
tion should be seen as an expanding frontier relation between landlord, capitalist tenant, and
of expropriation; what constitutes the capitalist wage labour that succeeded to replace serfdom
mode of production mutates to exploit labour in in England, Brenner argues, because of its greater
different ways as it expands geographically, as productivity. These conditions both freed up
it occupies new territories, and the land and labour and created a home market:
peoples it “discovers” there, subordinating them English economic development thus depended
for its own purposes. upon a nearly unique symbiotic relationship
between agriculture and industry. It was indeed, in
the last analysis, an agricultural revolution, based
on the emergence of capitalist class relations in the
Free Labour and Subjugated Labour at countryside, which made it possible for England to
the Multiple Birth of Capitalism become the first nation to experience industrializa-
tion. (1985, p. 54)
The “original sin” of capitalism was not one
The issue to be addressed here is not the con-
immaculate conception; it was multiple rape. crete analysis of how agrarian capitalism emerged
The dispossession of the producer from their in England, so much as the ontological inferences
means of subsistence was not just one transition,
that Brenner and his school built from it, espe-
at one place at one time in one way, but a series of cially their downgrading of colonialism’s sys-
struggles in many places, at many times, and in temic role in over centuries as a long running
many ways. It was a contradictory accumulation
relationship that accelerated the movement from
of transitions over a historical epoch. This is the preindustrial capitalism to manufacturing and
argument sketched out by Immanuel Wallerstein then on to industrial capitalism (Brenner 1977).
who wrote not of one unique transition from
feudalism to capitalism but many transitions by
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 7

The Brenner school sharpened its approach processes of primitive accumulation of capital
in opposition to the world systems theory, the taken as a whole. One does not need to argue
classic confrontation being between Brenner and that Spanish and Portuguese societies were
Wallerstein. This is a debate that jumps around already capitalist at the time of the conquest, but
from one point of focus to another. The literature rather that they had contradictions that gave birth
is expertly reviewed in Spanish by Astarita (2009 to a capitalistic impulse, an expansionist project
[1992], 2010), who is sympathetic to Brenner, seeking to profit from conquest overseas. The
and in English by Tomich (2003), who is more external expression of these societies was that
sympathetic to Wallerstein. Banaji (1983, 2013) they most frankly and greedily sought precious
has made subtle contributions, critiquing both metals as the universal bearer of value. The plun-
Wallerstein and Brenner. Seabra (2015) provides dering egoism of the merchant class was the freest
a collection in Portuguese of contributions from of any constraints; obligations to the crown and
the dependency perspective. the church only fuelled the conquest and the
Historical sequence does not confer logical mercantile profiteering that proceeded to domi-
priority of one phase over others in the final out- nate the colonial economies.
come. Yet Brenner selects one element in Marx’s We can now reflect on the distinction between
synthetic account of the primitive accumulation the Brenner school and the dependency school,
of capital and magnifies its importance. Here which articulates a different historical experience
Brenner is contrary to the internationalism of of the birth of capitalism that connects capitalism
Marx. In Marx’s own account, the combined inseparably with colonial and neocolonial extrac-
effects of internal transitions and European colo- tion. One of the school’s most celebrated authors,
nialism are treated in a much more holistic man- Eduardo Galeano, identified in the Open Veins’
ner. Notably in contrast to the developed capitalist two different categories of labour, free labour and
mode of production itself, Marx does not specify subjugated labour (1973, p. 147). This distinction
any “laws of motion” of the primitive accumula- is of course a broad generalization, but it is one of
tion of capital. Adopting Hegel’s notion idea here, cardinal importance. If the test of capitalist social
Marx does point to the different elements of a relations is restricted narrowly to the emergence
systemic totality in movement: of “free labour,” then capitalism did not emerge in
The different moments of primitive accumulation most parts of Latin America until well into the
can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, twentieth century, most typically around transport
Holland, France, and England, in more or less in workers and other wage labourers involved in
chronological order. These different moments are commodity export chains. If the test is subjugated
systematically combined together at the end of the
17th century in England; the combination embraces labour, then we go right back to the years follow-
the colonies, the national debt, the modern taxation ing the conquest onward as early capitalist enter-
system, and the system of protection. These prises, as argued by dependency authors (Bagú
methods depend in part on brute force, for instance 1949; Frank 1971).
the colonial system. But they all employ the power
of the state, the concentrated and organized force of The Brenner thesis is one of the more
society, to hasten, as in a hot-house, the process of unrepentant expressions of Eurocentric Marxism.
transformation of the feudal mode of production Blaut critiques Brenner by looking at colonial
into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transi- relations in the seventeenth century, before the
tion. (1976, pp. 915–916)
generalization of manufacturing and clearly
It hardly needs adding that by the end of the before the industrial revolution and factory pro-
seventeenth century, the Americas had already duction. Blaut argues “the key question is this:
suffered two centuries of violent colonial wealth How central was the role played by colonial and
extraction and that large parts of Africa and Asia semi-colonial enterprise in seventeenth century
as well as the Americas had by then been attacked rise of Europe and the rise of capitalism within
by European expansionism. Thus for Marx the Europe?” (1993, p. 199; see also 1992, 1999).
predatory colonial dimension was a part of the This question refers to a central tenet of the
8 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

dependency thesis that Europe became rich by capitalism is defined theoretically and politically
extracting wealth from the Latin American colo- based on the prevalence of relative surplus-value,
nies, thus at the same time actively impoverishing without including colonial exploitation as a nec-
Latin America, and furthermore that the colonial essary component. This fits in the Eurocentric
enterprises were a key mechanism of value trans- tradition of identifying the essential characteris-
fer. We need then to analyze the mechanisms tics of the system as a whole as only those features
of production behind the value transfer, how col- which were first or most prominently manifest in
onized labour produced the value that ended up Europe. This false universalization from the Euro-
being transferred. pean experience leaves the manifestations of the
The hundreds of thousands of indigenous birth of capitalism in the colonized world as par-
labourers put to task digging out Potosí, as evoked ticulars and the nexus of colonial relations of
by Galeano and still part of the collective memory, exploitation as inessential to specifying the core
could hardly be described as free labour. The relations of the mode of production. In this way
response from the Brenner school is that because the colonial manifestations of capital accumula-
the silver miners were not free labour, then by tion are relegated to the periphery of theory, and
definition, it could not have been capital that so there is an epistemological reproduction of the
exploited them, and so they must have been core-periphery but in this case in a system of
exploited in a pre-capitalist relation. The tautol- knowledge claiming Marxist heritage.
ogy is based on the simple identity that capitalism Just because a region produces commodities
= wage labour. This concerns the form of employ- for the world market, argues Brenner, does not
ment of labour power, which is important in its make it capitalist. He characterizes colonized
own right, but stops there and does not enquire Latin America as a pre-capitalist region. Compare
into the content of the exploitation relations even this to the characterization by Wallerstein (1976)
though not expressed in the form of wage labour. of a capitalist system, not a mode of production, a
The point is that wage labour is the simplest and definition in which the production of surplus-
most general form of the purchase of labour power value and the role of labour are left in the
in the capitalist mode of production; it is not the background. Brenner characterizes world system
only and exclusive form (Wallerstein 1976, p. theory as ignoring the social relations of produc-
280). tion and hence being too “circulationist” in its
The question resolves to this, how does subju- approach, which is overly concerned with the
gated labour fit into the theory of Marx? Neither world market and commodity circulation, as
Brenner nor Wallerstein answers this satisfacto- opposed to the relations pertaining to commodity
rily, largely because they do not engage critically production. Wallerstein does however emphasize
with the theoretical problematic of labour’s pro- the international in the definition of capitalism, for
duction of surplus-value elaborated in the central he argues that capitalism starts with the formation
chapters of Capital Vol. 1. The primary candidate of the world market. At least Wallerstein’s per-
to take the analysis deeper must be the theory of spective allows for, although he does not provide,
surplus-value. Brenner (1977, pp. 30–31) takes more substantive analysis of how subjugated
from Marx’s argument in Capital Vol. 1 a sharp labour is surplus-value producing. We therefore
contrast between relative surplus-value and abso- have two incomplete sides, both miss capitalism
lute surplus-value, repeating the received wisdom as a colonial international social relation of
that capitalist production based on relative sur- production in which different forms of exploited
plus-value presupposes and follows on after pro- labour power produce surplus-value as an essen-
duction based on absolute surplus-value. The tial of the capitalist mode of production.
Brenner school privileges “free labour,” because Another version of the question is reposed in
it is considered as more productive labour, pro- another classic debate: was there a significant
ducing relative surplus-value through the employ- reinvestment of profits gained from slavery into
ment of machinery. The upshot is that for Brenner early forms of industrial capitalism in England?
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 9

The pioneering work of Eric Williams (1994 Wallerstein debate was itself a reprise of an earlier
[1944]) responds to this question by pointing out exchange between Dobb and Sweezy concerning
various mechanisms of profit transfer, for which the emergence of capitalism. We explore this
he gives extensive evidence, but he does not ana- briefly to bring out another important aspect of
lyze the conditions that created these same profits. the overall picture, which is through what class
Williams’ innovation is that he treated slavery did capitalism emerge? What class turned to cap-
in international relation terms, but his limit is italist production? Here again we find a multiplic-
that the analysis is still not in value production ity of answers rather than one single defining
terms, and this “conceptual fragmentation experience.
makes Williams vulnerable to his critics” as Dale In his study of the breakup of feudalism and the
Tomich notes (2011, p. 308). It is a fair criticism origins of capitalism in Western Europe, Maurice
of Williams at least that he only makes a Dobb (1963) builds his theoretical structure
“circulationist” case of the connection between around the distinction of two ways that capitalist
slavery and capitalism. production relations came into being drawn from
In contrast to Williams, while also writing from Marx. The specific quote from Vol. III of Capital
the dependency perspective, Ruy Mauro Marini reads:
stands out as the author who does look at the The transition from the feudal mode of production
social relations of production of subjugated labour takes place in two different ways. The producer may
in Latin America. Marini’s original contribution become a merchant and capitalist, in contrast to the
occupied the huge gap between the Brenner and agricultural natural economy and the guild-bound
handicraft of medieval urban industry. This is the
the Wallerstein camps, the one giving priority to really revolutionary way. Alternatively, however,
labour conditions in Europe and the other to the the merchant may take direct control of production
market relations of colonial extraction. The gap is himself. But however frequently this occurs as a
evidently the political economy of colonized historical transition – for example, the English
clothier of the seventeenth century, who brought
labour and its role in international value produc- weavers who were formerly independent under his
tion. Marini’s grounding of unequal trade rela- control, selling them their wool and buying up their
tions in labour super-exploitation in the colonies cloth – it cannot bring about the overthrow of
and former colonies remains the foundational the old mode of production by itself, but rather
preserves and retains it as its own precondition.
breakthrough that opens up an entire field of (Marx 1981, p. 452)
conceptual development and critical analysis
(Marini 1973). For summaries in English, see The first way was from below; the immediate
Higginbottom (2010) and Latimer (2019). producer such as an artisan or a better off peasant
As we proceed we will find Marini’s concept of becomes a capitalist. Procacci (1976, p. 137)
labour super-exploitation provides a vital means exemplifies this process with the social base of
to analyzing “New World” slavery in historical Cromwell’s New Model Army in England in the
materialist terms, in their relation to Marx’s seventeenth century, demanding a fuller, more
theory. Before reaching that point, there are democratic political transition than Cromwell
other aspects of the origins of capitalism under produced. The second way of transition into
colonial conditions of exploitation that we need to capitalism was decidedly from above. The exam-
draw into the picture. ple given here by Marx was the “putting out”
system, whereby merchants controlled scattered
wool weavers, who continued to work in their
What Class Turned Capitalist? own household even though they were squeezed
by capitalist pressure. As Marx points out, the
Each theoretical generation comes back to this merchant’s “sway over production” was still
argument between the internal and external quite limited at this point: domestically produced
origins of capitalism, in terms set by that wool, the seventeenth century, in England. This
generation’s particular challenges. The Brenner- would be an example of merely formal
10 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

subsumption by capital of the legacy labour pro- of Adam Smith at the last point before industrial-
cess, referred to above. ization. The capitalists were not yet building fac-
To build an entire theoretical structure of tories, not yet using machines comprehensively,
the transition to capitalism around this one quote but they were directing labour processes that
from Marx from a chapter concerning the relied on an increasingly extensive and minute
historical facts about merchant’s capital is limiting division of labour.
historically and geographically. The result is an We come to the evident geographical selectiv-
arbitrary narrowing of scope and a limited ity of Dobb’s theoretical construction. Western
understanding of the sweep of transitions taking Europe’s centuries-long transition from feudalism
place to form early capitalism through a to capitalism did not only occur on its own
multiplicity of connected yet different paths. territories; colonization was a major component
Evidence of Dobb’s historical selectivity even as of this broad process. In the colonies there was not
far as England is concerned comes from Capital an emergence of capitalism flowing “spontane-
Vol. 1 Chap. 13 on Cooperation, where Marx ously on the basis of the formal subsumption of
explains that by the eighteenth century, and with labour under capital” (Marx 1976, p. 645), cited in
variations by sector, the transition “from above” (Brenner 1977, p. 31). To the contrary there was a
began to take on different forms of division of world-shattering rupture, violent conquest and
labour in production. Colonial monopoly was a occupation, and a forced march from many types
hothouse for domestic manufacture. The eigh- of pre-capitalist society to early forms of capitalist
teenth century sees the English state combining production. That is, there was a colonial move-
mercantile trade and slavery as impulses to ment from the merchant to the capitalist which
manufacturing production, which they protected involved the appropriation of subjugated labour
from the competition of better and cheaper cotton rather than free labour. There was a distinct colo-
goods from India, in an expanding system of nial face of the merchant-to-capitalist transition,
colonial exploitation and capital accumulation that involved the exploitation of colonized and
(Inikori 2002). forced labour in the mines and on the plantations
Merchants becoming capitalists did so primar- from the sixteenth century, and was based from
ily by bringing together the producers into a work- the start on imposed forms of labour cooperation.
shop or similar unit of manufacture, by putting Furthermore the Latin American colonial
labourers to work in cooperation within labour experience of the transition into capitalism
processes under capital’s direct command. The included a long interregnum in which the Euro-
way that capitalism emerged “from above” had peans occupied the land and extracted indigenous
moved from the scattered producers of the putting labour tied to landed estates in a semifeudal man-
out system, which continued to persist alongside ner and from the white settler latifundistas and
manufacture according to the sector. Significantly, hacendados classes another; now a fourth way of
Marx positions this material on the rise of manu- transition into capitalism emerged, from a class
facture not as a moment of primitive accumulation not even mentioned in the above quotation from
but within his conceptual determinations of the Marx. The fourth way of transition into capitalism
capitalist mode of production as such and builds was also from above but through the colonially
its determinations around capital’s direct appro- empowered landowners (neither the immediate
priation of surplus-value from the labourers producers, nor merchants) becoming commodity
employed. To emphasize, according to Chap. 13, producers for export. The examples of this are
an early yet distinctively capitalist mode of pro- many and become the main current in the period
duction was present and becoming generalized of neocolonial informal empire of the nineteenth
through the spread of manufacturing in England century on.
in the eighteenth century. The merchants turned Finally, for the sake of completeness for now,
manufacturers were by then clearly capitalist and we can readily identify a fifth way also well
found their expression in the political economy known to Marx (1981, pp. 808–9) and used as a
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 11

point of contrast by Galeano, which was the white possessions that the Perestrello had in Puerto
settlers of North America who were granted cheap Santo. (Losada 1990, pp. 20–22)
land to become proto-capitalists based on the first However, this sanitized version fails to record
instance on the labour of their families. This route that Columbus’s father-in-law was in fact a slave-
of the small farmer becoming capitalist echoes holder. In the years before he set sail, Columbus
the rich peasant way but in a colonial setting of had been groomed in slaveholding. Indeed behind
racial privilege based on the dispossession of the the individual figure lies an entire inter-genera-
original immediate producers, fundamentally tional process of formation, the transmission belt
qualifying the claim that this way is as democratic of slave plantations from the Eastern Mediterra-
as a racially exclusionary “democracy.” nean to the Atlantic that was controlled by Italian
Summarizing this section, in addition to the merchants over three centuries. The westward
two paths that Dobb highlighted in England, we movement dates from the Capture of Tyre from
have identified at least three further ways that the Fatimids in 1123: “Venice proceeded to
capitalist labour relations of production were engage in the sugar industry that it found in its
established in the American colonies: from the new possessions.” Islands were preferred loca-
colonial merchant turned capitalist, from the colo- tions. From Crete and Cyprus, “the Italians trans-
nial landowner turned capitalist, and from the ferred the sugar-slave complex, which they had
colonial small farmer turned capitalist. Each of developed as a means of colonial exploitation, to
these paths involved different early forms of Madeira, the Canaries, and the West African
capitalist relations with colonized labour. From islands. . .to Sao Tome to Brazil and to the Carib-
this prolonged prologue, we now turn to the bean” (Solow 1987, p. 6). It was only once the
installment of plantation slavery in the colonized sugar-slave complex reached Madeira, by the
“new world.” middle of the fifteenth century, that the Genoese
began enslaving peoples from West Africa. “It
was black slavery that was chiefly used in Madei-
Plantation Slavery: The “Genius” of ran sugar production” writes Solow, who con-
Columbus? cludes that “the spread of the slave-sugar
complex played a major role in the discovery
Among the many things that Columbus brought and economic exploitation of America” (1987, p.
with him to help colonize was the intent to enforce 6).
labour in order to make profit. Columbus’ journal If capitalist slavery had already arrived in the
comment on 16 December 1492 was “The Indians Americas with Columbus, it was not until the
. . .need only to be given orders to be made to sugar plantation took hold that it really prospered.
work, to sow, or to do anything useful.” Lochardt and Schwartz reveal the sugar engenho
According to Chaunu such remarks “bear the in Brazil as a profit-making engine, based on
mark of genius. After such a trial and amid exploitation. It is hard to imagine a more complete
such anxiety and uncertainty, he could show this and brutal regime; these authors describe it as hell
lucidity and this unhurried attention” (cited in on Earth. Slaves could replace their purchase price
Solow 1987, p. 10). within 3 years and were worked to death within
Unhurried or not, Columbus’ will to command 6 years, to be replaced by newly bought arrivals
was not “genius” – it was part of the social (1983, p. 218). The engenho was a system that had
formation he carried with him across the ocean. no need for children; to buy a new adult labourer
He was already well acquainted with slave pro- from the slave traders was cheaper than to raise
duction for profit, and it sat alongside the looting them. And so the voracious appetite for profit in
of precious metals as his primary motive. An the Americas continued the depredation of Africa,
orthodox textbook records that Columbus: for three centuries and more. There is no sense
Married in 1480 with Felipa Moniz de Perestrello, here of a mode of labour exploitation that is
daughter of Bartolomé Perestrello, discoverer of the concerned to generate its own conditions of
Madeira . . . [and] . . . lived some time in the
12 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

reproduction; in this regard we are not yet at the What is at issue here is not so much the
developed capitalist mode of production creating description of slave plantations as work to death
the basis of its own reproduction. camps but testing the limits and adequacy of
As Moreno Fraginals (1976) details in the case Marx’s concepts as applied to those conditions.
of Cuba, the sugar plantation went through a In her analysis of the Jamaican plantation, Abigail
series of transitions both in its technical basis, Bakan gives a well-articulated version of a stan-
especially concerning the mechanization of dard Marxist view. She rightly argues that:
sugar manufacture, and in the supply of labour. The critical feature in defining the capitalist mode of
The slave plantations were set up in order to production in the historical sense is not the presence
accumulate capital, by adapting a “primitive” of wage labour as a phenomenon, but the social
form of obtaining their labour supply. European relationship between wage labour and capital. The
distinct feature of the wage labour form is not
merchant capital did not only steal goods from primarily how it is paid for, but that it stands,
other societies; it stole live human beings from in Marx’s terms, as “capital-positing, capital-pro-
the African continent and forced them to work to ducing labour.” (1987, p. 77)
death in the Americas. Merchant capital moved
Bakan also rightly distinguishes different uses
out of circulation and into the realm of production
by Marx of the term capitalist “mode of produc-
to expand itself. In this respect the slave planta-
tion,” which she designates as either the entirety
tions were an advanced point, an anticipation of
or the particular, in which “each historical
how the more developed forms of capitalism
instance is a distinct ‘mode’.” From this dual
would operate as a mode of production, in that
definition of mode of production, a dichotomy
labour power was a commodity that had been
between the historical and the technical follows:
obtained solely because it was the source of sur-
plus-value and hence profit. Jamaican slavery can be identified as part of the
general historic epoch during which capitalism
became predominant as a “mode of production”
on a world scale. Yet the specific form of labour
Theorizing Plantation Slavery: Moving exploitation was not marked by the wage labour/
Beyond the Impasse capital relationship. In the technical sense of the
concept, Jamaican plantation slavery therefore can-
not be considered to be a capitalist “mode of pro-
The primitive accumulation of capital involves duction.” (1987, p. 74)
different processes, one is direct looting of
And again, the theoretical framework:
resources that are then sold as commodities for
profit; this is what the conquistadors and the must point out not only the similarities between
Atlantic slave traders did; another is putting the slave and free labour in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction in the historical sense, but also the features
enslaved Africans to work, creating surplus-value which differentiate them from one another as modes
to be realized and spent as revenue or accumulated of production in the technical sense. (1987, p. 85)
as capital. The various processes that Marx sum-
Depending on how one defines the capitalist
marized as the primitive accumulation of capital
mode of production, slavery is part of it, or not.
were not all pre-capitalist; rather they constituted
It is at this point the analysis peters out, for Bakan
capitalism in its becoming, the early stages of
has reached an impasse, from which there is no
capitalism as a mode of production. The processes
escape within the premises of the argument.
were the original accumulation of capital. The
Bakan takes seriously the question of slavery’s
slave plantations from the beginning demonstrate
correspondence with surplus-value and searches
major characteristics of capitalist enterprise: the
for a theoretical grounding in absolute surplus-
purchase of labour power, setting enslaved labour
value:
to work in order to produce commodities for sale,
and the realization of a profit. How then do we Plantation production was based on absolute sur-
conceptualize enslaved African labour in terms of plus-value, though it differed from the classic form
Marx describes in Capital. (1987, p. 74)
the production of value and surplus-value?
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 13

Bakan recognizes the need for an analysis fixed form characteristic of a particular epoch in the
of nonwage labour in the capitalist mode of pro- development of the capitalist mode of production.
At the most it appears to do so, and that only
duction, but here we come to sticking point of an approximately, in the handicraft-like beginnings of
analysis that modifies Marx’s existing categories manufacture, and in that kind of large-scale agricul-
marginally rather than moving beyond them in ture, which corresponds to the period of manufac-
a necessary determination. The production of sur- ture, and is distinguished from peasant agriculture,
mainly by the number of the workers simulta-
plus-value by enslaved labour cannot be fully neously employed, and the mass of the means of
understood by the two categories of absolute sur- production concentrated for their use. Simple co-
plus-value and primitive accumulation alone, for operation has always been, and continues to be the
two major reasons. In the first place, as Moreno prevailing form, in those branches of production in
which capital operates on a large scale, and division
Fraginals (1976) demonstrates, the production of of labour and machinery play but a subordinate part.
sugar involved increasing labour productivity, (1976, pp. 453–4)
that is, relative surplus-value is also necessarily
part of the valorization process on the slave plan- We have seen that the first appearance of the
tation. Secondly, to resolve the conceptual capitalist mode of production in manufacturing
impasse, a further determination is needed. occurred in the sixteenth to eighteenth century.
What is missing between two senses of mode Marx shows that cooperation between labourers
of production presented as the universal and the in the labour process, the creation of the collective
particular is the intermediate concept of mode of workforce, can have major advantages for capital
exploitation, a concept present embryonically in over leaving the work to be carried out by
Marx in his contrast of the slavery of antiquity fragmented individual labourers. In the first
with modern capitalism (1981, p. 923). Slavery as place, bringing the workforce together in simple
a mode of exploitation was qualitatively different cooperation, even when the workers each do the
to wage labour and cannot be reduced to it without same kind of work, can create advantages in terms
eliding the racial oppression involved. The of labour productivity.
enslavement of African labour had specific char- Beyond that, in industries where critical
acteristics of white supremacy within the capital- moments occur, such as at harvest time, coopera-
ist mode of production (in the broad sense), with tion allows for a “large mass of labour to be
its own contradictions. The enslaved labourer did thrown into the field of production” (Marx 1976,
not own their labour power; they were owned and p. 445). Marx points out that the twofold nature of
sold by another. The commodification of their capitalist direction of social labour – “on the one
labour power involved the capture of their body hand, a social process for the creation of a product,
and the commodification of their entire being, and on the other capital’s process of valorization”
including the capacity to labour. The enslaved (1976, p. 450) – means it must be despotic. Even
labourer’s entire life, not only their working life, as wage labourers, the workers’ cooperation is not
was lived under the racial domination of the voluntary. Marx identifies two forms of division
exploiting class. of labour in the manufacturing system, depending
If not a combination of primitive accumulation on the nature of the article produced. The concept
and absolute surplus-value, in what theoretical of increasing relative surplus-value therefore does
terms were the plantation system a capitalist not depend exclusively on machine production
labour process? Plantation slavery was a colonial but rests initially on reorganization of the labour
form of cooperation adopted in the period of cap- process under capitalist direction. Moreover, it is
italist manufacture that had many similarities as clear that Marx distinguishes two forms of the
well as crucial differences with it. Marx sums up capitalist mode of production and two periods in
the chapter on cooperation as follows: its history, precisely around this point. This is the
transition from manufacture (Chap. 14) to
In the simple shape, as investigated so far, co-oper- machinery and large-scale industry (Chap. 15).
ation is a necessary concomitant of all production
on a large scale, but it does not, in itself, represent a
14 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

Many of these insights can be applied with to conflicting interpretations. On the one hand,
appropriate modification to the analysis of colo- the systematic use of force by the masters on
nial plantation slavery in its different forms. the enslaved could disallow the relation to be
Except cooperation in the labour effort took considered capitalist; on the other hand, the for-
place on the premise of force at every step and in mation of the relation was clearly impelled by the
every sinew (Craton 1974). Marx designates the profit motive.
separation of the mental and the manual as a The social relation between plantation master
product of the division of labour in manufacture. and the enslaved Africans in the Americas was
The further special product of the division of forged under conditions of a colonial capital accu-
labour on the plantation was the separation of mulation. The enslaved labourers produced value
the overseeing parties who would perpetrate vio- and surplus-value through commodity produc-
lence and those who received it. The calculated tion. Plantation slavery is best interpreted within
use of force was a constant lever in production. a Marxist framework as a form of colonial capi-
This argument has already been made in more talist enforced “cooperation,” with many features
detail in the work of Sidney Mintz, who writes: similar to manufacture, but with the key distinc-
The seventeenth century was preindustrial; and the tion of racial violence that has the purpose of even
idea that there might have been “industry” on the more exploitation through domination. Sugar
colonial plantation before it existed in the homeland plantation slavery is here considered akin to the
may seem heretical. First, it has been conceived manufacturing workshop in England, an early
of as predominantly agricultural because it was a
colonial enterprise and manned mostly by coerced, form of capitalism with a single point of command
rather than free, labour. . .. It may seem a topsy- and a division of labour set in motion to accumu-
turvy view of the West to find its factories elsewhere late capital, although still not yet with the gener-
at so early a period. But the sugar-cane plantation is alized use of machines. The plantation was not
gradually winning recognition as an unusual com-
bination of agricultural and industrial forms, and I quite the factory in the field, but rather the work-
believe it was probably the closest thing to industry shop in the field.
that was typical of the seventeenth century. (1985, For this reason it is not enough to leave the
p. 48) theoretical definition of plantation slavery outside
The one difference I have with this is to lower the internal relations of the capitalist mode of
the claim, to deliberately align it to manufacture production, as an element of the original accumu-
in Marx’s terminology rather than the factory. lation of capital, or as a pre-capitalist form as does
Brenner. The form has to be analyzed in terms of
value production and surplus-value expropriation.
Although Marx did not make this analysis, he
Conclusion provides us with the tools and methodology to
do so. But we also reached the limits of a literal
The becoming of industrial capitalism from pre- application of Marx to the problem.
capitalism passes through both the manufacturing We have shown how selective readings of
workshop and the slave plantation. The availabil- Marx are used to validate a Eurocentric reading.
ity of colonized, subjugated, and enslaved labour However we have not yet solved the problem
was, just as much as free labour, a presupposition beyond that critique. Within the conceptual frame-
of the capitalist mode of production. The original work of Capital 1, there remains a problem which
sin of colonial capitalism was twofold: violent is the limitation of the concept of surplus-value to
plunder and the plain robbery of accumulated absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value.
wealth, followed by ruptures that tore labourers It has been argued that on the one hand, the
away from their homelands and communities and enslavement of Africans was an early form of
threw them into labour for the purpose of their the capital labour relation, hence of the production
exploitation. The combination of profit-making of surplus-value, and yet on the other hand, the
and force renders colonial slave enterprises open categories of surplus-value from Marx are in and
Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism 15

of themselves insufficient to explain the relation. We will see further that subjugated or super-
If we are to use Marx, it must be in a modified exploited labour in the Americas is not only
way. Based on the work of Marini, we have an artifact of the original accumulation of capital
opened up the argument that as a mode of labour that is later converted into free labour under the
exploitation, plantation slavery combined wage form; rather it is a continuing essential
absolute surplus-value, relative surplus-value, feature of the capitalist mode of production,
and intense labour within an envelope of violent which is reproduced as capitalism reproduces its
racial super-exploitation of the workforce. class relations on a world scale.
For close on four centuries, enslaved Africans
in the Americas produced value and surplus-value
for the Europe-centered world capitalist system.
Cross-References
This essential truth concerning racial capitalism
should be beyond denial. This chapter thus fits
▶ Anti-Apartheid, Anti-Capitalism and Anti-
well with other readings of “racial capitalism”
Imperialism: Liberation in South Africa
from its origins in Europe (Robinson 2000) to
▶ Marini, Ruy Mauro (1932–1997)
the nineteenth century “second slavery” serving
▶ Marx, Karl (1818–1883), and Imperialism
industrial capitalism (Johnson 2017: Tomich
▶ Marxism, Value Theory and Imperialism
2017), to imperialism and white supremacy in
▶ Racial Capitalism and Globalisation
South Africa, and to the structural reproduction
▶ Racism and Imperialism
of racial oppression in contemporary capitalism
▶ Rodney, Walter (1942–1980)
(Bhattacharyya 2018).
▶ Super-Exploitation, the Race to the Bottom
This analysis suggests a reversal of Robin
and the Missing International
Blackburn’s view that slavery was an “extended
primitive accumulation” lasting well into the nine-
teenth century (1997, p. 572). The length of exten-
sion is not in issue, it is the connotation of Bibliography
primitive accumulation that is misleading. The
current presentation conceives colonial plantation Astarita, R. (2009). Monopolio, imperialismo e
intercambio desigual Madrid: Maia Ediciones
slavery from the sixteenth century on as an early Astarita, R. (2010). Economía Política De La Dependencia
if particular form of capitalist super-exploitation. Y El Subdesarrollo: Tipo de cambio y venta agraria
Adapting the more apposite term “para-indus- en la Argentina. Bernal, Buenos Aires: Universidad
trial,” also from Blackburn (1988, p. 520), the Nacional de Quilmes Editorial.
Bagú, S. (1992[1949]). Economía de la Sociedad Colonial:
capitalist colonial slavery mode of exploitation Ensayo de historia comparada de América Latina.
corresponded to a form of para-manufacture that Edición ampliada y actualizada Mexico D.F.: Consejo
did indeed persist over centuries as a node Nacional para la Cultura y las Artas/ Editorial Grijalbo
of value production within mercantile and then Bakan, A. (1987). Plantation slavery and the capitalist
mode of production: An analysis of the development
industrial capitalist systems. of the Jamaican labour force. Studies in Political
Labour productivity in an agricultural context Economy, 22, 73–99.
involves another aspect, the climate and fertility Banaji, J. (1983). Gunder Frank in retreat? In B. McFarlane
of the land appropriate to the crop, and what this & P. Limqueco (Eds.), Neo-Marxist theories of devel-
opment (pp. 97–113). London/Canberra/New York:
means for capitalist surplus-value production. Croom Helm/St Martin’s Press.
Plantation owners sought to increase productivity Banaji, J. (2013). Putting theory to work. Historical
by moving to new lands, either on the same island Materialism, 21(4), 129–143.
or in new territories. This aspect is noted here as a Bhattacharyya, G. (2018). Rethinking racial capitalism:
Questions of reproduction and survival. London/New
limitation of the present study; it became all the York: Rowman & Littlefield.
more important in the rapid expansion of cotton Blackburn, R. (1988). The overthrow of colonial slavery
production to meet industrial demand. 1776–1848. London/New York: Verso.
16 Enslaved African Labour: Violent Racial Capitalism

Blackburn, R. (1997). The making of new world slavery: Losada Castro, B. (1990). Cristóbal Colón. Madrid:
From the Baroque to the modern 1492–1800. London/ Ediciones RIALP.
New York: Verso. Magdoff, H. (2013). Primitive accumulation and imperial-
Blaut, J. M. (1992). On the significance of 1492. Political ism. Monthly Review, 13–25.
Geography, 114, 355–385. Marini, R. M. (1991 [1973]). Dialéctica de la dependencia.
Blaut, J. M. (1993). The Colonizer’s model of the world: México: Ediciones Era.
Geographical diffusionism and eurocentric history. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. 1). London: Penguin.
New York: Guilford Press. Marx, K. (1981). Capital (Vol. 3). London: Penguin.
Blaut, J. M. (1999). Marxism and eurocentric diffusionism. Mintz, S. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar
In R. Chilcote (Ed.), The political economy of in modern history. London: Penguin.
imperialism: Critical appraisals (pp. 127–140). Moreno Fraginals, M. (2008 [1976]). The Sugarmill: The
Boston: Kluwer. socioeconomic complex of sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860.
Brenner, R. (1977). The origins of capitalist development: New York: Monthly Review Press.
A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism. New Left Review, Procacci, G. (1976). A survey of the debate. In R. H. Hilton
I/104, 25–92. (Ed.), The transition from feudalism to capitalism (pp.
Brenner, R. (1985). Agrarian class structure and economic 128–143). London: Verso.
development in pre-industrial Europe. In T. H. Aston & Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the
C. H. E. Philpin (Eds.), The Brenner debate: agrarian black radical tradition (New ed.). Chapel Hill/London:
class structure and economic development in pre- The University of North Carolina Press.
industrial Europe (pp. 10–63). Cambridge: Cambridge Seabra, R. L. (2015). Dependência e Marxismo:
University Press. contribuições ao debate crítico latino-americano.
Craton, M. (1974). Sinews of empire: A short history of Florianópolis: Editora Insular.
British slavery. London: Maurice Temple Smith. Solow, B. (1987). Capitalism and slavery in the exceed-
Dobb, M. (1963). Studies in the development of capitalism. ingly long run. In B. Solow & S. L. Engerman (Eds.),
London: Routledge. British capitalism and Caribbean slavery: The legacy
Frank, A. G. (1971). Capitalism and underdevelopment in of Eric Williams (pp. 51–77). New York: Cambridge
Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil University Press.
(revised ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Solow, B. (1991). Slavery and colonization. In B. Solow
Galeano, E. (1973). Open veins of Latin America. New (Ed.), Slavery and the rise of The Atlantic System (pp.
York: Monthly Review Press. 21–42). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, D. (2016). Marx and value lecture 4: Tomich, D. (2003). Through the prism of
The space and time of value. Accessed 23 Nov 2018. slavery: Labor, capital, and world economy.
http://davidharvey.org/2016/11/david-harvey-marx-ca Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Oxford: Rowman
pital-lecture-4-space-time-value/ & Littlefield.
Higginbottom, A. (2010). Underdevelopment as super- Tomich, D. (2011). Econocide? From abolition to emanci-
exploitation: Marini’s political-economic thought. pation in the British and French Caribbean. In S. Palmie
Historical Materialism conference SOAS, London, & F. A. Scarano (Eds.), The Caribbean: A history of the
5–7 November 2010. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/ region and its peoples (pp. 303–316). Chicago: The
23279/8/Higginbottom-A-23279.pdf. University of Chicago Press.
Higginbottom, A. (2014). “Imperialist rent” in practice and Tomich, D. (Ed.). (2017). Slavery and historical
theory. Globalizations, 11(1), 23–33. capitalism during the nineteenth century. Lanham/
Inikori, J. (2002). Africans and the industrial revolution in Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books.
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1976). From feudalism to capitalism:
Johnson, W. with Kelley, R. D. G. (Eds.). (2017). Race, Transition or transitions? Social Forces, 552, 273–283.
capitalism, justice. Cambridge MA: Boston Review. Williams, E. (1994 [1944]). Capitalism and slavery.
Latimer, A. (2019). Marini, Ruy Mauro (1932–1997) Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Lockhart, J., & Schwartz, S. B. (1983). Early Latin
America: A history of colonial Latin America and
Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.