The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean

By Nick Nesbitt

The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx’s critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx’s key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx’s analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780813947105

Book preview

Cover Page for The Price of Slavery

The Price of Slavery

New World Studies

Marlene L. Daut, Editor

The Price of Slavery

Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean

Nick Nesbitt

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2022 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2022

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nesbitt, Nick, author.

Title: The price of slavery : capitalism and revolution in the Caribbean / Nick Nesbitt.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2022. | Series: New World studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021038228 (print) | LCCN 2021038229 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813947082 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813947099 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813947105 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Slave insurrections—Caribbean Area. | Slavery—Caribbean Area. | Marxist criticism. | Jacobins.

Classification: LCC HT1072 .N47 2022 (print) | LCC HT1072 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/6209729—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038228

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038229

Publication of this volume has been supported by New Literary History.

Cover art: Recto, 5,000-francs banknote, Institut d’Émission des Départements d’Outre-Mer, 1955. (https://banknoteindex.com/index.mhtml)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. From Marx . . .

1. The Problem of Social Form in Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery

2. Reading Capital in the Caribbean: Marx and the Nature of Capitalist Slavery

Part II. . . . To Black Jacobinism

3. The Reinvention of Social Form: The Necessity of Revolution in C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins

4. Slavery, Postcolonial Labor, and Social Form from St. Domingue to Haiti

5. The Caribbean Critique of Social Form: Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Suzanne Césaire

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK was composed while I was in Prague on a sabbatical leave from Princeton University, and in the ensuing pandemic of Covid-19 it came to be thanks to this generosity, along with that of my intellectual home in Prague, the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. There, I benefitted infinitely from the many discussions and colloquia and the welcoming friendship of colleagues, including Ivan Landa, Petr Kužel, Michael Hauser, Joe Feinberg, and Jana Beránková. In that context, the research and work on this book was generously supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) as part of the research project entitled From Bolzano to Badiou (GA 19–20319S).

Elena Louisa Lange, Chris Wright, Sara-Maria Sorentino, and two anonymous readers generously read this manuscript and suggested many improvements. At the University of Virginia Press, Eric Brandt, Helen Chandler, Joanne Allen, and Marlene Daut enthusiastically supported this project from its initial stages through to completion. The New World Studies series has been my intellectual home base since the day as a graduate student I placed a chapter of my dissertation into the hands of James Arnold, who in response invited me to submit what eventually became my first monograph, Voicing Memory. I am honored to be published again in the Caribbean series he conceived.

I am indebted to intensive discussions on the nature of capitalist slavery with Nate Holdren, Tiarnan O’Muilleoir, Kailash Srinivasan, George Garcia, Jasper Bernes, and James Furner and above all to discussions on slavery and Marx’s concept of the value-form with Elena Louisa Lange. Paul Cheney, Laurent Dubois, Simon Gikandi, Warren Montag, Agon Hamza, Etienne Balibar, Peter Hallward, and Caitlin Rosenthal generously offered comments, critique, and archival materials along the way, making crucial contributions to the book’s argument. Students in seminars on slavery and capitalism and Spinoza and French theory pushed me to clarify many of my arguments and contributed substantially to the book’s development. Portions of this book have been drawn and revised from the following publications: "Fragments of a Universal History: Structures, Subjects, and Ideas in The Black Jacobins," in The Black Jacobins Reader, ed. Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 139–61; "The Slave Machine: On ‘Proletarian,’ Slavery, and Capital in The Black Jacobins," Small Axe SX 3 (Spring 2019), published online at http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue03.html; and From Louverture to Lenin: Aimé Césaire and Anticolonial Marxism, Small Axe 48 (Fall 2015): 129–44. As always, without the support and love of Eva Cermanová, this book would not have been possible. I dedicate this book to the constant memory of an unfailingly compassionate and learned friend and colleague, J. Michael Dash.

The Price of Slavery

Introduction

AN ANTILLEAN woman dressed in the traditional madras clothing of the doudou holds out a bowl of fruit to an unseen figure. Behind her, the mountains of Martinique or Guadeloupe frame a dense tropical forest in mid-foreground, while around her float various symbols of the quantitative value of the commodified fruit she presumably offers in exchange: cinq mille francs, contre-valeur de 50 nouveaux francs, 5000. This strikingly expressive image, which adorned banknotes that circulated throughout the French départements d’outre-mer (DOM) in the 1950s and 1960s, vividly figures an ideological allegory of French colonial capitalism.¹ The image, subtly composed and rendered by one of the principal artists of twentieth-century French banknotes, Robert Pughéon,² poses a series of questions that can initiate this book’s analysis of the nature of capitalist slavery and colonialism as social forms: What is the relation between this gendered, racialized, and subaltern subject of colonialism and the commodities she has produced and now presents in exchange for money? What is the relation between this visibly free (judging by her elegant clothing), postslavery subject of colonialism, one who will implicitly be paid for the commodities she holds out, and her ancestors, the African and Creole slaves who produced Antillean commodities without remuneration, under the threat of immediate bodily violence within the pre-1848 social form of plantation slavery? What is her relation, as well as that of her enslaved ancestors, to the expansion of global capitalism since the eighteenth century and to the attendant transformation of social relations that accompanied this expansion? While these may be fairly obvious questions, this book further inquires into the specific social relation this image explicitly constructs between the living labor that produces commodities; the commodities themselves, here rendered in the form of the material goods she offers (fruit); and finally, their monetary price (50 nouveaux francs). How are individual, private acts of labor such as this image depicts socially valorized in the capitalist social form? Is the relation between the commodity and its price form that this image presents essential and necessary to the capitalist social form, or is the price of such a colonial commodity a merely contingent expedient in the process of exchange? Above all, this book asks, under what social form is it the case that social relations—including the variously enslaved and/or remunerated forms of labor that produced such commodities—necessarily take the form of a monetary value (as wage, as price)? What, finally, can an inquiry into this quite abstract relation of material commodities to their monetary form hope to tell us about the material, empirical, and historical problems of slavery and capitalism, social violence, and the millennial human struggle for justice as equality?

Recto, 5,000-francs banknote, Institut d’Émission des Départements d’Outre-Mer, 1955. (https://banknoteindex.com/index.mhtml)

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This book analyzes the francophone Caribbean critique of social structure, from plantation slavery and the Haitian Revolution to the neocolonial present, as a tropical refiguration of Marx’s thought. I argue that the writings of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire—key figures of a critical tradition I have called Black Jacobinism—develop a critique of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism best understood as what Marx called social forms (gesellschaftliche Formen).³ The core of this argument, drawn from Marx, proposes an original theory of the relation of slavery and capitalism. Rejecting the customary economistic notion of slavery and capitalism as mere functional regimes of commercial production (of sugar, coffee, or cotton), I argue that the complex historical entanglement of slavery within global capitalism—despite decades of historicist debate since Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944)—still demands theoretical clarification: slavery and capitalism are in this view at once historically entangled yet analytically distinct.

In part 1, I argue that while slave-based production indisputably constitutes a crucial element in the development and expansion of global capitalism since the eighteenth century, capitalist slave labor is nonetheless by definition unproductive (in the specific sense Marx gave the term), incapable, that is, of contributing surplus value to the process of capitalist accumulation. In the face of the latter restriction, what, then, constitutes the function of capitalist slave labor? The answer, I maintain, lies in Marx’s demonstration (in volume 3 of Capital) that through market competition all capitalist firms—including capitalist production by slave labor—can potentially capture an average rate of profit for their commodities, whether or not they have actually created surplus value in their production. Marx’s claim that commodities without surplus value can have a price and potentially realize a profit for their owner, though a meaningless statement for classical and neoclassical economic thought in the absence of a concept of social form, in fact indicates the essential nature of capitalist production, and slave labor within it in particular. In part 2, I follow the thought of Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Jacques Stephen Alexis in their vehement critiques of slavery and colonialism, as they call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust order into one of universal justice as equality. It is no coincidence, moreover, that each of these thinkers (with the obvious exception of Christophe) developed their thought in intensive dialogue with Marx’s critique. Although Marx’s analyses of slavery and colonialism are fragmentary and widely dispersed throughout his writings, they nonetheless provide the theoretical resources for robust critique. At the same time, these Black Jacobin Marxist thinkers tropicalize Marx and transform the analysis of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism to scrutinize problems Marx left underdeveloped or unaddressed in his attention to the capitalist system in its pure conceptual form, above all the necessary parameters of the revolutionary transformation and overthrow of slavery and colonialism, as well as the critique of the imperialist state and colonial underdevelopment.

Chapter 1 intervenes in the long-standing historiographic debate on slavery and capitalism surrounding Eric Williams’s seminal Capitalism and Slavery. I argue that this predominantly historiographic discussion still requires theoretical clarification, notwithstanding the many and varied arguments since Williams, both for the substantial contribution of slave labor to the expansion of capitalism (from Williams to Immanuel Wallerstein, Cedric Robinson, Robin Blackburn, and the New History of Capitalism) and against (from the New Economic History to Eugene Genovese and Robert Brenner). In response to this lack of theoretical clarity, I argue that the relation of slavery to capitalism is best conceived not (as in the historiographic debate) in terms of the material production of commodities and the profits they generate (both transhistorical phenomena nonspecific to capitalism), nor via the particular lived experiences of the subjects of slavery and wage labor, and this despite the violence and injustice of colonial oppression, but rather via Marx’s concept of social form. By this term, Marx indicates that social relationships under capitalism must be comprehended in relation to the central governing element of that society, value, and its general form of appearance as commodities bearing a monetary price or exchange value.

Marx demonstrates in Capital that to be exchangeable in a commodity-based society, each commodity must necessarily possess a monetary price.⁴ Rejecting all nominalism, Marx argues that money and the corresponding price form of commodities are no mere expedient aids to exchange, as both classical and neoclassical economics and traditional Marxism variously believed, but instead must be grasped as the essential and necessary forms of appearance of value in the capitalist social form.⁵ This crucial insight makes Marx’s critique of political economy utterly unique and powerfully insightful but also quite demanding theoretically. To attempt superficially to bypass money and the market for a direct, more egalitarian remuneration of individual labor and distribution of its various products, as both Proudhonian and tricontinental, Leninist socialism variously attempted, short-circuits Marx’s insight into capitalism as a total social form in which all elements, including mere forms of appearance such as money, wages, and price, have their necessary place. Money, Marx argued against the Proudhonians as early as 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy, "is not a thing, it is a social relation, [and value] is constituted, not by the time needed to produce [a commodity] by itself, but in relation to the quota of each and every other product which can be created in the same time."⁶ In light of this critique, this book thus argues that only an analysis of capitalism as a total social form can adequately explain the relation of slavery and capitalism. Furthermore, Marx’s critique holds the ultimate political consequence that only a transformation of this encompassing social form, as opposed to one or more of its superficial but necessary aspects, could hope to pass beyond the limits of capitalism.

While classical Ricardian and neoclassical economics analyze the quantities and distribution of wealth, Marx’s critique poses the more basic question of the specific forms and purpose of wealth and labor in a given society. Marx’s unique contribution to the critique of capitalism—but also of slavery—was to analyze the (historically and analytically) specific social forms governing material-technical processes of production, as well as, inversely, to examine the determination of capitalist social relations in general by the monetary value-form of labor. Marx asked for the first time why under capitalism labor must appear as what he called its value-form (Wertform), manifest as the price of labor power (wage), and, furthermore, demonstrated how the formal equality of commodity exchange—including the purchase and use of wage labor (but not that of slaves)—is nonetheless able to create surplus value. Money, in the form of exchange value (price), is no mere convention; it is the key relational intermediary that governs and regulates social interaction under capitalism, crucially enabling the socialization of all private labor. Slavery, in which only the laborer, but not her labor power, is commodified, is by definition excluded from this socialization of labor power in the form of exchange value. From this monetary labor theory of value it follows that in the capitalist social form, slaves necessarily constitute what Marx called constant capital, functionally no different than other mechanized and natural means of production, from wind and waterpower to mules, horses, and machines.

While the view that labor creates value was developed long before Marx (notably by Adam Smith and David Ricardo), Marx for the first time distinguished transhistorical, material-physiological processes of commodity production (concrete labor) from their specific social forms (including slavery) in a commodity-based society (as abstract labor, the substance of value). In this fashion, he demonstrated why in a society governed by commodity exchange, labor must take the historically distinct form of a monetary exchange value that Marx termed labor power (and without this necessity implying the immediate irrelevance of other precedent forms of labor from waterpower and mules to slavery). My examination of Marx’s analysis in chapter 2 thus extends Marx’s value-form analysis to interrogate the place of slavery within the development of global capitalism, a question Marx only addressed rarely and obliquely, in various comments dispersed across the thousands of manuscript pages and drafts that make up what we now know as the three volumes of Capital.

If in this view (1) slave-based production indisputably constitutes a crucial element in the development and expansion of global capitalism since the eighteenth century but (2) slave labor is by definition as incapable of creating surplus value as wind, steam, or mule power, what, then, constitutes the specific contribution of Caribbean slave-based labor to capitalist accumulation? If, owing to its inaccessibility to commodification (only the slave, not her labor power, has an exchange value), slave labor is incapable of generating surplus value—the very substance and lifeblood of capital itself—how can we nonetheless grasp its necessary place within the development of capitalism without abstractly and counterfactually relegating slavery to a mere anticipatory or external status relative to capitalism (as Eugene Genevose, Ernesto Laclau, and Robert Brenner have variously argued)? For, as Dale Tomich has shown in the single most coherently argued treatment of slavery and capitalism to date, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, slave-based production was transformed and displaced but also radically expanded following the human rights–based American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, precisely in the period of global capitalist industrialization that is the object of Marx’s critique.

I argue in response in the final section of part 1 that slave-based production initially allowed for the massive capture of profit (which Marx rigorously distinguishes from the creation of surplus value) in an already global commodity market in the eighteenth century. With the subsequent consolidation of capitalism as a social form dependent upon wage labor and the accompanying scientific transformation of commodity production (of sugar, of cotton), however, the hidebound, reified social forms of Caribbean slave labor became increasingly incapable of producing these commodities at the ever-increasing levels of productivity required to continue to capture profits in a globalized system.

This analysis of slavery and capitalism as interwoven and codependent social forms thus sets the theoretical scene for properly grasping the radical, revolutionary Black Jacobin critique of social form, the militant peripheral critique of slavery and colonial capitalism understood not as technical modes of material production but as profoundly unjust social forms of relation requiring revolutionary transformation.

Chapter 3 thus turns to the problem of the revolutionary overthrow of slavery, focusing on C. L. R. James’s analysis of the successful anticolonial revolution in its paradigmatic instance: Haiti. What, James famously asked in The Black Jacobins, can assure the revolutionary transformation of an unjust and hyperviolent social form into a more just, egalitarian one? What can explain the astonishing success of the Haitian Revolution, the first successful slave revolt in history? According to James, neither the number of slaves taking part, the horrific violence of slavery itself, nor African cultural remnants or even local hygienic conditions in St. Domingue were determinate in the unfolding of the Haitian Revolution. San Domingo was not the first place where European invaders had met fever. It was the decree of abolition, the bravery of the blacks, and the ability of their leaders, that had done it. In this simple formulation, James encapsulates the three heterogeneous causes that in his view turned what began as one more slave revolt into a successful mass revolution that overthrew the savage capitalist social form of plantation slavery. These criteria can be summarized as (1) the idea of freedom and equality, the idea, in other words, of the French Revolution concretized in the Jacobin abolition decree of 6 February 1794; (2) the concerted struggle of a mass (the word James adopts throughout The Black Jacobins) of half a million former slaves; and (3), in what is still the most original and controversial dimension of the book’s argument, the guidance of leaders of genius and above all Toussaint Louverture. This analysis allows James, in compelling prose, to present the material process of anticolonial revolution, understood not as blind contingency but in the necessity governing its historical unfolding across the twentieth century.

Chapter 4 then interrogates Antillean plantation slavery and the competing social forms—from forced sharecropping to the general refusal of work—that replaced it in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. In comparing C. L. R. James’s understanding of the concept proletariat—in The Black Jacobins and in James’s World Revolution, 1917–1936 (1937)—with Marx’s various developments of the concept across the three volumes of Capital, I argue that the problem of postcolonial labor and social form should rightly focus on the concept of the proletarian as Marx and James develop it. This analysis contrasts James’s rich political and historicist deployment of the concept with Marx’s analytical usage of the notion in his categorial critique of capitalism.

If, following Marx, we cannot consider slave labor to be proletarian in any but the vaguest, transhistorical sense of the term, the same cannot be said of the social forms of labor that succeeded the destruction of plantation slavery in the Haitian Revolution. While I have argued elsewhere that the radicality of the Haitian Revolution initiated a novel and veritably world-historical process of universal emancipation, I here examine in detail the postrevolutionary passage from slavery to various postslavery regimes in St. Domingue / Haiti from 1791 to 1820.⁷ I argue that competing notions of freedom and autonomy—between the forced-but-remunerated-labor forms of agrarian corporalism under Etienne Polverel, Toussaint Louverture, and Henry Christophe and the demand for stateless self-sufficiency of the rural Haitian population, the moun andeyò—together composed a struggle for and against the subsumption of Haiti within the expanding order of global capitalism.

The various sharecrop remunerations (typically a quarter of production) postslavery labor received furthered the formal transition from postslavery to wage labor: pay, even in the form of coffee or sugar, must be exchanged for subsistence goods if workers were to survive. This process developed as a hybrid social form of labor I term noncommodified labor power.⁸ For Polverel, Louverture, and Christophe, the political and economic autonomy of the colony or state required the reintegration of St. Domingue / Haiti within the compass of global commodity production, while the subsistence-based independence claimed by the Haitian peasantry after 1791 (an autonomy that substantially persisted well into the twentieth century) engaged a significant refusal of Haitian primitive accumulation and accompanying dependency upon market commodities for survival. The chapter analyzes the various labor forms prescribed by Sonthonax and Polverel (1793–94) to then focus in particular on the historically unique and rarely analyzed Code Henry, promulgated by Henry Christophe in 1812.

Chapter 5 presents the Black Jacobin critique of colonial forms of labor and the state in the political writings of Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Compère Général Soleil, and Suzanne Césaire’s essays from the journal Tropiques. I argue that Aimé Césaire’s analysis of the state-based social form in neocolonial capitalism fills a notable gap in Marx’s critique of political economy. In this light, the chapter examines the key contribution of political and cultural Marxism to Césaire’s singular critique of social form, from his initial affiliation with the French Communist movement from 1936 to 1956 to his subsequent Marxian, democratic socialist, and anticolonial militancy into the 1980s. While the culturalist bent of francophone studies has tended to misread Césaire’s resignation from the French Communist Party as a definitive disavowal of Marxism, Césaire’s famous 1956 Lettre à Maurice Thorez could not be more explicit: It is neither Marxism nor Communism that I renounce, . . . [but rather] the use some have made of Marxism and Communism. Chapter 5 surveys in this light Césaire’s newly edited political writings (Aimé Césaire: Écrits politiques). I argue that Césaire’s constant defense of the Martinican proletariat and his repeated calls for the industrial development of Martinique constitute an anticolonial democratic socialism. Césaire undertakes an unyielding struggle—simultaneously on political and cultural fronts, in both Martinique and the colonial world more generally and across the span of the twentieth century—to articulate and construct social relations governed by the concern for universal justice as equality.

I conclude this discussion of the social forms of labor in the postcolonial Caribbean with an analysis of the writings of Jacques Stephen Alexis and Suzanne Césaire. Alexis’s magisterial novel Compère Général Soleil, in this reading, figures in fictional narrative the Leninist call for industrial development and the defense of proletarian labor across the Global South that likewise governs Césaire’s political prescriptions. The novel thus symptomatically stages a contradiction between this Marxist-humanist celebration of industrialization and labor, on the one hand, and a lyric ode to the natural Haitian world that supports human life in the Caribbean. The contradiction lies in the fact that this ecological symbiosis, as has become eminently clear today, is in fact unequivocally threatened by the secular onslaught of industrialization itself. In contrast to the praise of productionism characteristic of the entire tradition of Caribbean critique from Louverture and Christophe to Césaire and Alexis, Suzanne Césaire—feminist, communist fellow traveler, surrealist esprit libre—stands alone in having figured a powerful critique of industrialism and the capitalist social form of labor to reveal their ideological centrality to the discourse and practice of Antillean colonialism. In her brief corpus of seven essays for Tropiques, Césaire voices this critique while at the same time dismantling its inverse image, the bucolic pastoral of Antillean, doudouiste exoticism. For all their brevity, Suzanne Césaire’s visionary essays, above all her final, 1945 masterpiece, Le grand camouflage, thus rejoin Marx’s critique of the social form of labor, with which the book begins, to constitute a culminating moment in the Caribbean critique of late colonial capitalism.

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From 1776 to 1804, the Atlantic revolutions instituted increasingly egalitarian social forms, revolutionary societies in which human freedom from slavery was eventually deemed universal and inalienable. This process culminated in the Haitian Revolution and independence, which created a society in which all humans, without exception, were deemed ineligible for enslavement. The magnificent conquest of the Haitian Revolution is to have instantiated this fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human person.

The ambivalence of the Haitian Revolution, however, lies in this very same achievement, for under the capitalist social form, this universal souk in which everything is offered up for sale, the free subject of human rights is, as Marx first argued, none other than the unequivocally necessary subject of capitalism. In a social form in which everything has its price, where every thing can and must be monetized for profit under the demonic imperative of accumulation, there can and must, however, remain only one exception to this general rule: the free subject of human rights, the subject whose capacity for labor must be voluntarily offered as a commodity, namely, labor power, the sole and unique commodity able to create surplus value, the lifeblood of capital. When a person is bought as a commodity, as a slave, Marx argued, they are not free to own their labor power as their property, and thus to sell it for a wage, but are instead debased to a mere means of production, a source of motive power no different, from the perspective of capital and its demand for surplus value, from any donkey, steam engine, or robot. Although slaves have undeniably formed a historical (and contemporary) element within the capitalist social form, the latter nonetheless requires not slaves but free wage labor, humans compelled to offer their labor power for sale, and thus tends ineluctably to force humans to accept the demands of wage labor through various forms of ongoing primitive accumulation. It is this ambivalence, along with the possibility of its overcoming, that the following chapters seek to describe.

Part I

From Marx . . .

1. The Problem of Social Form in Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery

How could I and my advisors have neglected that classic work of Marx [Capital] on the colonies as the source of primary capitalistic accumulation?

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870

THE PUBLICATION of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 shattered in a single blow the complacent, self-congratulatory consensus of British historicism, dissolving previously unquestioned ideological certainty via the corrosive force of its radical, carefully documented theses: that New World slavery made the most vital and, indeed, decisive contribution to the formation and consolidation of British capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in Europe more generally (thus placing the Caribbean at the heart of global modernity); equally revolutionary and even more upsetting to North Atlantic consensus was Williams’s further assertion that the implacable, systematic compulsion of economic forces, and not the magnanimous humanitarianism of the abolitionists, drove the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. That these propositions may seem immediately plausible today is itself testament to the impact of Williams’s book, which has continued to set the terms of debate on the relation of slavery and capitalism into the present.¹

Only a decade earlier the British, celebrating the 1933 centenary of abolition, had basked in the warm glow of unanimous moral certainty. Seymour Drescher describes how in 1933 "there seemed little ambiguity about either the historical concept of the original event [abolition] or its long-range significance. Professors G. M. Trevelyan in the Times and Reginald Coupland at Hull agreed that the abolition was an act of the British nation which had lifted mankind to a higher moral plane and nurtured the religious and secular optimism of the Victorian Age."² The ideological atmosphere was one of national progress, tinged with the religious moralism of its principal hero figure, William Wilberforce, an atmosphere that impelled an imperialist vision of a benevolent emancipation in celebratory testimony to the redemptive force of British liberalism and its imperial mission.³

In upsetting this sentimental sense of moral superiority, Williams had had to confront and overcome an analogous academic moral consensus in order to complete his 1938 Oxford dissertation, with resistance originating from his supervisor, Vincent Harlow, in particular.⁴ In his autobiography, Williams writes that when he was a doctoral student at Oxford all the dice were loaded against me, for at Oxford, I had committed the unpardonable sin—I had challenged the British interpretation of the abolition of slavery. . . . I still recall, how I was told, in unambiguous language, that if I persisted in my analysis of [William] Pitt’s policy in respect of slavery and the slave trade in the war with France, not only would my thesis be failed, but in the opinion of the spokesman, rightly be failed.⁵ Following the troubled but finally successful completion of his dissertation, Williams left the inhospitable English academic milieu in 1938 to accept a professorship at Howard University. Finding a publisher for the manuscript of Capitalism and Slavery proved no easier than completing the dissertation itself. When Williams approached the progressive English publisher Fredric Warburg—who in 1938 had published the Trotskyist historical study World Revolution by Williams’s principal mentor, C. L. R. James—Williams received a flat, expressly ideological rejection from Britain’s most radical publisher: Mr. Williams, are you trying to tell me that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not for humanitarian reasons? I would never publish such a book for it would be contrary to the British tradition.⁶ Not without further difficulty, Williams was finally able to secure publication by the University of North Carolina Press with support from the historian of the British West Indies Lowell Ragatz, though the press required Williams to subvent its publication to the sum of seven hundred dollars, which proved quite difficult for the young Trinidadian professor to raise.⁷

Further opposition came from the manuscript’s reviewers, two of whom, along with Melville Herskovitz, urged Williams to eliminate the reference to capitalism in the book’s title. Williams did not relent, arguing that his book deals with what the slaves produced, how they were purchased, and the consequences of these points for capitalism.⁸ The editors finally relented, and the book was published with the eminently clear and concise title that has continued to define a field of inquiry for generations of scholars.

At least as remarkable as this institutional, ideological resistance to the analytical conjunction of slavery and capitalism is the fact that the word capitalism, astonishingly, had not appeared once in Williams’s 1938 dissertation. Where the dissertation had spoken vaguely of the economy, Williams incorporated into his book manuscript the insights of a key 1943 article, Laissez Faire, Sugar, and Slavery, in which Williams first clearly articulated his key thesis about the role of economic determinism in the rise and fall of plantation slavery: The rise and fall of slavery was a phase of the rise and fall of mercantilism.⁹ As Pepijn Brandon points out, this terminological shift marked a crucial development and clarification of Williams’s argument; the title on which Williams rightly insisted clearly defines the novel conceptual object the book will proceed to construct, delineating the conjunction of capitalist slavery as an Atlantic systemic totality.¹⁰

It is worth considering for a moment this object of analysis that Williams’s title constructs. The mere titular conjunction of these two substantives, capitalism and slavery, in itself constitutes an ideological intervention, uniting what liberal, imperialist ideology had studiously held apart: the moral odium of slavery and the glorious historical progress of capitalism.¹¹ Williams’s considered formulation of this object of inquiry forced historians to confront the relation of these two social forms as a single variegated and historically evolving totality, initiating a debate that has only intensified with the passage of time.¹²

In fact, Williams’s argument is far more complex than a putative Williams thesis (that slavery was incompatible with mature industrial capitalism) acknowledges. In arguing that both the growth and the decline of British West Indian slavery were determined in the final instance by the British economy, Capitalism and Slavery proposes that emancipation was an uneven, complex, and varied phenomenon across the Atlantic world. Williams observes that a second wave of slavery developed across the nineteenth century as Cuba, Brazil, and the United States radically increased commodity production by slave labor following its abolition in the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the British abolition of 1833:

The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly. That slavery to them was relative and not absolute and depended on latitude and longitude, is proved after 1833 by their attitude to Cuba, Brazil and the United States. They taunted their opponents with seeing slavery only where they saw sugar and limiting their observation to the circumference of a hogshead. (C&S, 169)¹³

Among the great accomplishments of Capitalism and Slavery is to have axiomatically posited this complex linkage of these two social forms and to have then developed its analysis in refusing a reductive, celebratory narrative of a gradual abolition in line with a putative progressive development and refinement of British moral sentiment.

It is frequently pointed out that while Capitalism and Slavery makes no explicit references to Marxist theory, the book nonetheless develops along these lines a minimally materialist argument, in the sense that economic factors are argued to be historically determinant relative to the idealism of emancipationist sentiment and discourse.¹⁴ I argue below that there is a clear sense, however, in which the complexity of his object (the conjuncture of capitalism and slavery), while ultimately inadequately theorized by Williams, nonetheless far exceeds the reductive, binary opposition drawn by subsequent traditional Marxist theorizations, which have tended