I have to say that the present events over the past couple of weeks have been amusing to me in a schadenfreude type sense. After decades of denying the possibility of incipient fascism in the developed world, especially over the past 25 years when a massive growth in neo-fascist parties occurred on the European continent, now mainstream liberals have erupted with the howl that "Trump is a fascist!" or pained question-begging in numerous click-bait articles variously titled: "Is Trump a Fascist?" Trump, for his part, is aware of the similarity of his positions with that of the far-Right and instead of calling upon the ghost of Hitler or even a living Marine Le Pen, he meekly outlines the similarity of his position to that of US presidents past. FDR, in the first-case, the great holy spirit that dwells within the bosom of American liberals, and Carter--another reasonable liberal, a humanitarian no-less, who was one of America's lest militaristic post-war presidents, who also prioritized rationality over nationalist idealism on issues like the environment or dependence on foreign oil. What also should we make of Trump's twitter spat with a Saudi prince and billionaire? Isn't it an absurd, perhaps even obscene, spectacle that it was a Saudi billionaire-prince who called Trump "a disgrace to America and the GOP"? Zizek correctly pointed out that while Saudi Arabia seems the most feudalistic fundamentalist country in the region, it is also the nation most integrated with modern global financial capital. Perhaps then its no wonder that this Saudi prince donned his social media armor to ride in to the rescue of American democratic liberalism, in the same way that the US has consistently rode in with lavish support for the brutal monarchy based on sclerotic feudal principles.
But let's get down to business shall we? As always when there's some kind of outburst of political activity, there's always someone who sits in the back of a room somewhere and says, "c'mon its really not as bad as all that!" I couldn't help but notice a Vox article in that vein where the author interviewed five "fascism experts" on the subject of whether Trump was a fascist. Being a "fascism expert" in present times is a lot like being a "pornography expert" because the criteria for whether something is fascist always seems to boil down to a "I'll know it when I see it" basis that was the Supreme Court's rationale for determining what is and isn't pornography. Most left-wing groups have allowed Dimitrov and the COMINTERN's Marxist analysis of fascism to go by the wayside in favor of a left-liberal definition where it constitutes whatever is mean, white, and male. I'll be the first to say that there are problems with merely grafting Dimitrov's analysis of fascism from the 1930s onto present times, but in general it retains a greater clarity and correctness than, say, the 14 points of Fascism which is often bandied around on left-liberal websites.
We should note the absurdity of having a debate about fascism within the present mainstream political discourse and press in the United States. The US is involved in so many illegal wars, both overt and covert, that it is honestly exhausting to list, document and catalogue them all. And they are only proliferating. Ever since WWII, but especially since Vietnam, the United States Deep State has made every effort possible to short-circuit democratic checks and balances on war-making and to avoid seeking popular mandates on wars. The case of Libya was instructive, Obama addressed Congress on the situation but chose not to put the Libyan war to a vote citing presidential powers--remarks for which he received applause. Prompting the question, why even address Congress on it in the first place?
Then what should be said about the lack of resistance to war or any kind of Left outside the Democratic party (and its fellow travelers) in the United States? You see, for 8 years while Bush was waging these wars, we heard that they were the result of bad old christian white men. The Republicans seem to specialize in being the party of older Christian whites, so as the question was framed, the struggle against militarism outside US borders is inherently connected to resistance to greater democracy and liberalism in US borders. To the great embarrassment of the Left, it was the conservative christian whites, particularly those attracted to the edges of the Tea Party, who put up the only resistance to an open war against Syria and Assad. Then to great embarrassment, and only Black Agenda Report critically reported this shameful fact, black support for Obama's war on Syria outpaced that of whites.
While the Right had been motivated more by the fact that Obama had chosen to use Jihadist proxies in Syria against a secular government that protects Christians than any genuine anti-war/imperial sentiment, it was easy to detect within the speakers who protested this move a war-weary exhaustion from a community that had served as the foot soldiers for the war on terror. On the other hand, Black Lives Matter, a mob controlled by the democratic party, has said very little about the wars, and offered next to nothing besides rhetoric. Black Lives Matter is seeking partnership with US imperialism in exchange for elevating more blacks to positions of privilege. And even Bromma, hardly some white racist has pointed out 1. capital gets more bang for its buck by offering privilege to historically excluded populations 2. some segments of America's national minorities have outpaced the white working class in living standards, which have stagnated.
Let's be clear: buying off more "non-white" people isn't emblematic of the standard of bourgeois democracy; the present ethos of the Democratic party is hardly the antithesis of fascism. While Trump is taken for task for things he might do, we should talk about things that have already been done, histories which would be relevant if it was Bush in the White House. While democrats are held captive by the fantasy that Trump maybe reading Mein Kampf before he goes to bed, we hear nothing about Lolo Soetoro, the step-father of Barrack Obama who was colonel in the Indonesian military during the genocide of 1965. We hear nothing about how Obama's life in Indonesia during the genocide may have affected him, but during the Bush years, some liberals talked of the flirtation of W's grandfather with Nazism as a permanent stain on the political family; something dark that could not be exorcised. Unremarkably, documents on US involvement with the Indonesian genocide(s) have never been released. I wonder why? I think comparatively, if Romney had been elected in 2012 he would have had a lot less to lose by doing such a thing.
Then who talks of the fact that the Clintons have more blood on their hands than any family on Earth? Who talks of the 8-10 Congolese killed by Bill Clinton's proxy armies in the Congo? Or the 1.7 million Iraqis killed by the sanctions that he organized, at least 500,000 of whom were children. Bill Clinton invented the WMD canard that was used to invade Iraq by Bush. Some sources even claim that 50,000 black libyans were exterminated by the proxy forces that Clinton and Obama gave so much support to. Too my knowledge, Trump hasn't killed anyone, but we must act extremely worried that he will when he gains power. Unlike Clinton who shares blame in a body count that is probably second only to Hitler's.
Then we must, of course, really fear that Trump will wage rhetorical or economic attacks on friendly imperialist nations like China, South Korea, and Japan. However, we have nothing to fear from Obama's hate campaign against Russia and Russians. In the age of Buzzfeed liberalism, Russia has emerged as a most convenient boogeyman, it is a ready-made trailer trash nation, and hence promoting hatred of it is not racist, in fact it is now defined as "anti-racist". The Russians still carry around pictures of Stalin and Lenin and communists and their supporters still play an important role in Russian politics, so to the liberal mind, the Russian working class is just like the white working class whom they lock up in prisons and who join Nazi prisons gangs there. Like the demographic that consistently refuses to vote for Obama and put its trust in the democratic party, the Russians are alleged to be homophobic, transphobic, crypto-totalitarian religious xenophobes who have yet to embrace a nebulously defined "Democracy".
Obama and the Clintons want to finish what they started in the Soviet Union in the 1990s, they want what's remaining of the collectively owned assets to be sold off, for Russia to become a banana republic that's fated to break up. They want to fill their mouths with the blood of the carcass of what's remaining of the "last great European Empire"and to call it democracy. Meanwhile the more than a billion people who will become subject to the TTP and TTIP blocs will become the subjects of a top-secret experiment of corporate extra-territoriality, placed under the thumb of finance capital, walled off in the resurrected wet-dream of Japanese Fascism, America's very own Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere. Violating democratic rights and starting trade wars are only fascist when Trump proposes to do it.
In the spirit of taking discussion of fascism away from rough-shod definitions of what's merely "white and mean" I propose that a discussion regarding the development of a new type of social-fascism begin. The concept has been much neglected ever since historians have dubiously assigned to it the blame for the lack of an effective opposition to Hitler's rise to power. We maybe coming to the the age of Buzzfeed social-fascism where the interests of the labor aristocracy, whatever its skin color, and finance capital combine in a kind of lynchmob democracy with a utopian liberal veneer. I do not propose a full explanation of the concept here, but merely argue that in relation to the issue, choosing democratic social-fascism over Trump's "fascism" is no choice at all, they are "both worse" to borrow from Stalin.
What drives buzzfeed social-fascism in its essence, is a combination of the rent-seeking techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley with its dreams of hierarchal anarchism with the free trade ideology of port-centers like Singapore and Hong Kong which are important nodes in the geographical construction of global finance capital. In other words, yes to free trade, and now even limited freedom of population movement, but no to the obstruction of rent and interest payments, we are talking about a militarized free trade, where lowly tinkerers and tech pirates along with politicians who emphasize national sovereignty will be swiftly dispensed with. It is to be expected that humanist and ecological objections to technological violations of nature and human bodies in pursuit of capital will also be quashed and struck down as merely quaint luddism.
To return to the original topic, when modern liberals accuse Trump of engineering a neo-fascism reliant on populism and utilizing American democratic norms they are only setting themselves up to be hung by their own petard. For decades, liberals countered accusations of human rights abuses, comparison of their policies with those of the fascist nations of WWII with the objection that fascism was an internally coherent 'total' ideology and historically specific. In other words, the US could violently kill 3.8 million civilians in Vietnam according to a Harvard medical study, and that wasn't fascist because there were no gangs marching down streets with jackboots and arm bands. De Gaulle could take power in a coup and re-write the French constitution and that wasn't fascist, because he did it to preserve the liberal norm, and in any case popular involvement in politics was returned after May 68. Horrors resulting from local responses to the refugee crisis in Hungary and the Czech republic again raise the canard of "populism" now practically a by-word for the trans-atlantic elite for fascism. But few care to remember that it was in Brussels and Berlin where the continent's atrocious immigration policies and border militarizations initiated.
Meritocratic technocracy is its own type of populism, otherwise where comes the colleges filled to the brim with business, management, advertisement and STEM students? Buzzfeed social fascism produces its own mobs, its own sophistic talking points, its own tyrannies, its own privileged castes which no one may dare speak against. It creates a populism for the labor aristocracy on a global scale; and with the new reports on the spike in mortality among the white working class, we may legitimately say old labor aristocracies are allowed to collapse into proletarian status because of their skin color, proletarian whites have sunk still further. Enlightenment and Christian culture alike is destroyed in the name of particularity, of privilege, of grievance, of identity, paradoxically crushed under the banner of "equality".
Very little evidence has been provided that Trump will be worse than Clinton. We could probably expect slow-motion attacks on muslims and (proletarian) immigrants rather than Trump's blanket repressions. We could expect a totalitarian submission to the logic of capital, which Trump accepts but only rejects in the case of free trade. Its no basis for supporting the democrats.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
Reflections on Baptist/Beckert
Ghost-Notes of the Whipping-Machine
"I mean, these are camps [Southern 'plantations'] that could have impressed the Nazis" said Noam Chomsky in a recent interview in discussion of American racism and the legacy of slavery. He referred to Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told several times and referred to it several times as "shocking". Here we should take a pause. Noam Chomsky has authored more than 100 books and is as rigorous of a scholar as it is humanly possible to be. In his 80 years, no scholar has collected and documented as many facts on the evils of American foreign policy. Regarding America's domestic history, he's certainly no slouch (he's been alive for much of it!), so the very fact that Baptist's book shocked even Chomsky should give us pause. Given the health statistics and rampant cruelty that he documents, Baptist was certainly being generous when he said American slavery: "probably killed hundreds of thousands of people". We could certainly calculate the death toll at one million or even several million when we look at the effect of 80 years of brutal slavery on a whole people. For a long time, slavery had been identified, along with the extermination of the indigenous population, as America's "founding crime", or rather, it's original sin. But it is a crime so enormous that it must continually be erased or dressed up in the American imagination. In fact, Americans have an easier time imagining the true nature of their forebears extermination of the Indians then they do conceptualizing that slavery may have been something other than brutal yet benevolent care.
As the Baltimore riots raged, I felt a strange compulsion to go through the end notes of Baptist's book, to reread the economic sections and recheck the data. I paid particular attention to Baptist's claim that the American Revolution caused a profound rupture in the structure of Early Modern slavery which resulted in an unprecedented rise in labor productivity. Early Modern slaveries, or "War Capitalism" as Beckert might call it, rested on a structure of continually acquiring new acres of land and clearing it to plant sugar, tobacco and placing more slaves on it. It would appear that Baptist is correct to assert that it hadn't changed so much since the sugar slavery of Portuguese/Dutch Brazil, with labor productivity rising slowly, if at all, over several centuries. Another feature of older slaveries is the practice of manumission (which was practiced all over the Americas) and stratification of labor (i.e. skilled artisans etc.) within slave labor forces. As Baptist's book demonstrates, these factors were conspicuously absent in the American experience of slavery.Labor in the cotton fields was notoriously despecialized and deskilled; it resembled a modern sweatshop far more than it resembled any other agricultural sector of its age. In comparison, to the viciously avant-garde and modern organization of labor in the Southern slave labor camp, the modern cotton mill, often seemed antique. Recent decades have brought more focus on the 400 year Atlantic Slave Trade and its contribution to Western progress. But such wide focus has a tendency to obscure specific facts or uniqueness of experience; it can be said that there is an omission by inclusion. If it sounds contradictory, it's really not. If everyone was involved in and benefited from the slave trade then everyone is guilty. And that actually makes Uncle Sam look awfully good. By concentrating on slave ships and the number of slaves imported to this or that particular colony, we leave to one side the conditions under which slaves actually worked. So only 6% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic made their way to North American shores, thus Uncle Sam comes off looking good comparatively, to slave-labor sinkholes such as Brazil. Even American complicity in the heyday of the 19th century slave-trade can be used to cast its own slavery practices at home in a favorable light. Since, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French slavers were also involved there's plenty of parties for the blame to be spread around.
But the enormous internal slave-trade of one million people must not be talked about. All efforts must be made to make Brazilian or Jamaican plantations look comparatively worse. If caribbean plantations were the height of cruelty and exploitation then why did Eric Williams think they were in decline circa the late 18th century? And why did Britain and France give them up? The frequency of slave-revolts and constant need for new labor imports are cited as the proof that conditions were worse. But the former can only be proof that it was easier for slaves to rebel, not that conditions were easier. In the first place, non-North American colonies usually had a gender imbalance owing to the fact that slave-traders often preferred young men and boys for plantation labor. The fact that the American slaves who built the Empire of liberty had an equitable gender-balance and had generally resigned in the colonies for several generations can explain a lot about why labor imports were required in Haiti but not in say Virginia. The data also shows that the fertility of American slave women was much higher than in Jamaica, and the slave-rape/breeding culture must play a significant part in this, but the facts are that infant mortality was much higher than present day Haiti and similar to Caribbean plantation islands and West Africa. What does this say when the United States has a temperate climate? Most slaves died young. They were shorter than their white counter-parts and according to some sources slave women often did not achieve menarche until their early to mid-twenties. Johnson has documented that starvation and undernourishment were pervasive on slave-planations and this quite counter to popular notions that slave-owners had an interest in keeping their slaves healthy in order to extract value from them. Raising yields and attaining profits this season often overshadowed the long-run. In addition to the brutal combination of torture and modern management, when slaves weren't picking cotton they were doing plenty of other work that often underwrote the costs of the labor camps. Whether its growing food to sustain themselves or mending clothes. Baptist notes that the rare times that slaves were paid, it was for 'overtime' usually for night-work on Sundays, because they couldn't ask it of them for religious reasons. Wages don't make US slavery any nicer than any other American slavery, because in fact slaves received wages all over the Americas for certain kinds of work.
The skeptic might sit back and think that even if all this information proves that American slavery was far from benign, it doesn't prove it was worse then elsewhere. But consider this: the explosion in labor productivity that US slavery produced was unprecedented, in fact it is so great that on its own terms it could explain the Great Divergence. Is this a shocking claim? Not when you consider that when US cotton production hit its height in 1860, 4 million slaves were producing more cotton than 200 million Indian peasants. Suddenly, the West had capitalized, monetized, and securitized an enormous cotton crop that outdistance that produced by the vast and prosperous peasant economies of Asia. It was a massive source of wealth and capital. Production for export did not fully recover until 1875. We can also point out that the entire cotton export cotton crop of the African continent surpassed America's 1860 output--in 1930! European colonialism in Africa was never renowned for its benevolence, so we can infer that the brutality that American slaves experienced must have been extreme, if the colonialists of the Livingstone-Rhodes generation took so long in squeezing a similar sized crop out of the continent. We should also note that it was not a foreign crop, Africans were skilled cotton weavers and agriculturalists. Johnson pointed out that Jefferson and others hoped that by allowing slavery to spread into newly seized southwest territories that the African population of the seaboard would be 'diffused' and that their labor would help aid in building a white yeoman republic, and they would themselves die out. Few have even broached the issue of whether American slavery could be described as ethnic cleansing or genocidal. In part it must be said that its because the enslaved population in absolute numbers rose and also because by the early 1820s slavery was a dominant and dynamic institution. Whatever the intent, America had a larger slave economy than any other place on the planet in the 19th century. It held the majority of the 6 million slaves that powered the Atlantic Market Revolution of the 19th century as Grandin refers to it. Baptist is correct to say that slavery financed the occupation of the North American continent. The entire British Empire and its domains were also completely dependent on the wealth extracted from the blood of American slaves. It would seem that US slavery presages the worst episodes of capitalist brutality such as the Belgian Congo. Baptist has pointed to the indelible imprint that both the slaves and the enslavers left on modernity. So, many "free" workers would suffer from the scientific system of labor management that was developed inside those labor camps. The "scientific" racism of the confederacy and the antebellum South would presage the horrors of Nazi Germany, but would also serve as a justification for the repression and extermination of many other peoples. The confederacy itself, and its fearsome spawn, the Ku Klux Klan would in many ways serve as a template for the construction of classical fascism globally. Likewise, the slaves too, remade the world from the many strains of global protestantism reaching out from America influenced by African American slave preachers and beliefs, to the very soundtrack of the 20th century. The language of African American abolitionists, served as a template for the construction of human rights discourse and influenced the anti-colonial movement.
The spine of American Imperialism was forged in the age of slavery, its most vile inhumanities and the most dynamic features of its character took shape in that time. The ghost-notes of the whipping machine have continued to pervade the rhythm of the American imperialist machine long after the former's dissolution. We can only speculate that it is the great unnamed, and that it will continue to dog the consciousness of Americans weighing like a nightmare upon the living until its full shadow is reckoned with and exposed. If foreigners want to know "who are the Americans?" in the most intimate and raw sense possible, then there is hardly a better starting place then Baptist's book.
Industrial Labor, Cotton Imperialism, and Globalization
The perfect complement to the revolutionary historiography of Baptist and Johnson respectively is Sven Beckert's book Empire of Cotton: A Global History. All three historians are meticulous and are aware of each other's work and even cite each other sometimes. What is remarkable about Beckert's book is that it's not about some isolated field of study, such as US slavery but is rather a comprehensive history of the global capitalism from the perspective of the cotton industry. It is one of the most comprehensive, readable and erudite histories of global capitalism yet written. While most histories of global capitalism tend to either become too wide and lose focus or too narrow and unreadable, Beckert's book avoids these pitfalls by focusing on capitalism's leading edge: the cotton industry. According to Beckert cotton was the world's premier industry from 1000 CE-1900 and what he narrates is the dramatic story of how the region in the world poorest in cotton production and technology came to seize control of that world industry. In a marked blow to Eurocentrism, Beckert points out that while peasants in the Americas, Africa and Asia all grew and wove cotton, for most of European history the region was impoverished in terms of cotton cloth and cotton textile industries. While cotton textiles had been making its way to Europe from Asia since the Middle Ages, its importation was a drain on European national economies and it was only available for the rich. But not long after the dawn of the Early Modern Age something strange began to happen. Raw cotton in limited quantities began to stream in through European merchant networks in a slapdash and inconstant manner during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Here, merchants possessed one advantage over local spinners and weavers that elites elsewhere did not-- the artisans were completely dependent on them; they could not grow their own supply of cotton. As cotton made its way into Europe through informal trade networks and suppliers in Africa, the Ottoman Empire, elsewhere in Asia, it was paid for either with the pillage of the New World or in the few trade goods Europeans were relatively advantaged in. But it was often paid for at a premium and non-European merchants and suppliers often showed little interest in selling raw cotton when finished cloth goods would fetch far better prices. Few peasant economies were set up for a massive export of raw cotton to Europe in any case.
The Early Modern state, particularly in Britain, responded by placing prohibitive tariffs on foreign textiles, enforced by the death penalty in the British case. State coercion plays a much larger role in Beckert's analysis of the rise of cotton capitalism than it probably does for most historians. He choses to emphasize the statist, monopolistic, anti-democratic and protectionist aspect of this era of capitalism. Certainly Marx thought that the public debt, high taxes and tariffs that arose throughout Early Modern Europe was "forcing house" for capitalism aimed at looting the public. Of particular interest is Beckert's analysis of the Caribean cotton revolution and the industrial revolution. As Williams, Inikori, Marx and others, have pointed out, slavery and the slave trade was integral to the economy of Northern Britain where the world's first industrial revolution occurred. Beckert keeps with traditional historiography emphasizing how decentralized, seemingly spontaneous, and entrepreneurial, the initial industrial revolution was. Starting with the water-frame, the mule and the spinning jenny, these innovations to traditional textile industries in the second half of the late 18th century, gradually raised the productivity of labor manyfold. The effect was that by the end of the 18th century, a British worker could outproduce an Indian textile worker on the open-market in spite of higher labor costs. But an important factor in this story that Beckert emphasizes is that this revolution in productivity would never have been possible without new steady and constant sources of raw cotton coming online at the same time. While much more renowned for their sugar, the Caribean had been the site of the first boom in white gold. It put control of a steady and expanding source of cotton in the hands of European merchants for the first time. Needless to say it was a statist endeavor that was built upon slavery. Haiti was the single largest source of white gold in the Americas. Beckert points out that half of Haiti's plantations were cotton plantations which puts new light on the Haitian Revolution and the British/French invasions of Haiti. The desire of British cotton manufacturers to trade with the French cotton isles by itself can explain why British cotton capitalists embraced free trade. Beckert has little use for an abstraction like free trade except other then to deconstruct the free trade of that era as being less than ideal. This is somewhat like "the theory of force" promoted by Eugene Duhring which is often restated in a veiled form by anarchist theorists and historians influenced by anarchist epistemology. It also leaves aside that in 19th century economic thought a "free market" had a very specific meaning, it was never meant to be "free" in an anarchistic sense but rather meant "free" in a social sense of eliminating cost and the remnants of feudalism that were still a significant factor in the Western economy. That latter project of eliminating or marginalizing the landlord class which many notable bourgeois economists demanded was bound to be a "statist" endeavor as they themselves recognized. And secondly, to decry 19th century free trade deficient merely due to the fact that there was protectionism obscures the fact that great progress towards that ideal was made--it has only been in recent history that Europe has made gains in economic integration beyond what had been achieved in that era.
But for Beckert, the sudden rise of a pan-West European textile manufacturing industry has its roots in both the priorities of national security between competing European states and the blockade of the Napoleonic Wars. Continenal cotton capitalists took advantage of the exclusion of British textiles from the European market to develop their own national industries. Once this occurred, the textile bourgeoisie of the respective European countries became an increasingly activist group demanding tariffs on low-grade cloth for the purposes of national security. Which meant Britain could still dominate the market for high-grade cloth, but slowly as these industries developed they also became competitors in this field. It would seem that most Europeans were not sold on the idea that off-shoring is free-trade, an idea in vogue with modern neo-liberals. The inability of London to persuade European and American neighbours on the benefit of this kind of "free-trade" meant that they did most of their business with India and China. Beckert points out that other scholars have legitimately pointed out that this "free trade" with India and China had a more imperialist aggressive character then that of more legitimate business. The unrestrained dumping of British textiles on the Indian market resulted in Beckert calls "perhaps the greatest de-industrialization in history" with 2-6 million "industrial" jobs lost in colonial india. Similar, imperialist free-trade treaties and practices were forced on China and the Ottoman Empire. But again we have the resurgence of "theory of force" which while certainly playing its role, was not sufficient by itself to magically make British textiles cheaper than Indian or Chinese textiles. Nor could it make Chinese or Indian consumers buy them--especially when local handmade textiles were renowned for better quality and were much closer to local tastes. Some work remains to be done here, especially when Baptist is bold enough to claim that slave-made cotton benefited the entire world in some ways. It's a plausible claim as Chinese and Indian consumers found that buying European textiles which were made with slave-cotton left extra cash in their pocket books--even if it did do a great deal to ruin their national industries.
As far as the issue of "industrialization" goes, it should be said that most textile production was based in the households of the peasantry. In this sense, there was no real difference between England, India and China until the late 18th century. But as we've seen merchants had more power over the conditions of labor in Europe and were also better able to realize profits from the embodied labor of slave-produced raw cotton. This allowed entrepreneurs to build large workshops and factories that allowed manufacturers to more effectively exploit the labor of workers. What is fascinating is the dual character of cotton industrialization: one the one-hand it destroyed old industries and patterns of life and on the other it was completely dependent upon them. Industrialization in Northern England, Catalonia, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhineland, Austria and Russia all had one factor in common: a large established textile trade and culture prior to industrialization. Above all histories from the bourgeois point of view usually tell of sharp entrepreneurs whose singular brilliance allows them to do away with old and inefficient ways of doing things. In reality, the skills and talents of textile workers continued to be essential even as industrialization and deskilling advanced ever more rapidly. Beckert is correct to say that in comparison to the work style and regimen of an American slave, textile workers managed to preserve much more of the traditions, rhythm and workplace organization inherited from feudalism. For this reason, young women and children were highly preferred as workers since they could be hired cheaply and would more readily accede to brutal discipline and demands. But unlike the brutal overseer system that gave birth to modern management, it was mainly adult male business owners and skilled workers that did the job of "minding" the work of child and female workers. In Beckert's words, this capitalist revolution could only be successful because it was not complete. In other words, the cutting edge modern world of the cotton mill was dependent precisely on the fact that the world outside of the mill was not as modern. The persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the European countryside, patriarchy, as well as limited electoral suffrage, combined to create a world where a mill-owner could be a King himself on his own property. In fact, a great many cotton capitalists from Manchester to Moscow started their organizations with child laborers that had been lent to them from State orphanages. Marx often compared the trade that English mill-owners conducted in child laborers with that of American slaves across the Atlantic.
Beckert does great work in comparative industrialization, showing that the industrial revolution spread out from North England relatively rapidly even to non-European locales such as Mexico and Egypt. He focuses a great deal on the industrialization effort of Egypt but leaves aside the fact that the reason that state-led industrialization had failed by the mid-19th century was because Britain forced free-trade on the Ottoman Empire and its Egyptian dependency through military force. Prior to this, Egypt held the fifth place in the world of spindles per capita. In other words, Egypt in the 19th century was closer to Europe then it was apart from it in terms of industrialization and had it held that ground then it would have become a First World nation. In present times, Egypt is one of the poorest nations in the world and has to take up substantial unsustainable loans just to import fuel. Cotton industrialization and protectionism according to Beckert is the reason why Mexico has always held a unique position among Third World nations. What he means is that Mexico is a rich country among Third World nations even if it is poor nation in comparison with US, Japan, and Europe. In truth, Mexico is closer to South Korea, Taiwan, and the richer regions of China then it is to Bangladesh. Mexico has been on the "cusp" of becoming a wealthy developed nation for at least 100 years, or even longer if we go by Beckert's model of cotton driven industrialization. A slight diversion would be the case of Argentina and Uruguay which could be legitimately called "First World" nations in 1900 but have slipped into poverty, decay and neocolonial rule. Since cotton production or manufacturing wasn't strong in either of these countries (or indeed certain British settler-states) it would seem that cotton wasn't necessarily the only road to development in the 19th century.
Especially interesting is Beckert's ideas on cotton's relationship to reconstruction and the new imperialism of the late 19th century. Basically, the American Civil War caused a massive price explosion in cotton that forced a world-wide scramble on the part of European governments to secure alternative sources. For the first time since the late-1780s, the market price for cotton began to tilt in favor of producers in what is now called the Third World. Egypt was by far the biggest producer with the state taking the lead in squeezing the peasantry and importing thousands of slaves from the Sudan to keep up with the huge labor demand. Egypt would see a massive influx of European capital and take out massive loans which would later lead the nation into a debt spiral once cotton prices collapsed. The British made Egypt into an outright protectorate of the crown in 1884 due to its financial insolvency. The British and the Russians undertook major state-led projects to develop export-cotton production in Turkmenistan and India respectively during the Civil War. In the wake of the fall of U.S. slavery, these colonial cotton projects which had been on the minds of European rulers would be economically feasible for the first time in history. Earlier efforts at growing cotton for export by British colonial authorities had failed; post-Civil War nearly all of Europe and Japan would drink from the trough of Indian cotton, specifically in the state of Berar. The U.S. did retain its post-war cotton dominance until the 1930s but Beckert points out this was done through a strange witches brew of wage labor, small-farming, settler-expansion, and violent coercion.
The post-reconstruction South with its terrorist vigilante organizations and prison camps put major pressure on American blacks to produce cotton for export. As Baptist has pointed out even this could not match the efficiency of slavery which averaged 200 lbs of cotton per day and with labor productivity until the 1930s being half that. But quite legitimately the repressions of militarized cotton districts of Northern Mexico and colonial Africa and Asia come to mind in comparisons with the post-bellum South. There are some problems with considering the American South part of the global South as Beckert does. In the first place, the data on wages show that while Northern wages were more than twice as high as Southern wages. That's a major difference but hardly the 10-1 difference between the US and China at the turn of the century. It seems closer to the Central European countries which were hardly "global south". There was a major colonized population in the South--African Americans, which makes the comparison seem legitimate. For African Americans taken separately perhaps it is. But a large portion of cotton producing labor was done by small white farmers, white sharecroppers, or immigrant labor. The latter was probably closer to colonial conditions, but I have massive doubts about the former. If the South actually did become "colonized" and part of the Global South after the Civil War, then wouldn't that imply that southern white nationalism was some kind of anti-colonial rebellion? What seems more likely is that Southern whites retained major privileges from slavery and were willing to resort to terrorism to keep them from dissipating. Like with the oil industry, we shouldn't assume that just because cotton was a Third-World phenomenon that means conditions in the industry situated in the developed world are the same. But again, I'm not averse to viewing the situation with black labor as colonial. Since the US was the world's number one cotton producer until the 1930s, it would be helpful to keep in mind how the lynching tree not only benefited the ruling class in the US but also rising imperialist states like Germany and Japan. The former was almost completely dependent on American cotton, both before and after slavery, and the latter got at least half of its cotton from the US (the other major source being India).
For Beckert, cotton imperialism drove the late 19th century scramble to divide up the world. As cotton capitalists, assorted nationalists, and states bureaucrats began to see the importance of having a colonial supply of cotton to fall back on. Colonial cotton domination led to great misery and very often massive famines for the colonial peasantry that had now been enlisted in the world market. But it also contained the seeds of its own destruction. By the early 20th century, not only had the Western world diverged but it diverged to the point that the wages and labor standards of metropolitan workers were so high that textile manufacturing even on modern machinery was no longer very profitable. This was the original age of industrial globalization as textile manufacturing spread first to Japan where the countryside was ransacked in search of young women who would submit themselves to the dictatorship of factory life in hopes of earning a dowry. Manufacturers in Manchester and Massachusetts were unable to compete. Then came the first age of industrial development for colonial exploitation in China and India. The conditions that Chinese textile workers faced were perhaps the worst of all, female workers were literally kept under lock and key in Barracks and Beckert says that they were in a condition that approached bonded labor. Even Indian manufacturers couldn't beat China on labor costs. This led to a peculiar situation where the colonial British state stepped in to force labor standards on the Indian textile capitalists in order to preserve their own interests. This was furiously resisted by Indian capitalists who asserted the subhuman and instrumental existence of their laborers to the British authorities. There was also an almost worrying nascent sub-imperialist orientation among Indian textile manufacturers. The Indian industrialists oriented their export industry to British colonial Africa and strived to produce textiles that matched African tastes. Which makes one wonder if all the agitation on the part of the Indian bourgeoisie was simply about pushing off British rule in order to grab super-profits from African colonies. It was not very successful. But perhaps this explains why India ended up being far draconian and far more useful to global imperialism then it was even before independence.
As for today, China holds a near monopoly on both cotton production and manufacturing. The abuses familiar to the era of Industrialization continue, from the super-exploitation of workers in Bangladeshi factories to the 2 million child laborers in Uzbekistan who are forced to cultivate cotton underneath the repressive dictatorship there. However, synthetic fabrics have equaled or surpassed cotton fabrics starting in the 90s according to Beckert. So while the abuses continue, the potential for nations to develop on the cotton textile/cotton-producing model is very slight. Cotton may still be King but its power is more like that of a constitutional monarch in a small central european nation, not the power of a Roman Emperor that it once wielded in the mid-19th century.
"I mean, these are camps [Southern 'plantations'] that could have impressed the Nazis" said Noam Chomsky in a recent interview in discussion of American racism and the legacy of slavery. He referred to Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told several times and referred to it several times as "shocking". Here we should take a pause. Noam Chomsky has authored more than 100 books and is as rigorous of a scholar as it is humanly possible to be. In his 80 years, no scholar has collected and documented as many facts on the evils of American foreign policy. Regarding America's domestic history, he's certainly no slouch (he's been alive for much of it!), so the very fact that Baptist's book shocked even Chomsky should give us pause. Given the health statistics and rampant cruelty that he documents, Baptist was certainly being generous when he said American slavery: "probably killed hundreds of thousands of people". We could certainly calculate the death toll at one million or even several million when we look at the effect of 80 years of brutal slavery on a whole people. For a long time, slavery had been identified, along with the extermination of the indigenous population, as America's "founding crime", or rather, it's original sin. But it is a crime so enormous that it must continually be erased or dressed up in the American imagination. In fact, Americans have an easier time imagining the true nature of their forebears extermination of the Indians then they do conceptualizing that slavery may have been something other than brutal yet benevolent care.
As the Baltimore riots raged, I felt a strange compulsion to go through the end notes of Baptist's book, to reread the economic sections and recheck the data. I paid particular attention to Baptist's claim that the American Revolution caused a profound rupture in the structure of Early Modern slavery which resulted in an unprecedented rise in labor productivity. Early Modern slaveries, or "War Capitalism" as Beckert might call it, rested on a structure of continually acquiring new acres of land and clearing it to plant sugar, tobacco and placing more slaves on it. It would appear that Baptist is correct to assert that it hadn't changed so much since the sugar slavery of Portuguese/Dutch Brazil, with labor productivity rising slowly, if at all, over several centuries. Another feature of older slaveries is the practice of manumission (which was practiced all over the Americas) and stratification of labor (i.e. skilled artisans etc.) within slave labor forces. As Baptist's book demonstrates, these factors were conspicuously absent in the American experience of slavery.Labor in the cotton fields was notoriously despecialized and deskilled; it resembled a modern sweatshop far more than it resembled any other agricultural sector of its age. In comparison, to the viciously avant-garde and modern organization of labor in the Southern slave labor camp, the modern cotton mill, often seemed antique. Recent decades have brought more focus on the 400 year Atlantic Slave Trade and its contribution to Western progress. But such wide focus has a tendency to obscure specific facts or uniqueness of experience; it can be said that there is an omission by inclusion. If it sounds contradictory, it's really not. If everyone was involved in and benefited from the slave trade then everyone is guilty. And that actually makes Uncle Sam look awfully good. By concentrating on slave ships and the number of slaves imported to this or that particular colony, we leave to one side the conditions under which slaves actually worked. So only 6% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic made their way to North American shores, thus Uncle Sam comes off looking good comparatively, to slave-labor sinkholes such as Brazil. Even American complicity in the heyday of the 19th century slave-trade can be used to cast its own slavery practices at home in a favorable light. Since, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French slavers were also involved there's plenty of parties for the blame to be spread around.
But the enormous internal slave-trade of one million people must not be talked about. All efforts must be made to make Brazilian or Jamaican plantations look comparatively worse. If caribbean plantations were the height of cruelty and exploitation then why did Eric Williams think they were in decline circa the late 18th century? And why did Britain and France give them up? The frequency of slave-revolts and constant need for new labor imports are cited as the proof that conditions were worse. But the former can only be proof that it was easier for slaves to rebel, not that conditions were easier. In the first place, non-North American colonies usually had a gender imbalance owing to the fact that slave-traders often preferred young men and boys for plantation labor. The fact that the American slaves who built the Empire of liberty had an equitable gender-balance and had generally resigned in the colonies for several generations can explain a lot about why labor imports were required in Haiti but not in say Virginia. The data also shows that the fertility of American slave women was much higher than in Jamaica, and the slave-rape/breeding culture must play a significant part in this, but the facts are that infant mortality was much higher than present day Haiti and similar to Caribbean plantation islands and West Africa. What does this say when the United States has a temperate climate? Most slaves died young. They were shorter than their white counter-parts and according to some sources slave women often did not achieve menarche until their early to mid-twenties. Johnson has documented that starvation and undernourishment were pervasive on slave-planations and this quite counter to popular notions that slave-owners had an interest in keeping their slaves healthy in order to extract value from them. Raising yields and attaining profits this season often overshadowed the long-run. In addition to the brutal combination of torture and modern management, when slaves weren't picking cotton they were doing plenty of other work that often underwrote the costs of the labor camps. Whether its growing food to sustain themselves or mending clothes. Baptist notes that the rare times that slaves were paid, it was for 'overtime' usually for night-work on Sundays, because they couldn't ask it of them for religious reasons. Wages don't make US slavery any nicer than any other American slavery, because in fact slaves received wages all over the Americas for certain kinds of work.
The skeptic might sit back and think that even if all this information proves that American slavery was far from benign, it doesn't prove it was worse then elsewhere. But consider this: the explosion in labor productivity that US slavery produced was unprecedented, in fact it is so great that on its own terms it could explain the Great Divergence. Is this a shocking claim? Not when you consider that when US cotton production hit its height in 1860, 4 million slaves were producing more cotton than 200 million Indian peasants. Suddenly, the West had capitalized, monetized, and securitized an enormous cotton crop that outdistance that produced by the vast and prosperous peasant economies of Asia. It was a massive source of wealth and capital. Production for export did not fully recover until 1875. We can also point out that the entire cotton export cotton crop of the African continent surpassed America's 1860 output--in 1930! European colonialism in Africa was never renowned for its benevolence, so we can infer that the brutality that American slaves experienced must have been extreme, if the colonialists of the Livingstone-Rhodes generation took so long in squeezing a similar sized crop out of the continent. We should also note that it was not a foreign crop, Africans were skilled cotton weavers and agriculturalists. Johnson pointed out that Jefferson and others hoped that by allowing slavery to spread into newly seized southwest territories that the African population of the seaboard would be 'diffused' and that their labor would help aid in building a white yeoman republic, and they would themselves die out. Few have even broached the issue of whether American slavery could be described as ethnic cleansing or genocidal. In part it must be said that its because the enslaved population in absolute numbers rose and also because by the early 1820s slavery was a dominant and dynamic institution. Whatever the intent, America had a larger slave economy than any other place on the planet in the 19th century. It held the majority of the 6 million slaves that powered the Atlantic Market Revolution of the 19th century as Grandin refers to it. Baptist is correct to say that slavery financed the occupation of the North American continent. The entire British Empire and its domains were also completely dependent on the wealth extracted from the blood of American slaves. It would seem that US slavery presages the worst episodes of capitalist brutality such as the Belgian Congo. Baptist has pointed to the indelible imprint that both the slaves and the enslavers left on modernity. So, many "free" workers would suffer from the scientific system of labor management that was developed inside those labor camps. The "scientific" racism of the confederacy and the antebellum South would presage the horrors of Nazi Germany, but would also serve as a justification for the repression and extermination of many other peoples. The confederacy itself, and its fearsome spawn, the Ku Klux Klan would in many ways serve as a template for the construction of classical fascism globally. Likewise, the slaves too, remade the world from the many strains of global protestantism reaching out from America influenced by African American slave preachers and beliefs, to the very soundtrack of the 20th century. The language of African American abolitionists, served as a template for the construction of human rights discourse and influenced the anti-colonial movement.
The spine of American Imperialism was forged in the age of slavery, its most vile inhumanities and the most dynamic features of its character took shape in that time. The ghost-notes of the whipping machine have continued to pervade the rhythm of the American imperialist machine long after the former's dissolution. We can only speculate that it is the great unnamed, and that it will continue to dog the consciousness of Americans weighing like a nightmare upon the living until its full shadow is reckoned with and exposed. If foreigners want to know "who are the Americans?" in the most intimate and raw sense possible, then there is hardly a better starting place then Baptist's book.
Industrial Labor, Cotton Imperialism, and Globalization
The perfect complement to the revolutionary historiography of Baptist and Johnson respectively is Sven Beckert's book Empire of Cotton: A Global History. All three historians are meticulous and are aware of each other's work and even cite each other sometimes. What is remarkable about Beckert's book is that it's not about some isolated field of study, such as US slavery but is rather a comprehensive history of the global capitalism from the perspective of the cotton industry. It is one of the most comprehensive, readable and erudite histories of global capitalism yet written. While most histories of global capitalism tend to either become too wide and lose focus or too narrow and unreadable, Beckert's book avoids these pitfalls by focusing on capitalism's leading edge: the cotton industry. According to Beckert cotton was the world's premier industry from 1000 CE-1900 and what he narrates is the dramatic story of how the region in the world poorest in cotton production and technology came to seize control of that world industry. In a marked blow to Eurocentrism, Beckert points out that while peasants in the Americas, Africa and Asia all grew and wove cotton, for most of European history the region was impoverished in terms of cotton cloth and cotton textile industries. While cotton textiles had been making its way to Europe from Asia since the Middle Ages, its importation was a drain on European national economies and it was only available for the rich. But not long after the dawn of the Early Modern Age something strange began to happen. Raw cotton in limited quantities began to stream in through European merchant networks in a slapdash and inconstant manner during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Here, merchants possessed one advantage over local spinners and weavers that elites elsewhere did not-- the artisans were completely dependent on them; they could not grow their own supply of cotton. As cotton made its way into Europe through informal trade networks and suppliers in Africa, the Ottoman Empire, elsewhere in Asia, it was paid for either with the pillage of the New World or in the few trade goods Europeans were relatively advantaged in. But it was often paid for at a premium and non-European merchants and suppliers often showed little interest in selling raw cotton when finished cloth goods would fetch far better prices. Few peasant economies were set up for a massive export of raw cotton to Europe in any case.
The Early Modern state, particularly in Britain, responded by placing prohibitive tariffs on foreign textiles, enforced by the death penalty in the British case. State coercion plays a much larger role in Beckert's analysis of the rise of cotton capitalism than it probably does for most historians. He choses to emphasize the statist, monopolistic, anti-democratic and protectionist aspect of this era of capitalism. Certainly Marx thought that the public debt, high taxes and tariffs that arose throughout Early Modern Europe was "forcing house" for capitalism aimed at looting the public. Of particular interest is Beckert's analysis of the Caribean cotton revolution and the industrial revolution. As Williams, Inikori, Marx and others, have pointed out, slavery and the slave trade was integral to the economy of Northern Britain where the world's first industrial revolution occurred. Beckert keeps with traditional historiography emphasizing how decentralized, seemingly spontaneous, and entrepreneurial, the initial industrial revolution was. Starting with the water-frame, the mule and the spinning jenny, these innovations to traditional textile industries in the second half of the late 18th century, gradually raised the productivity of labor manyfold. The effect was that by the end of the 18th century, a British worker could outproduce an Indian textile worker on the open-market in spite of higher labor costs. But an important factor in this story that Beckert emphasizes is that this revolution in productivity would never have been possible without new steady and constant sources of raw cotton coming online at the same time. While much more renowned for their sugar, the Caribean had been the site of the first boom in white gold. It put control of a steady and expanding source of cotton in the hands of European merchants for the first time. Needless to say it was a statist endeavor that was built upon slavery. Haiti was the single largest source of white gold in the Americas. Beckert points out that half of Haiti's plantations were cotton plantations which puts new light on the Haitian Revolution and the British/French invasions of Haiti. The desire of British cotton manufacturers to trade with the French cotton isles by itself can explain why British cotton capitalists embraced free trade. Beckert has little use for an abstraction like free trade except other then to deconstruct the free trade of that era as being less than ideal. This is somewhat like "the theory of force" promoted by Eugene Duhring which is often restated in a veiled form by anarchist theorists and historians influenced by anarchist epistemology. It also leaves aside that in 19th century economic thought a "free market" had a very specific meaning, it was never meant to be "free" in an anarchistic sense but rather meant "free" in a social sense of eliminating cost and the remnants of feudalism that were still a significant factor in the Western economy. That latter project of eliminating or marginalizing the landlord class which many notable bourgeois economists demanded was bound to be a "statist" endeavor as they themselves recognized. And secondly, to decry 19th century free trade deficient merely due to the fact that there was protectionism obscures the fact that great progress towards that ideal was made--it has only been in recent history that Europe has made gains in economic integration beyond what had been achieved in that era.
But for Beckert, the sudden rise of a pan-West European textile manufacturing industry has its roots in both the priorities of national security between competing European states and the blockade of the Napoleonic Wars. Continenal cotton capitalists took advantage of the exclusion of British textiles from the European market to develop their own national industries. Once this occurred, the textile bourgeoisie of the respective European countries became an increasingly activist group demanding tariffs on low-grade cloth for the purposes of national security. Which meant Britain could still dominate the market for high-grade cloth, but slowly as these industries developed they also became competitors in this field. It would seem that most Europeans were not sold on the idea that off-shoring is free-trade, an idea in vogue with modern neo-liberals. The inability of London to persuade European and American neighbours on the benefit of this kind of "free-trade" meant that they did most of their business with India and China. Beckert points out that other scholars have legitimately pointed out that this "free trade" with India and China had a more imperialist aggressive character then that of more legitimate business. The unrestrained dumping of British textiles on the Indian market resulted in Beckert calls "perhaps the greatest de-industrialization in history" with 2-6 million "industrial" jobs lost in colonial india. Similar, imperialist free-trade treaties and practices were forced on China and the Ottoman Empire. But again we have the resurgence of "theory of force" which while certainly playing its role, was not sufficient by itself to magically make British textiles cheaper than Indian or Chinese textiles. Nor could it make Chinese or Indian consumers buy them--especially when local handmade textiles were renowned for better quality and were much closer to local tastes. Some work remains to be done here, especially when Baptist is bold enough to claim that slave-made cotton benefited the entire world in some ways. It's a plausible claim as Chinese and Indian consumers found that buying European textiles which were made with slave-cotton left extra cash in their pocket books--even if it did do a great deal to ruin their national industries.
As far as the issue of "industrialization" goes, it should be said that most textile production was based in the households of the peasantry. In this sense, there was no real difference between England, India and China until the late 18th century. But as we've seen merchants had more power over the conditions of labor in Europe and were also better able to realize profits from the embodied labor of slave-produced raw cotton. This allowed entrepreneurs to build large workshops and factories that allowed manufacturers to more effectively exploit the labor of workers. What is fascinating is the dual character of cotton industrialization: one the one-hand it destroyed old industries and patterns of life and on the other it was completely dependent upon them. Industrialization in Northern England, Catalonia, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhineland, Austria and Russia all had one factor in common: a large established textile trade and culture prior to industrialization. Above all histories from the bourgeois point of view usually tell of sharp entrepreneurs whose singular brilliance allows them to do away with old and inefficient ways of doing things. In reality, the skills and talents of textile workers continued to be essential even as industrialization and deskilling advanced ever more rapidly. Beckert is correct to say that in comparison to the work style and regimen of an American slave, textile workers managed to preserve much more of the traditions, rhythm and workplace organization inherited from feudalism. For this reason, young women and children were highly preferred as workers since they could be hired cheaply and would more readily accede to brutal discipline and demands. But unlike the brutal overseer system that gave birth to modern management, it was mainly adult male business owners and skilled workers that did the job of "minding" the work of child and female workers. In Beckert's words, this capitalist revolution could only be successful because it was not complete. In other words, the cutting edge modern world of the cotton mill was dependent precisely on the fact that the world outside of the mill was not as modern. The persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the European countryside, patriarchy, as well as limited electoral suffrage, combined to create a world where a mill-owner could be a King himself on his own property. In fact, a great many cotton capitalists from Manchester to Moscow started their organizations with child laborers that had been lent to them from State orphanages. Marx often compared the trade that English mill-owners conducted in child laborers with that of American slaves across the Atlantic.
Beckert does great work in comparative industrialization, showing that the industrial revolution spread out from North England relatively rapidly even to non-European locales such as Mexico and Egypt. He focuses a great deal on the industrialization effort of Egypt but leaves aside the fact that the reason that state-led industrialization had failed by the mid-19th century was because Britain forced free-trade on the Ottoman Empire and its Egyptian dependency through military force. Prior to this, Egypt held the fifth place in the world of spindles per capita. In other words, Egypt in the 19th century was closer to Europe then it was apart from it in terms of industrialization and had it held that ground then it would have become a First World nation. In present times, Egypt is one of the poorest nations in the world and has to take up substantial unsustainable loans just to import fuel. Cotton industrialization and protectionism according to Beckert is the reason why Mexico has always held a unique position among Third World nations. What he means is that Mexico is a rich country among Third World nations even if it is poor nation in comparison with US, Japan, and Europe. In truth, Mexico is closer to South Korea, Taiwan, and the richer regions of China then it is to Bangladesh. Mexico has been on the "cusp" of becoming a wealthy developed nation for at least 100 years, or even longer if we go by Beckert's model of cotton driven industrialization. A slight diversion would be the case of Argentina and Uruguay which could be legitimately called "First World" nations in 1900 but have slipped into poverty, decay and neocolonial rule. Since cotton production or manufacturing wasn't strong in either of these countries (or indeed certain British settler-states) it would seem that cotton wasn't necessarily the only road to development in the 19th century.
Especially interesting is Beckert's ideas on cotton's relationship to reconstruction and the new imperialism of the late 19th century. Basically, the American Civil War caused a massive price explosion in cotton that forced a world-wide scramble on the part of European governments to secure alternative sources. For the first time since the late-1780s, the market price for cotton began to tilt in favor of producers in what is now called the Third World. Egypt was by far the biggest producer with the state taking the lead in squeezing the peasantry and importing thousands of slaves from the Sudan to keep up with the huge labor demand. Egypt would see a massive influx of European capital and take out massive loans which would later lead the nation into a debt spiral once cotton prices collapsed. The British made Egypt into an outright protectorate of the crown in 1884 due to its financial insolvency. The British and the Russians undertook major state-led projects to develop export-cotton production in Turkmenistan and India respectively during the Civil War. In the wake of the fall of U.S. slavery, these colonial cotton projects which had been on the minds of European rulers would be economically feasible for the first time in history. Earlier efforts at growing cotton for export by British colonial authorities had failed; post-Civil War nearly all of Europe and Japan would drink from the trough of Indian cotton, specifically in the state of Berar. The U.S. did retain its post-war cotton dominance until the 1930s but Beckert points out this was done through a strange witches brew of wage labor, small-farming, settler-expansion, and violent coercion.
The post-reconstruction South with its terrorist vigilante organizations and prison camps put major pressure on American blacks to produce cotton for export. As Baptist has pointed out even this could not match the efficiency of slavery which averaged 200 lbs of cotton per day and with labor productivity until the 1930s being half that. But quite legitimately the repressions of militarized cotton districts of Northern Mexico and colonial Africa and Asia come to mind in comparisons with the post-bellum South. There are some problems with considering the American South part of the global South as Beckert does. In the first place, the data on wages show that while Northern wages were more than twice as high as Southern wages. That's a major difference but hardly the 10-1 difference between the US and China at the turn of the century. It seems closer to the Central European countries which were hardly "global south". There was a major colonized population in the South--African Americans, which makes the comparison seem legitimate. For African Americans taken separately perhaps it is. But a large portion of cotton producing labor was done by small white farmers, white sharecroppers, or immigrant labor. The latter was probably closer to colonial conditions, but I have massive doubts about the former. If the South actually did become "colonized" and part of the Global South after the Civil War, then wouldn't that imply that southern white nationalism was some kind of anti-colonial rebellion? What seems more likely is that Southern whites retained major privileges from slavery and were willing to resort to terrorism to keep them from dissipating. Like with the oil industry, we shouldn't assume that just because cotton was a Third-World phenomenon that means conditions in the industry situated in the developed world are the same. But again, I'm not averse to viewing the situation with black labor as colonial. Since the US was the world's number one cotton producer until the 1930s, it would be helpful to keep in mind how the lynching tree not only benefited the ruling class in the US but also rising imperialist states like Germany and Japan. The former was almost completely dependent on American cotton, both before and after slavery, and the latter got at least half of its cotton from the US (the other major source being India).
For Beckert, cotton imperialism drove the late 19th century scramble to divide up the world. As cotton capitalists, assorted nationalists, and states bureaucrats began to see the importance of having a colonial supply of cotton to fall back on. Colonial cotton domination led to great misery and very often massive famines for the colonial peasantry that had now been enlisted in the world market. But it also contained the seeds of its own destruction. By the early 20th century, not only had the Western world diverged but it diverged to the point that the wages and labor standards of metropolitan workers were so high that textile manufacturing even on modern machinery was no longer very profitable. This was the original age of industrial globalization as textile manufacturing spread first to Japan where the countryside was ransacked in search of young women who would submit themselves to the dictatorship of factory life in hopes of earning a dowry. Manufacturers in Manchester and Massachusetts were unable to compete. Then came the first age of industrial development for colonial exploitation in China and India. The conditions that Chinese textile workers faced were perhaps the worst of all, female workers were literally kept under lock and key in Barracks and Beckert says that they were in a condition that approached bonded labor. Even Indian manufacturers couldn't beat China on labor costs. This led to a peculiar situation where the colonial British state stepped in to force labor standards on the Indian textile capitalists in order to preserve their own interests. This was furiously resisted by Indian capitalists who asserted the subhuman and instrumental existence of their laborers to the British authorities. There was also an almost worrying nascent sub-imperialist orientation among Indian textile manufacturers. The Indian industrialists oriented their export industry to British colonial Africa and strived to produce textiles that matched African tastes. Which makes one wonder if all the agitation on the part of the Indian bourgeoisie was simply about pushing off British rule in order to grab super-profits from African colonies. It was not very successful. But perhaps this explains why India ended up being far draconian and far more useful to global imperialism then it was even before independence.
As for today, China holds a near monopoly on both cotton production and manufacturing. The abuses familiar to the era of Industrialization continue, from the super-exploitation of workers in Bangladeshi factories to the 2 million child laborers in Uzbekistan who are forced to cultivate cotton underneath the repressive dictatorship there. However, synthetic fabrics have equaled or surpassed cotton fabrics starting in the 90s according to Beckert. So while the abuses continue, the potential for nations to develop on the cotton textile/cotton-producing model is very slight. Cotton may still be King but its power is more like that of a constitutional monarch in a small central european nation, not the power of a Roman Emperor that it once wielded in the mid-19th century.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Review: A New World of Labor
I couldn't fail but to become more interested in the history of slavery after reading Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom which persuasively argues that the slaveholding South was not a backwards looking anachronism but actually a capitalist dynamo and innovator that the fueled the global economy. Not long after Johnson's book was published Baptist's stunningly sophisticated and visceral work The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism was published and thanks to a panned review in the economist became the center of brouhaha that spread from out of the twitter-sphere. Regardless of that sincerely written retraction letter its extremely unlikely that the controversy did anything to change the agenda or biases of The Economist the controversy itself demonstrates impotence of manufactured outrage in the age of social media. On the plus side it did much to popularize what I must say is a very important work. Being a native of the American Deep South I've been forced to grapple with slavery and its legacy in a manner that is probably a bit more personal than that of scholars in other parts of the country or the wider West. Slavery may have made Europe rich--as a new generation of scholars seizing on Eric Williams legacy are demonstrating, but for Europeans slavery was always something that happened elsewhere-- in the colonies. The wreckage of that institution was left somewhere else to become a burden upon developing societies. When schematizing a narrative history of the rise of capitalism we are left with a complex chicken-or-the-egg debate: did capitalism first arise in Europe and then spread out to the colonies, or was slavery itself the original sin of capitalism fueling the development and industrialization of the European metropolis? When it comes to the great transition debate centering around Brenner-Sweezy the question has always been where to draw the line. In the humanities, specifically literature, this question inevitably divides us two camps, it asks us to make a choice: are we medievalists or early modernists? If you believe that capitalism was a product of Europe's "unique" culture and "special path" then you inevitably begin a search for the "deep roots" of industrial capitalism in medieval texts. If you believe capitalism was a far more recent invention, that European civilization wasn't much different from feudal civilizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and even Oceania, and that slavery fueled the rise of modern capitalism then you inevitably become an Early Modernist. A final defunct camp in the debate are modernists--not in the literary and cultural sense, but in the position that capitalism did not come into being until the 19th century and the steam engine. As evidence continues to accumulate regarding the extent of industrialization, the size of the wage-earning population and the profound transformation of political, social, and cultural life in England during the mid 17th-18th centuries the argument that England wasn't capitalist--or even industrialist, for that matter, has become almost silly [Added Note*: I no longer believe these statements about modernism and believe I may have said this prematurely].
Surveying the evidence I had originally sided with medievalism whose arguments seemed more structurally sound then what I read in cultural histories on the Early Modern age. But then there are some odd questions, such as why capitalism took so long to develop if it really was invented in medieval Italy or Flanders from that perspective it is difficult to explain why there are 500 years distance from the development of "capitalism" in Flanders and Industrial Britain in 1750. We're also left with the question of why republican, democratic and constitutional monarchial ideologies seize Europe in the Early Modern and Modern ages but seem conspicuously muted in medieval history and literature. If one argues that medieval culture was far more advanced than historians have traditionally allowed then the Meyer thesis is completely unexplainable and would have to be thrown out. And while I'm critical of Meyer's thesis from an economic perspective, because it makes pre-WWI Europe seem far less capitalist than it was he did make a strong point that tradition still firmly, if not totally, lorded over the arts and science as well as the surprising persistence of aristocracy and feudal/semi-feudal relationships. Although it may seem like Meyer stuck out a position to the right of Marx who was one of the great avant-garde thinkers of the 19th century who always firmly emphasized how much things had diverged from the past, when Marx talked about the capitalist mode of production he was almost always talking about Britain as the furthest developed model; he considered Europe to be far-backward in comparison. For this reason Ellen-Meiskins Woods had a point when she asserted that the debate had little to do with special culture and make-up of Europe but rather it was about Britain's great economic and social divergence from Europe forcing the rest of Europe into a frenzied game of catch-up. Woods traces the development of capitalism in Europe all the way back to the late 15th century but is at pains to explain why industrialization took so long and what it was that made Britain special, other than a thesis regarding capitalist enclosing aristocrats who are her stand in for the bourgeoisie. As it stands Woods is at least right in chastising a certain segment of historians and Marxists (Sweezy and Dobb in particular) for being unable to discern the difference between capitalism as a mode of production and trade. A critical weakness of Woods work is pointed out by scholars of other parts of Europe and anti-Euro-centrists which is that a large agrarian wage earning population isn't unique to England.
Finally, we come to Newman whose work A New World of Labor even if somewhat boring is the beginning of a way out of these circular debates. Newman's thesis is that the English colonization of Barbados allowed for the rise of a planter class that exercised absolute power subject to almost no supervision of the crown. Crucially, these planters subjected their subjects to a extremely harsh--arguably even genocidal--regimen of bonded labor that diverged significantly from both African and British bonded labor. This qualitative transformation of the labor and status of bondmen allowed for the creation of the Barbados sugar-plantation complex which Newman convincingly argues was a singular invention in the Early Modern world. Nothing in the Early Modern world so closely resembled modern factories than the planation complex in Barbados. By 1650 it grown into the greatest creator of wealth in the British Atlantic world, to be anachronistic, it was Britain's very own Haiti. Over the course of its existence tens of thousands of bound laborers and an astonishing 600,000 african slaves were imported to Barbados, an island not larger than New York City. Most importantly they spread their system and style of slavery to the rest of British America and across the Americas. Rather quickly the planting populations of barbados shrunk from over 10,000 down a measly 1,000 planters with most of the most valuable property concentrated in the hands of 57 planters. In an age where budding industrialists were often rarely far elevated above skilled workers and could afford few luxuries, Barbadian planters grew into super-wealth, barbados became the silicon valley of its day. Before 1650, English trade with West Africa was mostly trade for gold, afterwards English trade became primarily concerned with trade for slaves. Prior to the 1650s, the cumulative impact of 200 years of the Atlantic slave trade was 300,000 slaves imported across the entire Atlantic, mostly by the Portuguese and Spanish. That was soon to transform qualitatively with the vast majority of African slaves crossing into the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The primacy of what Gerald Horne called "free trade in Africans" after the 1688 revolution to the rise of global capitalism remains in place. On the African side of things, we find that Europeans did not even pretend they had the ability to project power there, and that the terms of trade were dictated by the Africans themselves. Africans were skilled traders who often frustrated English merchants who were well-versed in European languages and who knew the value of a surprising number of luxury commodities from Europe and Asia. The day to day operations of the English fort on the African coast was mostly done by West African slaves, however the English knew it was impossible to work West African slaves as hard as slaves in Barbados and it appears there were times in which they had more freedom than white British workers imported from Britain. The British generally assumed that the mass death of Britons sent to Africa was due to climate rather than disease as they had no modern understanding of germ theory. It is interesting that tens of thousands of British nationals were able to perform slave-work Barbados which is very close to West Africa in terms of the climate band. The plantations of Barbados where built up first by white Britons (mostly Irish and scottish nationals) whose lives were considered forfeit by the English state. Many of these nationals were deported POWS from the English civil wars, this is an irony as many historians have lauded the moral superiority of the English revolutionaries for never having a French style "terror" but in fact the opponents of their revolution were deported to perform slave labor on an island-concentration camp. Contrary to conventional accounts of carribean slavery the British bonded laborers who worked here did not enjoy any great fluidity or improvement in their social status after being freed. By the 17th century the white population of barbados mostly lived in abject poverty subsisting on the charity of slaves or acting as intermediaries for stolen goods.
For these and other reasons Newman argues that the social order of Barbados and its labor system was based on class and not race. The importation of African slaves did not result in a qualitative change in the conditions of which African and European bondsmen worked, the only major qualitative difference major difference is that African slaves being of far-more cost value were hardly ever freed. With his focus on the importance of Africans to this new world of labor, Newman restores to Africans their place in the drama of modernity. Without African labor it is quite likely that the labor supply would've dried and the island would've ceased to be profitable. Likewise, African labor produced vast quantities of sugar and new distilled liquors such as rum, that gave England trade surpluses against other European nations and helped them urbanize and build critical infrastructure, which gave English manufacturers a "mega-market" in Inikori's words for their goods in West Africa, and which underwrote colonial expansion in Asia and the North American continent. Anyone who knows the history of British India knows that for a long time it was something of a burden on Britain, that English attempts to introduce capitalism to India were often spectacular and infamous failures. Likewise protectionist measures had to be adopted in the late 17th century to keep colonial India from ruining the British textile industry. In the mid-19th century it was the United States and China that were Britain's greatest trading partners. For sometime the British West-Indies were essential to keep the British Empire a "paying proposition" they allowed the British Isles to diverge dramatically from Europe and the rest of the world bringing it to the position of the first global super-power. Likewise, we should follow Walter Johnson's lead and recognize the centrality of slavery and not place it in a similar vein as say enclosures in Britain, as horrible as that was. Johnson also made a fascinating comment on how the enslaved body was the ultimate object of the commodity fetishist and how it the multi-faceted nature of the human body and the slave, expands that fetishism "five-fold". Williams and Inikori have both made persuasive cases for the centrality of slavery to the Industrial Revolution and Newman gives us a new in-depth on why this was and how it could happen. This also has interesting implications because it means that we must admit that England's colony was far more dynamic than England itself. We might consider the role Barbados and other possessions had in helping to make her revolutions possible, as it was a huge source of wealth coming online and expanding during the Civil Wars period. The majority of the representatives of the parliamentary cause had some sort of connection with Atlantic trade but whether they had major connections with barbadian planters is not something that I know. What is well-known is that the majority of planters who set up shop in the carribean during and after the revolution were either parliamentarians or parliamentary sympathizers. Additionally this gave a social basis to the whigs and their ideas allowing for the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy in 1688.
Why England developed this particular kind of slavery [Added Note: if it was particular] and not Spain or Portugal who controlled most of America at the time is still something of a mystery. Newman explains the development of waged labor and English attitudes regarding hard work in Tudor England. This quickly leads us back to Brenner and Woods, but Newmen points out in practice British workers still had a great deal of control over their product and were protected by local tradition. So ruthless, soul-crushing and profit-maximizing capitalism had yet to take form. Another solid criticism of the Brenner thesis comes from Newman's research of bonded-labor which came to replace out-and-out serfdom in which women and orphans were bonded to male heads of households, and the young to the old until they could grow out of their station. Their contracts were often signed for long-periods of time in which they received training and subsistence but were unable to freely leave and choose their professions. Contrary to the 'Free Britannia' bullshit they often had little bargaining power and could not leave at a moments notice and in some counties made up 25% of the population. Skilled 'waged' laborers often signed contracts for long terms, so in practice the difference between bound and 'waged' labor in Early Modern Britain could be blurry at best. Something did happen in Barbados that qualitatively changed bound labor and took a Britain that was still largely feudal and traditional down the capitalist road. Newman says that the majority of British planters had been bourgeois, so that is one place to look, the lack of interest the crown had in the colony allowed the bourgeois slavers to unleash the most bestial form of slavery unchecked by any outside watching eye. Every facet of society was dominated by the planter class and in practice they enjoyed a kind of freedom from the crown and absolute domination that bourgeois in England could only dream of. What peculiar cultural and social factors allowed them to create this type of slavery? The best answer is probably due to an unsung miniature revolution with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots which considerably elevated bourgeois influence, so much so that from Elizabeth's late reign onward the business of the state largely consisted of cracking down on troublemakers. It was certainly the most important event of Shakespeare's age. The legacy of revolutionary republican struggle and the preoccupation of the crown at home are probably what gave the planters their dynamism.
Sugar itself is not an explanation, neither is the influence of Portuguese/Dutch planters in helping them to grow sugar cane [Added note: This maybe untrue] Newman argues persuasively that the labor system remained the same when calicos and tobacco were its staples as it was when the sugar-monocrop arose. Newman is not saying that things did not change, in fact he makes the opposite case, the planters continued to innovate and raise production long after sugar prices had collapsed and profits began to fall. Thanks to Newman we are much closer to understanding the money-mad slaver class that arose in the Americas and fed the Atlantic and later global commodity markets. Thanks to Newman we are much closer to exiting the circular transition debate, even if mysteries and questions of continuities remain. It would seem that the side that has been arguing for the primacy of slavery are winning the debate, and so that also largely confirms the positions of those who argue against Euro-centricism and Anglo-centrism and who emphasize the urban as opposed to the agrarian. But the debate is not completely finished yet, as English particularities did make the industrial revolution possible, for example Spain and Portugal had New World colonies and slaves but they did not industrialize or even develop a bustling capitalist culture. These things boil down to a cocktail of factors but the one thing is forgotten is the class struggle, for whatever reason the Iberian bourgeoisie failed to lead a successful class struggle even as late as the mid-19th century. So does that mean the English were better at class struggle than the rest of the world? The evidence does not support that. But it does mean the English bourgeoisie was in a position to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities available to them.
*Added notes are simply notes that I've added in at a later date to distinguish regarding points I disagree with or find open to challenge.
Surveying the evidence I had originally sided with medievalism whose arguments seemed more structurally sound then what I read in cultural histories on the Early Modern age. But then there are some odd questions, such as why capitalism took so long to develop if it really was invented in medieval Italy or Flanders from that perspective it is difficult to explain why there are 500 years distance from the development of "capitalism" in Flanders and Industrial Britain in 1750. We're also left with the question of why republican, democratic and constitutional monarchial ideologies seize Europe in the Early Modern and Modern ages but seem conspicuously muted in medieval history and literature. If one argues that medieval culture was far more advanced than historians have traditionally allowed then the Meyer thesis is completely unexplainable and would have to be thrown out. And while I'm critical of Meyer's thesis from an economic perspective, because it makes pre-WWI Europe seem far less capitalist than it was he did make a strong point that tradition still firmly, if not totally, lorded over the arts and science as well as the surprising persistence of aristocracy and feudal/semi-feudal relationships. Although it may seem like Meyer stuck out a position to the right of Marx who was one of the great avant-garde thinkers of the 19th century who always firmly emphasized how much things had diverged from the past, when Marx talked about the capitalist mode of production he was almost always talking about Britain as the furthest developed model; he considered Europe to be far-backward in comparison. For this reason Ellen-Meiskins Woods had a point when she asserted that the debate had little to do with special culture and make-up of Europe but rather it was about Britain's great economic and social divergence from Europe forcing the rest of Europe into a frenzied game of catch-up. Woods traces the development of capitalism in Europe all the way back to the late 15th century but is at pains to explain why industrialization took so long and what it was that made Britain special, other than a thesis regarding capitalist enclosing aristocrats who are her stand in for the bourgeoisie. As it stands Woods is at least right in chastising a certain segment of historians and Marxists (Sweezy and Dobb in particular) for being unable to discern the difference between capitalism as a mode of production and trade. A critical weakness of Woods work is pointed out by scholars of other parts of Europe and anti-Euro-centrists which is that a large agrarian wage earning population isn't unique to England.
Finally, we come to Newman whose work A New World of Labor even if somewhat boring is the beginning of a way out of these circular debates. Newman's thesis is that the English colonization of Barbados allowed for the rise of a planter class that exercised absolute power subject to almost no supervision of the crown. Crucially, these planters subjected their subjects to a extremely harsh--arguably even genocidal--regimen of bonded labor that diverged significantly from both African and British bonded labor. This qualitative transformation of the labor and status of bondmen allowed for the creation of the Barbados sugar-plantation complex which Newman convincingly argues was a singular invention in the Early Modern world. Nothing in the Early Modern world so closely resembled modern factories than the planation complex in Barbados. By 1650 it grown into the greatest creator of wealth in the British Atlantic world, to be anachronistic, it was Britain's very own Haiti. Over the course of its existence tens of thousands of bound laborers and an astonishing 600,000 african slaves were imported to Barbados, an island not larger than New York City. Most importantly they spread their system and style of slavery to the rest of British America and across the Americas. Rather quickly the planting populations of barbados shrunk from over 10,000 down a measly 1,000 planters with most of the most valuable property concentrated in the hands of 57 planters. In an age where budding industrialists were often rarely far elevated above skilled workers and could afford few luxuries, Barbadian planters grew into super-wealth, barbados became the silicon valley of its day. Before 1650, English trade with West Africa was mostly trade for gold, afterwards English trade became primarily concerned with trade for slaves. Prior to the 1650s, the cumulative impact of 200 years of the Atlantic slave trade was 300,000 slaves imported across the entire Atlantic, mostly by the Portuguese and Spanish. That was soon to transform qualitatively with the vast majority of African slaves crossing into the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The primacy of what Gerald Horne called "free trade in Africans" after the 1688 revolution to the rise of global capitalism remains in place. On the African side of things, we find that Europeans did not even pretend they had the ability to project power there, and that the terms of trade were dictated by the Africans themselves. Africans were skilled traders who often frustrated English merchants who were well-versed in European languages and who knew the value of a surprising number of luxury commodities from Europe and Asia. The day to day operations of the English fort on the African coast was mostly done by West African slaves, however the English knew it was impossible to work West African slaves as hard as slaves in Barbados and it appears there were times in which they had more freedom than white British workers imported from Britain. The British generally assumed that the mass death of Britons sent to Africa was due to climate rather than disease as they had no modern understanding of germ theory. It is interesting that tens of thousands of British nationals were able to perform slave-work Barbados which is very close to West Africa in terms of the climate band. The plantations of Barbados where built up first by white Britons (mostly Irish and scottish nationals) whose lives were considered forfeit by the English state. Many of these nationals were deported POWS from the English civil wars, this is an irony as many historians have lauded the moral superiority of the English revolutionaries for never having a French style "terror" but in fact the opponents of their revolution were deported to perform slave labor on an island-concentration camp. Contrary to conventional accounts of carribean slavery the British bonded laborers who worked here did not enjoy any great fluidity or improvement in their social status after being freed. By the 17th century the white population of barbados mostly lived in abject poverty subsisting on the charity of slaves or acting as intermediaries for stolen goods.
For these and other reasons Newman argues that the social order of Barbados and its labor system was based on class and not race. The importation of African slaves did not result in a qualitative change in the conditions of which African and European bondsmen worked, the only major qualitative difference major difference is that African slaves being of far-more cost value were hardly ever freed. With his focus on the importance of Africans to this new world of labor, Newman restores to Africans their place in the drama of modernity. Without African labor it is quite likely that the labor supply would've dried and the island would've ceased to be profitable. Likewise, African labor produced vast quantities of sugar and new distilled liquors such as rum, that gave England trade surpluses against other European nations and helped them urbanize and build critical infrastructure, which gave English manufacturers a "mega-market" in Inikori's words for their goods in West Africa, and which underwrote colonial expansion in Asia and the North American continent. Anyone who knows the history of British India knows that for a long time it was something of a burden on Britain, that English attempts to introduce capitalism to India were often spectacular and infamous failures. Likewise protectionist measures had to be adopted in the late 17th century to keep colonial India from ruining the British textile industry. In the mid-19th century it was the United States and China that were Britain's greatest trading partners. For sometime the British West-Indies were essential to keep the British Empire a "paying proposition" they allowed the British Isles to diverge dramatically from Europe and the rest of the world bringing it to the position of the first global super-power. Likewise, we should follow Walter Johnson's lead and recognize the centrality of slavery and not place it in a similar vein as say enclosures in Britain, as horrible as that was. Johnson also made a fascinating comment on how the enslaved body was the ultimate object of the commodity fetishist and how it the multi-faceted nature of the human body and the slave, expands that fetishism "five-fold". Williams and Inikori have both made persuasive cases for the centrality of slavery to the Industrial Revolution and Newman gives us a new in-depth on why this was and how it could happen. This also has interesting implications because it means that we must admit that England's colony was far more dynamic than England itself. We might consider the role Barbados and other possessions had in helping to make her revolutions possible, as it was a huge source of wealth coming online and expanding during the Civil Wars period. The majority of the representatives of the parliamentary cause had some sort of connection with Atlantic trade but whether they had major connections with barbadian planters is not something that I know. What is well-known is that the majority of planters who set up shop in the carribean during and after the revolution were either parliamentarians or parliamentary sympathizers. Additionally this gave a social basis to the whigs and their ideas allowing for the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy in 1688.
Why England developed this particular kind of slavery [Added Note: if it was particular] and not Spain or Portugal who controlled most of America at the time is still something of a mystery. Newman explains the development of waged labor and English attitudes regarding hard work in Tudor England. This quickly leads us back to Brenner and Woods, but Newmen points out in practice British workers still had a great deal of control over their product and were protected by local tradition. So ruthless, soul-crushing and profit-maximizing capitalism had yet to take form. Another solid criticism of the Brenner thesis comes from Newman's research of bonded-labor which came to replace out-and-out serfdom in which women and orphans were bonded to male heads of households, and the young to the old until they could grow out of their station. Their contracts were often signed for long-periods of time in which they received training and subsistence but were unable to freely leave and choose their professions. Contrary to the 'Free Britannia' bullshit they often had little bargaining power and could not leave at a moments notice and in some counties made up 25% of the population. Skilled 'waged' laborers often signed contracts for long terms, so in practice the difference between bound and 'waged' labor in Early Modern Britain could be blurry at best. Something did happen in Barbados that qualitatively changed bound labor and took a Britain that was still largely feudal and traditional down the capitalist road. Newman says that the majority of British planters had been bourgeois, so that is one place to look, the lack of interest the crown had in the colony allowed the bourgeois slavers to unleash the most bestial form of slavery unchecked by any outside watching eye. Every facet of society was dominated by the planter class and in practice they enjoyed a kind of freedom from the crown and absolute domination that bourgeois in England could only dream of. What peculiar cultural and social factors allowed them to create this type of slavery? The best answer is probably due to an unsung miniature revolution with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots which considerably elevated bourgeois influence, so much so that from Elizabeth's late reign onward the business of the state largely consisted of cracking down on troublemakers. It was certainly the most important event of Shakespeare's age. The legacy of revolutionary republican struggle and the preoccupation of the crown at home are probably what gave the planters their dynamism.
Sugar itself is not an explanation, neither is the influence of Portuguese/Dutch planters in helping them to grow sugar cane [Added note: This maybe untrue] Newman argues persuasively that the labor system remained the same when calicos and tobacco were its staples as it was when the sugar-monocrop arose. Newman is not saying that things did not change, in fact he makes the opposite case, the planters continued to innovate and raise production long after sugar prices had collapsed and profits began to fall. Thanks to Newman we are much closer to understanding the money-mad slaver class that arose in the Americas and fed the Atlantic and later global commodity markets. Thanks to Newman we are much closer to exiting the circular transition debate, even if mysteries and questions of continuities remain. It would seem that the side that has been arguing for the primacy of slavery are winning the debate, and so that also largely confirms the positions of those who argue against Euro-centricism and Anglo-centrism and who emphasize the urban as opposed to the agrarian. But the debate is not completely finished yet, as English particularities did make the industrial revolution possible, for example Spain and Portugal had New World colonies and slaves but they did not industrialize or even develop a bustling capitalist culture. These things boil down to a cocktail of factors but the one thing is forgotten is the class struggle, for whatever reason the Iberian bourgeoisie failed to lead a successful class struggle even as late as the mid-19th century. So does that mean the English were better at class struggle than the rest of the world? The evidence does not support that. But it does mean the English bourgeoisie was in a position to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities available to them.
*Added notes are simply notes that I've added in at a later date to distinguish regarding points I disagree with or find open to challenge.
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