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.
