The Second Slavery and World Capitalism: A Perspective for Historical Inquiry

• Published in: International review of social history 2018-12, Vol.63 (3), p.477-501
• Main Author: Tomich, Dale
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Abolition of slavery; Accentuation; Accumulation; Agricultural production; Attention; Capitalism; Coffee; Commodities; Concepts; Concrete; Cotton; Crises; Decolonization; Dialectics; Differentiation; Division of labor; Economic development; Economic growth; Economic history; Economics; Forced labor; Global local relationship; Hierarchies; Historical development; Ideology; Industrialization; Markets; Modernity; Nation states; Politics; Profitability; Scholars; Slave trade; Slavery; Social development; Social history; Specification; Sugar; Suggestions and Debates; Systems analysis; Time; Translation
• ISSN: 0020-8590; 1469-512X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0020859018000536

The concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion. This article examines the conceptual framework and methodological procedures that inform this interpretation. It reformulates the concept of the capitalist world-economy by emphasizing the mutual formation and historical interrelation of global–local relations. This open conception of world-economy permits the temporal-spatial specification of the zones of the second slavery. In this way, it is possible both to distinguish the new zones of the second slavery from previous world-economic zones of slave production and to establish the ways in which they are formative of the emerging industrial world division of labor. From this perspective, analysis of sugar production in Jamaica, Guyana, and Cuba discloses spatial-temporal differences between what would otherwise be taken as apparently similar historical-geographical complexes. This comparison demonstrates how world-economic processes produce particular local histories and how such histories structure the world-economy as a whole. This approach locates the crisis of slavery during the nineteenth century in the differentiated response to processes of world accumulation, rather than the incompatibility of slave production with industrialization and open, competitive markets. More generally, it calls attention to the continuity of forms of forced labor in the historical development of the capitalist world-economy and to the ways that processes of capitalist development produce social-economic differentiation and hierarchy on a world scale. Dale Tomich. Le second esclavage et le capitalisme mondial: Une perspective pour la recherche historique. Le concept du second esclavage réinterprète radicalement la relation entre l’esclave et le capitalisme, en attirant l’attention sur l’émergence de nouvelles zones étendues de production de marchandise esclave dans le sud américain, à Cuba et au Brésil en tant que partie de l’industrialisation du dix-neuvième siècle et de l’expansion économique mondiale. Cet article étudie le cadre conceptuel et les procédures méthodologiques qui façonnent cette interprétation. Il reformule le concept de l’économie mondiale capitaliste, en mettant l’accent sur la formation mutuelle et l’interrel