Oxford University Press American Historical Association

Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean Author(s): Steve J.
Stern Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 829-872 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1863526 . Accessed: 06/06/2013 15:29
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Feudalism, Capitalism,and the World-System in the Perspectiveof Latin America and the Caribbean
STEVE J. STERN
About this provocative trilogy THE WORLD-SYSTEM. CAPITALISM, Immanuel Wallersteinwrote a provocativebook. In Volume 1 of The Modern around thebeginningof argued that, World-System, publishedin 1974, Wallerstein Europe solved thecrisisof feudalismbycreatinga capitalist the sixteenth century, world-economy.The new order was premised on three key elements: "an expansion of the geographicalsize of the world in question,the developmentof zones of productsand different variegatedmethodsof labor controlfordifferent in what state machineries of relatively strong and the creation theworld-economy, Since,Wallerstein of thiscapitalist world-economy." would become thecore-states world-economy crossed the boundariesof various"politicoargued, the capitalist the conventionalunit of analysis (discretepolitico-cultural cultural"structures, as of historians is mistaken.If the "world-system" and social scientists structures) and major changes a whole exerted decisive influenceon the social structures one could hardlygain unitsithad incorporated, evidentwithin thepolitico-cultural "theunit For Wallerstein, on suchunitsas discrete entities. deep insight byfocusing of analysisis an economic entity, the one thatis measured by the existenceof an effective divisionof labor." And the divisionof labor created during the "long" was laid out as follows: sixteenth century (circa1450-1640) studiedbyWallerstein in the core-statesof Western Europe, the rise of free wage labor (and selfin the peripheries in agriculture, and industry; pastoralproduction, employment) of Latin America and Eastern Europe, the use of forcedlabor-either slaveryor "coerced cash-croplabor"-to produce bullion,sugar, and cereals; in the "semiperiphery" of Southern Europe, a necessary mediating region consistingof "former core areas turning in the direction of peripheral structures,"the
FEUDALISM,
This essay is a revisedversionof a paper originally presentedat the AmericanHistoricalAssociation Conventionin Chicago, December 27-30, 1986. The authorwishesto thankvariouspeople forhelpful and stimulating comments: membersof the panel and audience at the original session, especially of Minnesota, Immanuel Wallerstein; and SocietySeminarof the University participants at the History where the paper was presented in February 1987; colleagues Roger Bartra, Allen Hunter, Gerda of the manuscript Lerner,FlorenciaMallon, and Thomas Skidmore;and threeanonymousreviewers forthe AHR. The author also thanksDavid Weber forinviting him to writethe originalpaper, John Coatsworth for gracious encouragement, and the Universityof Wisconsin Graduate Research Committeefor assistancethatfacilitated completionof the essay.
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labor relation,sharecropping.' prevalence of an intermediate of labor deliveredto the states structure and interlocking This complementary of capital accumulationin the and privilegedclasses of the core the chiefbenefits world-system as a whole. In Wallerstein'sconception, the explanation of the of particulartypesof productionand labor relationsacross various distribution and the capitalists regionsderivesfromthe needs of the core (or, more precisely, as a whole: statesof the core), and of the world-system the labor... at the same point in timewithin modes of organizing Why different forparticular of is bestsuited types Becauseeachmodeoflaborcontrol world-economy? in different zones of the worldproduction. And whywerethesemodesconcentrated (in ... ? Becausethemodesof laborcontrol affect thepolitical system greatly economy foran indigenous and the possibilities the strength of the stateapparatus) particular on theassumption that there wasbasedprecisely tothrive. The world-economy bourgeoisie oflabor havedifferent modes control. didinfact infact three zonesandthat they were these ofthesurplus to assurethekindofflow Werethis notso,itwouldnothavebeenpossible which system to comeintoexistence.2 enabledthecapitalist carried the storyforwardinto the In Volume 2, published in 1980,3Wallerstein in itsdiscussion century (circa1600-1750). A workfascinating "long" seventeenth of Dutch industriesand hegemony,and in its innovativetwiston the familiar developmentin Britainand France,Volume 2 adds depth comparisonof capitalist to Wallerstein's insights concerningcyclical manyparticular thesisand contributes trendsand seventeenth-century developments.But it reviseslittleof the grand in itsdiscussionof the periphery.4 The paradigmsketchedin Volume 1,especially fromthe southerncolonies of BritishNorth greaterCaribbean region,stretching America to the Northeast of Portuguese Brazil, becomes a "new" American periphery added to the "old" periphery of Spanish America. The specific discussion of events in the peripherydevotes closer attention to local social initiatives, and geography.Occasional exceptionsto forced labor, as in conflicts, the case of apparent wage labor in the Mexican silver mines, are noted and discussed.But theoverallpictureremainsthe same. Forced labor prevailedin the encumbered the laborers periphery(even in the Mexican mines,the mineowners withcoercivedevices,includingdebt),and the explanationof economic and labor fromthe world-system or its core, or indirectly patternsderives eitherdirectly through the rational response of local American capitaliststo the changing
1 Immanuel Wallerstein, TheModern World-System: CapitalistAgriculture andthe Origins oftheEuropean World-Economy in theSixteenth (New York, 1974), hereafter, World-System I, 38, xi, 91, 103. A Century streamlined "textedition"(whichdeleted the notesand bibliographical listbut added a special preface and briefbibliographical essay) was publishedin 1976. All citations givenin Arabic numeralsare from the 1974 edn.; all citationsin Roman numeralsare fromthe 1976 preface. 2 World-System I, 87. 3 The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and theConsolidation of theEuropean World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York, 1980), hereafter, World-System II. 4 Seeesp. World-System II, 7-8, whereWallerstein asserted"theessentialcontinuity betweenthe long sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies,with the one great difference[being cyclicalexpansion and contraction]."
and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,
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international market.5 for Latin world-system interpretation The promise and limitsof Wallerstein's constitute the centralsubjectof thisessay.6 Americanhistory and historiography to round of Caribbean slavery I willon occasion, however,referalso to thehistory out the picture. The greater Caribbean region, after all, constitutedboth an arena of Spanish colonization, importantAmerican peripheryand a significant and itssocial and economicexperiencewithcolonial slavery bears at leasta family resemblanceto patterns thatemergedin Spanishand PortugueseAmericaproper. Wallerstein's historical strikes interpretation Widelypraised and widelycriticized, and an important chord among students of the so-calledThird World,capitalism, to capitalism.Among scholarsof earlymodern Europe, Wallerstein's transitions workhas stimulateddiscussionsof high caliber.7Especiallyfromstudentsof the colonial era in Latin America, one might have expected that Wallerstein's would have triggered a reconceptualizationof colonialism and mercantilism and lengthyand significant debate. From the corner of Latin American history provocation(in the best sense of the term) social sciences,however,Wallerstein's of theworld-systems has seemed less thansharp. His is onlyone of severalversions idea, and about this idea Latin Americans thoughtlong and hard before the
II, see 129-75. In general, Vol. 2 is more cognizant of 5 On the periphery in World-System a diversity of labor arrangments-that local geography, phenomena in the periphery-social conflicts, throughon theirpossible couldbe takento complicatethe thesissketchedin Vol. 1 butavoids following in Vol. 1 remainsunaltered.For Wallerstein's The resultis thatthe basic model set forth implications. II, 147-55, see World-System minesin particular, treatment of labor in Mexico in general,and in itssilver esp. n. 130. For recognitionof social conflictin the peripherybut a method of explanation that or subsumes the causes, outcomes,and impactsof such eventsunder the needs of the world-system, see 130-31, 137, 139-40, 144-45, 154-55 (incl. n. of Americanelitesrespondingto the world-system, 130), 167-74 (esp. 172-74 and n. 219). 6 Wallerstein is a prolific scholarwho has published numerousother workson the world-system. of issues related viewson a variety helpfulfor roundingout one's sense of Wallerstein's Particularly insights, are the and for appreciationof his diverseand sometimespenetrating to the world-system, World-Economy (New York and Paris, 1979); essays available in the followingbooks: The Capitalist Historical (London, 1983), an especiallyperceptivework to this reader; The Politicsof the Capitalism (New York and Paris, 1984). This article Movements, and theCivilizations The States, the World-Economy: II, both I and applied in World-System willfocus,however, on theparadigmas developed in World-System and thoroughlyresearched historicalanalyses and because these are Wallerstein'smost systematic because his subsequent essays have not, to my knowledge,changed the essentialsof his historical scholarship. mostinfluential seriesis Wallerstein's Withgood reason, the World-System interpretation. 7 Important discussions from a mainly European perspectiveinclude Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,"New LeftReview, 104 A CriticalReview 1977): 25-92; RobertS. DuPlessis,"From Demesne to World-System: (July-August 4 (Winter Review, of the Literatureon the TransitionfromFeudalism to Capitalism,"Radical History Europeand theWorld-Economy, and Merchant Capitalists: Landlords, 1977): 3-4 1; Peter Kriedte,Peasants, 1500-1800 (orig. German edn., 1980; LeamingtonSpa, 1983); Domenico Sella, "The World-System and Its Dangers," Peasant Studies,6 Uanuary 1977): 29-32; Theda Skocpol, "Wallerstein'sWorld 82 (1977): Journalof Sociology, CapitalistSystem: A Theoretical and HistoricalCritique,"American World is ably reviewedin RobertS. DuPlessis, "Wallerstein, 1075-90. The fullerEuropean literature paper presented at the American SystemsTheory, and Early Modern European Historiography," AssociationConvention, Chicago,December 27-30,1986; DuPlessis,"The PartialTransition Historical Review, 39 (1987): 11-27. See also RadicalHistory to World-Systems Analysisin EarlyModern History," Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structureand Economic Development in Pre-IndustrialEurope," in subsequent issues of 70 (February 1976): 30-75, and the debate and commentary Past and Present, the same journal. These important essaysmayalso be consultedin T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, in Pre-Industrial Europe(New and Economic Development Debate:Agrarian ClassStructure eds., TheBrenner York, 1985).
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In order both to understand the publication of The Modern World-System. the to Wallerstein and to assess honestly idiosyncrasy of Latin Americanresponses forthe history of Iberian America,and its sister significance of his world-system region the Caribbean, we must firstmove Wallersteininto a Latin American with context.We must,in short,put on new spectaclesand look at world history peripheral vision.
OF THE COLONIAL PERIOD has long loomed large in HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY Latin America.The feudal "diagnosis"of the the interpretation of contemporary colonial inheritance reaches back to the nineteenth century, although the nineteenth-century meaning of "feudalism"referredless to economic relationIn the twentieth when century, ships than to political,social,and jural patterns.8 analyses of the economic basis of societybecame more of a perceived priority, scholarly debate about the prevalenceof feudalismor capitalismin colonial Latin of the world economic systemfor any such America,and about the significance as earlyas the 1940s. To be sure, the prevailing assessment, began to assertitself trendwas to use feudalism or a feudal-like features, legacyto explain thedistinctive the agrarian question, that set Latin American societiesapart from particularly muchof themodernWest,especially theUnitedStates.JoseCarlos Mariateguiand Lesley B. Simpson in the 1920s; Luis Chavez Orozco, GilbertoFreyre,George McBride, Rodolfo Puiggros,and Silvio Zavala in the 1930s and 1940s; Woodrow Borah, Fran,ois Chevalier,and Jacques Lambertin the 1950s and 1960s-this is and otherwisediversefigureswho but a ruthlessly selectivelistof the prominent of Latin Americanlife invokeda feudal-like past to understandenduringfeatures and history.9Important works by Richard Morse, Octavio Paz, and Frank of Spanish America,and on the Tannenbaum on the Thomist politicaltradition contrastbetween Protestantand Catholic civilizationsin the Americas, rarely of addressed theirquestionsin termsdirectly translatable into the interpretation THE 8 SeeJose Carlos Chiaramonte, Formas desociedad y economia en hispanoamirica (Mexico City,1984), part 1, esp. 21-65. 9 Jose Carlos Mariategui,7 ensayos de interpretaci6n de la realidad peruana (Lima, 1928); Lesley B. Simpson,TheEncomienda inNewSpain: Forced Native Laborin the Spanish Colonies, 1492-1550 (Berkeley, Calif., 1929), significantly revised in a 1950 edn.; Luis Chavez Orozco, Historiaecon6mica y social de M&ico: Ensayode interpretaci6n e senzala (1933; 4th (Mexico City,1938); GilbertoFreyre,Casa-grande "definitive" edn. in 2 vols.,Rio de Janeiro,1943); George McBride,Chile:Land and Society (Baltimore, a la revolucion Md., 1936); Rodolfo Puiggr6s,De la colonia (1940; 2d edn., Buenos Aires, 1943); Silvio Zavala, "Origenes coloniales del peonaje en Mexico," El Trimestre econ6mico, 10 (1944): 711-48; Woodrow Borah,NewSpain'sCentury ofDepression (Berkeley, Calif.,1951); FranSoisChevalier,Land and in ColonialMexico:The GreatHacienda,trans.Alvin Eustis (orig. French edn., 1952; Berkeley, Society Calif.,1963); Jacques Lambert,LatinAmerica: SocialStructure andPolitical Institutions, trans.Helen Katel (orig. French edn., 1963; Berkeley,Calif., 1967). It should be noted thatthe interpretation of Latin Americansocietiesas feudal or neo-feudalwas not alwaysamong the centralpreoccupationsof these works,but all nonethelesscontributed to a feudal-like image. GilbertoFreyre,forexample, was more concerned with the roots of Brazilian culture and national characterthan with feudalism,but his interpretation emphasized the bonds of dependence and patriarchalism thatsuffusedthe relationof aristocratic masters and theirslave-servant populationson greatlanded estates, and he readilyadmitted the resemblanceto feudalism.Compare the workscitedin note 10 below. For the intellectual context of writings byU.S. scholars,see theexcellentessaybyBenjamin Keen, "Main Currentsin United States on Colonial Spanish America,1884-1984," HispanicAmerican Writings 65 (November HistoricalReview, 1985): 657-82.
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influential studies,however,proved a colonial legacyof feudalism.Their rightly it by to reinforce by and large compatiblewithsuch a thesisand servedindirectly rootedin late in Latin Americaof culturaltraditions the persistence underscoring medieval Europe.'0 and the world economic Still,dissentabout the place of feudalism,capitalism, in the interpretation of the colonial legacyappeared by the 1940s,and the system dissenters were mainly resident Latin Americans. Sergio Bagui, Jan Bazant, significant Jose Miranda,and Caio Prado,Jr.,all registered Alexander Marchant, new doubts about the prevailingwisdom. In theirversionsof colonial history, and relegatedto theshadowsthetraditional spotlight elementsdrewthehistorian's Descriptionand explanation ethosand feudal involution. emphasison aristocratic driveand profit motiveof the originalcolonizers, focusedon the entrepreneurial the evident force of mercantile exploitation as an engine structuringand the in LatinAmericanhinterlands, economiclifeand socialrelations restructuring commodities of Iberian Americato the role of providerof primary subordination of a Europe undergoing and an economic surplusto theexpanding worldmarket of thecolonial the riseof commercialcapitalism. In theCaribbean,thisrecasting experience as the exploitativeextensionof capitalismto the New World had its analogue in the celebrated worksof C. L. R. James and Eric Williams.12 stillverymuch a minority view,resonated withthe These revisionsof history, butone example environment. They constituted broader politicaland intellectual of skeptical stirringsabout the beneficence of economic relations and ideas promoted by the advanced capitalist (that is, industrialized)West. For Latin America, the beginningsof the historicalcritiqueof the feudal thesis roughly coincided with the beginningsof the social science critiqueof the comparative trade,associated especiallywiththe Comisi6n advantage theoryof international Econ6mica para America Latina (CEPAL) and its executive secretary,the
10 Richard M. Morse, "Toward a Theory of Spanish AmericanGovernment,"Jourmal History ofthe ofIdeas, 15 (1954): 71-93; Morse,"The Heritageof Latin America,"in Louis Hartz,etal., TheFounding de lasoledad(1950; rev.edn., Mexico (New York, 1964), 123-77; OctavioPaz, ElLaberinto ofNewSocieties (New York, 1946). Americas TheNegroin the City,1959); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: deAmerica Latina (Buenos comparada Ensayo dehistoria colonial: de la sociedad 1 Sergio Bagu, Economia econ6mico, Aires, 1949); Jan Bazant, "Feudalismo y capitalismoen la historiade Mexico,"El Trimestre 17 (1950): 81-98; Alexander Marchant, "Feudal and Capitalistic Elements in the Portuguese Historical of Brazil,"HispanicAmerican 22 (August 1942): 493-512; Jose Miranda, Review, Settlement "La Funci6n econ6mica del encomendero en los origenes del regimen colonial de Nueva Espafia e Historia, 2 (1941-46): 421-62; Caio Prado, NacionaldeAntropologia (1525-1531)," AnalesdelInstituto of Col6nia(Sao Paulo, 1942). Miranda was partof the community doBrasilcontemportneo: Jr.,Formafdo who resided in Mexico and helped launch El Colegio de Mexico, a leading exiled Spanish intellectuals center of research and higher learning. (I thank my Mexican colleague Roger Bartra for this Marchantresided in the United Statesbut had been born in Rio deJaneiro,visitedfairly information.) and was a visibleand involvedfigurein Brazil. See A. J. R. Russell-Wood,"United States regularly, Historical Review, American of Colonial Brazil,"Hispanic to the Historiography ScholarlyContributions 65 (November 1985): 694-95; and the obituaryin ibid.,62 (August 1982): 459. Revolution (1938; rev. San Domingo and the L'Ouverture Toussaint 12 C. L. R. James,TheBlackJacobins: and Slavery(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944); compare edn., New York, 1963); Eric Williams,Capitalism y el azucar ... (Havana, 1940). The connectionof this cubanodel tabaco Fernando Ortiz,Contrapunteo held with in interviews critiqueoftheWestis illuminated and theemerging ofcolonialhistory recasting ofHistory Radical HistoriansOrganization,Visions James in 1975 and 1982, and rpt. in Mid-Atlantic (New York, 1984), 266-77.
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As the 1950s and 1960s unfolded, several experieconomist Raul Prebisch.13 the cold war,the Cuban revolution, industrialization, ences-import-substitution intensified political polarization-contributedto a context in which the initial The resultwas a dissentsof the 1940s were taken up and debated extensively. and policy complicatedseriesof dialectics:betweenCEPAL-oriented intellectuals West;between"moderate"Latin Americanadvocates makersand themainstream of development, influencedby the CEPAL idea and the promise of importand associates;among and theirmore"radical"LatinAmericancritics substitution, of of a and healthyprocess self-evaluation; CEPAL-oriented colleagues, as part ofa "bourgeoisrevolution" inclinedto see thenecessity betweentheorthodoxleft, to transform a Latin America stillencumbered by feudalism,and an innovative left, increasinglyconvinced that it was the historic spread of international capitalism,beginningin the Age of Discovery,that explained Latin America's debates anachronistic economicstructures.14These critical poverty and apparently and dialogues culminated,in the 1960s, in whathas come to be knownlooselyas "dependency theory"-full-scalecritiquesof neo-classicaleconomics and modof an alternative visionof Latin American ernizationtheory, and the construction historyand reality emphasizing the external constraintsand impositionsof historical and sociological revisionist international capitalism.'5Not surprisingly,
13 and ItsPrincipal See the following CEPAL publications:TheEconomic Development ofLatinAmerica Problems (orig. Spanish edn., 1949; New York, 1950); Economic 1949 (New York, ofLatinAmerica Survey 1951); El Pensamiento dela CEPAL (Santiagode Chile, 1969). See also thesourcescitedin note 15 below. in 1950. More PrebischwroteTheEconomic Development and was named CEPAL's executivesecretary recentexamples of CEPAL thinking, includingthatof Prebisch,may be followedin CEPAL Review (1976- ). 14 This is to some extent a simplification because a numberof people crossedtheboundariesofthese forexample, the distinction between"in-house"and "external"criticism categories,thereby blurring, of diverseviewsknew of CEPAL ideas. The variousaxes of debate sometimes intellectuals intersected, and influencedone another,and CEPAL was sufficiently dynamicand inclusiveto pull diversefigures under its institutionalumbrella at one point or another. Andre Gunder Frank, for example, his polemics against moderate developmentalists,originally wrote one of his notwithstanding in LatinAmerica: and Underdevelopment celebratedessaysas a reportforCEPAL. See Frank,Capitalism Historical Studiesof Chile and Brazil (1967; rev. edn., New York, 1969), xii. My knowledge of the intellectual history of thisperiodwas greatly enhancedbythesourcescitedin note 15 below.A revealing warningagainstretrospective of thisintellectual is made byFernando Henrique simplifications history Cardoso, "The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States,"Latin American Research Review,12 (1977): 7-12. on the originsand evolving 15 Very helpfulretrospectives by leading Latin Americanintellectuals response to the CEPAL and dependency ideas include Cardoso, "Consumption of Dependency Theory," 7-24; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "The Originality of a Copy: CEPAL and the Idea of " 'Dependency Theory' and Latin Development,"CEPAL Review (1977): 7-40; Tulio Halperin-Donghi, American Historiography," LatinAmerican Research Review,17 (1982): 115-30. Cardoso's essayscited above and several other illuminating articleson the historyof CEPAL and dependency ideas are reprintedin his As ideiase seu lugar:Ensaiossobre as teorias do desenvolvimento (Petr6polis,1980). Also usefulareJoseph A. Kahl,Modernization, inLatinAmerica: Gonzdlez Exploitation, andDependency Germani, Casanova,and Cardoso(New Brunswick, N.J., 1976), 14-17, 129-94; Albert0. Hirschman,A Bias for Hope:Essays onDevelopmentand LatinAmerica (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 85-89,279-311 ;Joseph Love, Research "Raul Prebischand the Originsof the Doctrineof Unequal Exchange,"LatinAmerican Review, 15 (1980): 46-60. It is also worthnotingthat,despitethe growing of the West,especially conservatism in the United States,by the startof the 1950s, the intellectual critiquesof the West and of advanced isolation.The North sealed intellectual capitalismby Latin Americansdid not occur in hermetically AtlanticWorld also generated importantcritiques,among the most importantof which were Karl Polanyi,TheGreat Transformation: ThePolitical andEconomic Origins ofOur Time(1944; rpt.edn., Boston, A Note on theMechanism 1957); Gunnar Myrdal,Development and Under-Development: ofNationaland
Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System
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studiesappeared in the same period, accompanied by reprinteditionsof several was to cut away at more benign of the landmarkworksof the 1940s. Their effect between tradition, and at the sense of disconnection viewsof society and historical and more countryside of lifeassociatedwiththecolonial-like 'traditional"patterns enclaves.'6 "modern" patternsassociated withdynamiccitiesand capitalist various dependency perspectivesis The literatureexplicatingand criticizing spilledoutsideLatinAmericaand theCaribbeanto embrace enormousand quickly Africaand social sciencetheory in general.17 For our purposes,threepointsstand
revisedin the betterknownRichLandsand Poor: TheRoad (Cairo, 1956), slightly Inequality International Economy ofGrowth (New York, 1957). Prosperity (New York, 1957); Paul A. Baran, ThePolitical toWorld 16 For a sampling of major worksin three diverse countries, see the following:for Brazil, Roger emSao Paulo (1955; 2d rev. edn., Sao Paulo, 1959); Bastide and FlorestanFernandes,Brancose negros (Sao Paulo, 1962); F. H. no Brasil meridional e escraviddo Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Capitalismo no Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1964); Florestan economico industrial e desenvolvimento Cardoso, Empresdrio 2 vols. (Sao Paulo, 1965); Celso Furtado,Forma(ao declases, donegro na sociedade Fernandes,A integrapio (1966; 2d rev.edn., da Costa,Da senzalaa col6nia doBrasil(Rio deJaneiro, 1959); EmiliaViotti economica enM6xico(Mexico City,1965); Sao Paulo, 1982); forMexico, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, La Democracia Rodolfo Stavenhagen, "Clases, colonialismo y aculturaci6n:Ensayo sobre un sistema de relaciones Latina (Rio de Janeiro),6 (October-December 1963): 63-103; en Mesoamerica,"Ame'rica interetnicas (Tlaxiaco)(Mexico City,1957); Carlos Fuentes,La compare Alejandro Marroquin,La Ciudadmercado De y subdesarrollo: Muerte deArtemio Cruz(Mexico City,1962); forPeru,JorgeBravo Bresani,Desarrollo (Lima, 1967); Carlos Malpica, Los DueiiosdelPerui(1964; delhombre a la economia la economfa del hambre 3d rev. edn., Lima, 1968); Jose Matos Mar, et al., Perui-Problema (2d edn., Lima, 1969) and the subsequent volumes in the Perui-Problema series organized by the Institutode Estudios Peruanos; inJames Anibal Quijano Obreg6n, "Tendencies in PeruvianDevelopmentand in theClass Structure," (New York, 1968), 289-328; or Revolution? Reform Petras and Maurice Zeitlin,eds., Latin America: enelPerui (Buenos Aires,1971). Among the militarismo neoimperialismoy Quijano Obreg6n,Nacionalismo, worksof the 1940s cited in note 11 above, the books by Bag[ and Prado circulatedin new editionsin the 1960s, and Miranda's essay was republished in pamphlet form by the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico in 1965. Naturally, manyof these worksfocusedon topicsparticularto the countriesin question: in Brazil, the mythof racial democracyand the legacyof slavery;in Mexico, the politicalorder created by the of poor people and regions;in Peru, the split Mexican Revolutionand the continuingsubordination of the "nation" between Indian highlandsand creole coast, and the dominance of coastal societyby Nonetheless,the worksand authorscitedalso formedpartof a more oligarchsand foreigncapitalists. in Latin Americathatblended intothecritiqueof the feudalismthesis generalconjunctureof criticism well beyond particularcountries.(The factthat begun in the 1940s, and some authorshad influence thisprocess.) Other worksof exile in the 1960s facilitated suffered a number of criticalintellectuals more general influenceand circulationincluded Rodolfo Stavenhagen,"Seven Fallacies about Latin 13-3 1; Luis Vitale,"LatinAmerica:Feudal or Capitalist?" America,"in Petrasand Zeitlin,LatinAmerica, de 1810 de ChileII: La Coloniay la revoluci6n marxista de la historia in ibid.,32-43; Vitale,Interpretaci6n (1969; 3d edn., Santiago de Chile, 1972); Theotonio dos Santos,"El Nuevo caracterde la dependencia 6 (1967): 9-50. Socioecon6micos, del Centro de Estudios (gran empresa y capital extranjero),"Cuadernos appeared in the Mexican Stavenhagen's"Seven Fallacies"is an expanded versionof an articlethatfirst 5 (July appeared in theChilean magazineEstrategia, newspaperEl Dia inJune 1965; Vitale'sarticlefirst 19 n. 11. 1966), according to Vitale,Interpretaci6n, and for further bibliographical to the literaturefroma varietyof viewpoints 17 For orientations in note 15 above: Carlos Sempat Assadourian,etal., Modos see, in additionto the citations references, Latina (1973; 9th edn., Mexico City, 1982); Roger Bartra, et al., Modos de en America de producci6n 89-95; y economia, Latina (1975; Lima, 1976); Chiaramonte,Formasde sociedad en Ame'rica producci6n of Developmentand Alternative Perspectives Ronald H. ChilcoteandJoel C. Edelstein,"Introduction: with TheStruggle Underdevelopmentin Latin America,"in Chilcoteand Edelstein,eds., LatinAmerica: and Beyond(New York, 1974), 1-87; Ronald H. Chilcote, "Dependency or Mode of Dependency Mode ofDevelopment: Production?Theoretical Issues," in Chilcoteand Dale L. Johnson,eds., Theories "Africaand theWorld (BeverlyHills,Calif.,1983),9-30; Frederick-Cooper, orDependency? ofProduction "The Modes 1981): 1-86; Aidan Foster-Carter, 24 (June-September Review, Economy,"African Studies New LeftReview,107 (1978): 47-77; Peter F. Klaren and Thomas J. of Production Controversy," (Boulder, Colo., 1986), esp. the inLatinAmerica ofChange Theories ofDevelopment: Bossert,eds., Promise 1:1 and 8:3-4 (1974 Perspectives, essay by Klaren on 3-33, and by Bosserton 303-34; LatinAmerican
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in the mid-1960s stood out as the leading theoretical out. First, twoworkswritten a dependency perspectivefor Latin America. to construct and systematic efforts The co-authored book of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto on in mimeographs dependencyand development(publishedin 1969 but circulating and oral formsincethemid-1960s) and Andre Gunder Frank'sstudyof capitalism and underdevelopment(firstpublished in 1967) are the landmarks to which return.'8Second, the depeninevitably assessmentsof dependency perspectives ensconced in the historicalscholarshipregarding Latin dency idea was firmly Tulio Halperin-Donghi Americabytheearly1970s. In 1969 and 1970 respectively, and co-authorsStanleyJ. Stein and Barbara H. Stein published widelyadmired works of historicalsynthesis.'9These works combined nuanced insight,deep in empiricalresearchon Latin America,and sympathetic engagement immersion forserious of dependencyideas. The stature of thesebooks made itmore difficult to dismissthe dependency approach altogetheras the workof radical historians of presentist social scientists theoriesonto the projection caughtup in a superficial anti-theoretical professionis strongly past. In the United States,whose historical compared withthose of Latin America,new college textbookspublished in Latin American history reflected the continuingimpactof the dependency idea.20 (Cardoso's word) of dependency Third, despite thewidespread"consumption" perspectivesin toto or in part, the dependency perspective generated very considerabledebate, and thisdebate anticipatedsome of the issues arisingfrom and Wallerstein's laterbooks. Andre Gunder Frank drew the most international heated attention-perhaps because he published originallyin English (he soon or because his secured Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian translations),
and 1981); Brooke Larson, "Shifting Views of Colonialismand Resistance," Radical History Review, 27 (1983): 3-20; GabrielPalma,"Dependency:A FormalTheoryofUnderdevelopment or a Methodology forthe Analysisof ConcreteSituations of Underdevelopment?" World 6 (1978): 881-924; Development, WilliamRoseberry, and Capitalism in theVenezuelan Andes(Austin,Tex., 1983), 59-70; William Coffee B. Taylor,"BetweenGlobal Processand Local Knowledge:An InquiryintoEarlyLatinAmericanSocial History,1500-1900," in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving Past: The Worlds the ofSocial History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 115-90. 18 Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, desarrollo enAmericaLatina Dependenciay (Mexico A revisedEnglish-language City,1969); Frank,Capitalism and Underdevelopment. versionof Cardoso and Faletto's book was published in 1979: Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley). '9 Tulio Halperin-Donghi,Historia contempordnea deAmerica Latina (Madrid, 1969); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein,TheColonial Heritage ofLatinAmerica: Essays onEconomic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970). It should be notedthat, notwithstanding theresonanceofHistoria contempordnea with dependency ideas, Halperin-Donghi has also strongly criticizedthe reductionismin much of the dependency literature. See his "'Dependency Theory' and Latin AmericanHistoriography," 115-30. ? See especiallythe followingtextbooks:E. Bradford Burns, LatinAmerica: A Concise Interpretive History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972); Benjamin Keen and Mark Wasserman,A Short History ofLatin America (Boston, 1980); Thomas E. Skidmoreand Peter H. Smith,ModernLatinAmerica (New York, 1984); compare the popular interdisciplinary textbyEric R. Wolfand Edward C. Hansen, TheHuman in LatinAmerica Condition (New York, 1972). These textsand Stein and Stein,ColonialHeritage, each sold well enough tojustifyreprints or new editionsand remained in printas of 1986. (My personal copy of Wolf and Hansen, Human Condition, indicatesthatit was in its thirdprinting by 1973.) One important new textbookthatbears little imprint of dependencyideas isJames Lockhartand StuartB. Schwartz, A History EarlyLatinAmerica: ofColonial Spanish America andBrazil(New York, 1983). Another textbook authortreats dependencyideas withreservebutconsidersthemtoo influential to ignore: Lyle N. McAlister, 1492-1700 (Minneapolis,Minn., 1984), 387-90. Spain and Portugalin theNew World,
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analysis was crudely one-dimensional and unchanging compared to that of For Cardoso and Faletto,or because he was Anglo ratherthan Latin American.21 Latin Americanists, Frank's thesis now appears as a kind of vulgar preview of work on the world-system. Wallerstein'smore well researchedand sophisticated transferred linksthatsystematically Frank stresseda chain of metropolis-satellite to themetropoles(read: (read: "periphery") economicsurplusesfromthesatellites "core") and thereby caused the "underdevelopment" of the satellites. The metropolis-satellite polarizationcharacterizedrelationsnot only between world worldareas and areas (say,WesternEurope and Iberian America)but also within regions,converting some metropoles(for example, Spain and Portugal vis-a-vis of morepowerful metropoles (read: "semiperiphery") theircolonies)intosatellites analysisdemon(for example, the Netherlandsand England). Frank's historical commercialsystemhad stratedthat the exploitativechain of the international of Americato capitalism "remote" and Latin feudal-like regions bound apparently This bindinghad taken century. long ago, in some regionsas earlyas thesixteenth of theirwealthand regions that drained Latin American theformof exportbooms and decline easily confused with left in their wake regional impoverishment to demolishingthe notion, feudalism.Frank contributed therefore, importantly, prevalent in modernizationtheory,that Latin America was a region of "dual into modern capitalismand societies"divided betweendynamiczones integrated backwardzones languishingin feudal isolation.Capitalism,understoodas profitdrivenproductionof commoditiesforlarge-scalemarketson unequal termsthat benefitedcapitalistsand metropoles,was the quintessentialcolonial legacy in preciselythe impoverished regions considered "feudal" and "isolated" in the twentieth century.22
21 The flexibility and evolutionof Cardoso and Falettois indicated by the changes introducedin articleby Cardoso, "Associatedthe subsequenteditionsof theircelebratedbook and in an important in AlfredStepan, ed., Authoritarian Dependent Development:Theoretical and PracticalImplications," Brazil(New Haven, Conn., 1973), 142-78. On thechanges in variouseditionsof Cardoso and Faletto's book, Robert A. Packenham, "Plus Sa change.. . : The English Edition of Cardoso and Faletto's ResearchReview, 17 (1982): 131-51, is en AmericaLatina," Latin American y desarrollo Dependencia hostility to Cardoso and Falettoand by somewhatusefulalthoughmarredbythe author'stendentious a narrowview of the oral and printedmeans by whichideas circulatedin Santiago and elsewherein and Underdevelopment maybe found of Frank'sCapitalism Latin America. Referenceto the translations in the preface to the revised 1969 edition,xx. An enormouslyperceptiveaccount of the receptionof Frank's workin Latin America and in the United Statesis Halperin-Donghi,"'Dependency Theory' 115-30; compare F. H. Cardoso, "Consumptionof Dependency and Latin AmericanHistoriography," Theory," 7-24. 22 Frank,Capitalism As the priordiscussionand notes 14 and 17 make clear, and Underdevelopment. but part of a wider streamof revisionism Frank's celebratedworkwas not an isolated breakthrough undertaken by Latin Americans. In this regard, see esp. Stavenhagen, "Seven Fallacies," 13-31; Stavenhagen, "Clases, colonialismo y aculturaci6n,"63-103; Gonzalez Casanova, La Democraciaen but it is his early Mexico. Frank wrote and continues to writea large number of books and articles, is and Underdevelopment-that or extensionsof the keyideas of Capitalism work-mainly amplifications most importantfor the purposes of this essay. Other importantearly books were Latin America: Lumpendevelopment: (New York, 1969); Lumpenbourgeoisie: or Revolution Dependence, Underdevelopment introducedin thelatterbook, (New York, 1972). On themodifications inLatinAmerica Class,andPolitics see Brenner, "Origins of CapitalistDevelopment,"83-86. A later publicationon colonial Mexican agriculturewas actually researched and writtenin 1965-66 and reflectshis early views: Mexican (New York and Paris, 1979), vii-xii. oftheMode ofProduction 1521-1630: Transformation Agriculture,
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Scholars on the left,broadly defined, were the most disposed to confront of dependency perspectives, and the critical seriouslythe issues and implications assessment of Frank's work rekindled interestin the importantDobb-Sweezy fromfeudalismto capitalism.23 debate in the 1950s on Europe's transition In that debate, Sweezy'scritics argued thathis stresson the expansion of commerceand profit makingin late medievalEurope could not reallyaccount forthe qualitative transformations of technique ("forcesof production")and social relations("relationsof production")thatgave the capitalistmode of productionitsdistinctive historicalcharacter.Profitmaking and intense marketactivity that turned the toward exchange-value rather than purpose of production in wide territories of historical use-value could be found in a variety epochs and societies,including ancient Rome. What explained, at bottom,capitalism'sunique and even revolutionary impacton economic lifewas itsnew methodof organizingproductionon in exchange fora wage. Free the basis of the freesale of labor-powerto capitalists wage labor was the relationof productionthatliberatedentrepreneurship from the comparatively of pre-capitalist restrictions societies.Free wage labor stifling allowed for optimal and changing combinationsof machinery and labor, a possibility thatmade feasibleunparalleledtechnical experimentation and progress in production;it also encouraged the rise of mass marketsfor subsistenceitems purchased with wages, a development that expanded the scope of profitable market activity enormously.Marx's creative insightwas to analyze the causes, inner dynamics,and far-reaching mystifications, consequences of this transformationof the productionprocess. Sweezy'scritics argued that,once one focused on the productionratherthan the circulation of commodities, the strategic issues requiring explanation shifted from the expansion of the profit motive and internationalcommerce to the replacementof servile labor by proletarianized labor and the associated rise of home markets(that is, mass consumption of commodities).To explain the transition to capitalismthereforerequired close historical analysis of the social and class conflicts,expropriations of petty producers, and deterioration of subsistence strategies that underwrote the transition fromservileto free labor.24A good deal of the Europeanists' recent debate on capitalisttransition, Robert Brenner's importantessays, particularly followsin the traditionof the Dobb-Sweezydebate.25 Between Dobb and Brenner,however,came ErnestoLaclau.26Like Dobb, and like other criticsof Andre Gunder Frank, Laclau invoked the classic Marxist emphasis on capitalismas a mode of production. To demonstratethe rise of
23 See the collectionof articles, most of themorig. pub. in Science and Society in the 1950s, rpt. in Rodney Hilton,etal., The'Transition toCapitalism from Feudalism (London, 1976); Maurice Dobb, Studies in theDevelopment ofCapitalism (1947; rev.edn., New York, 1963). On therenewedinterest in thisdebate in Latin America,see the citationsin Assadourian,Modosde produccion; Bartra,Modosde producci6n. 24 The mostforceful proponentsof thisviewwere Dobb and Takahashi, in Hilton, Transition from toCapitalism. Feudalism Compare E.J. Hobsbawm,"The CrisisoftheSeventeenth Century" (orig. 1954), in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisisin Europe,1560-1660 (New York, 1967), 5-62. 25 See the sources cited in note 7 above. 26 Ernesto Laclau, "Feudalism and Capitalismin Latin America,"New Left Review, 67 (May-June 1971): 19-38.
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motive, as Frank had done forcolonial Latin and a profit commercialexploitation to demonstratethatthe Latin American economy had America,was insufficient been "capitalist"since Cortes and Pizarro. It was obvious, observed Laclau, that the coercive labor relationsand mercantileexploitationused as its instrument obligationscorrespondingto the feudal mode of production.This was tributary of Latin America's not a trivialpoint, since it greatlyaffectedthe explanation, historicunderdevelopment.In Laclau's scheme,underdevelopmentderived not only fromEurope's channelingof the colonies' economic surplusesfromsatellite theirrelationsof productionin an archaic to metropolisbut also fromits"fixing which retarded any process of social differcoercion, mould of extra-economic implication The first markets."27 and diminishedthesize of theirinternal entiation of production(transformations transformations in theabsence of further was that, the feudal that could not derive simplyfrom a process of commercialization), of Latin exploitation imposed by Europe's commercial socioeconomicstructure America would have blocked capitalistdevelopment,even had Latin America retained a greater share of economic surplus. Further,material progress in Latin America did indeed require the break-up of the feudal twentieth-century thatdominatedmanybackwardregions.Laclau held that socioeconomicstructures It was Frankhad confusedthe "mode of production"withthe"economicsystem." thatwas as a economic system thatan overarching possible,even likely, perfectly whole capitalist-that is, governedby the needs of a dominantcapitalistmode of principle-could include several modes of producproductionand by the profit thesis "parts."Frankhad demolishedthe "dual society" tionamong itsconstituent thatLatin America's"'backward" of the modernization theorists bydemonstrating system, intothe worldcapitalist terms, on exploitative regionshad been inserted, themselves were regions but this contributionhardly demonstratedthat such capitalist. between the economic systemand its heterogeneousparts Laclau's distinction undermined Frank's argument, but his assertion of the "feudal" effectively character of the colonial economy has nonetheless remained debatable. The problem is thatLatin America has so oftenseemed "in but not of" the capitalist economy of the North Atlanticworld. In the colonial period especially,Latin America has seemed a confusinghybridof pre-modern"feudal" and modern of least of all a historian eras. NeitherFrank nor Laclau is a historian, "capitalist" in colonialeconomichistory moreimmersed colonialLatinAmerica.For historians and social relations,posing the choice as one between a "feudal" or "capitalist" the nature of the problem. economy may itselfmisconstrue On the one hand, Latin America and the Caribbean supplied, throughtheir and contraband,essentialgoods and economic surpluses colonial trades,taxation, premised on the expansion of entrepreneurial to a European world-economy Moreover, withinLatin America, mercantile and accumulation. capital profit a powerfulforcereshapprincipleconstituted interests and the profit-investment the kinds and quantities of ing urban and regional economies, restructuring
27
Laclau, "Feudalism and Capitalism,"35.
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commoditiesproduced and the technologies and social relationsused to produce them.The riseof profit makingand commodity productionas a centralprinciple of economicorganization;thesimultaneous deterioration and destruction of local subsistenceeconomies; the impressivecapital expenditures undertaken in the mines, sugar plantations,and other enterprises;and the growthof cities and miningregions,wheretheredeveloped significant internalmarketsand relatively free formsof labor, includingrelationsresembling wage labor-all seem to lend strengthto the notion that, in the more dynamic colonial regions, the Latin Americaneconomywas never"feudal"but followeda "capitalist" logic,albeitone that reflected its special position as colony or periphery of the European world-economy.28 On the otherhand, a long-term viewof the social relationsand technologiesby which colonial production and social life were organized sees the rebirthon American soil of pre-capitalist or at least non-capitalist modes of production. and various formsof serfdomor peonage constiRotatinglabor drafts,slavery, tuted strategiclabor relations in Latin America's mines, plantations,textile workshops,and haciendas. Servilelabor relationssuch as these resembled those of Europe before the transitionto capitalisminsofar as they rested on extraeconomiccompulsionratherthanthefreehiring ofproletarianized laborerswhose lackof subsistence drove themto selltheirlabor-power fora wage. In thelong run, the mercantile of Latin Americapreventedneitherthereconstitution exploitation of effective,though considerably impoverished, subsistence economies and nor the use of "pre-capitalist" strategies by Indian communities devices (tribute, rents,labor drafts, slavery, peonage) to extracta surplus fromdirectproducers. Even the mining economies of eighteenth-century Mexico and Peru-Bolivia required for theirprofitability and expansion the reductionof relatively "free" laborers to more "bonded" status.29 Eventually,colonial internal marketsand to a capitalist technology stagnated.The transition mode of productionduringthe late nineteenthand twentieth centurieswas to require a struggleagainst subsistence rightsthatyielded land and labor arrangements more compatiblewiththe imperativesof capitalistindustryand production.30 The long-termview, then,
28 On the weight of mining and mercantileexploitationin the structureand organization of economic life, the work of Carlos Sempat Assadourian is fundamental: "Modos de produccion, capitalismoy subdesarrolloen AmericaLatina,"in Assadourian,Modosdeproducci6n, 47-81; El Sistema de la economia colonial:Mercadointerno, regiones y espacioecon6mico (Lima, 1982), which reprintsessays writtenin the 1960s and 1970s; and "La Producci6n de la mercancia dinero en la formaci6ndel mercado internocolonial: El Caso del espacio peruano, sigloXVI," in Enrique Florescano,ed., Ensayos sobre el desarrollo econ6mico deMexicoyAme'ricaLatina (1500-1975) (Mexico City,1979), 223-92; compare SteveJ. Stern,"New Directionsin Andean Economic History:A CriticalDialogue withCarlos Sempat Assadourian,"LatinAmerican Perspectives, 12 (Winter1985): 133-48. See also PeterJ. Bakewell,Silver MiningandSociety inColonialMexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge,1971); D. A. Bradingand Harry E. Cross,"Colonial SilverMining:Mexico and Peru,"Hispanic American HistoricalReview, 52 (November 1972): 545-79; and the stillusefulclassicbyEric R. Wolf,Sonsofthe ThePeopleofMexico ShakingEarth: and Guatemala-TheirLand, History, and Culture (Chicago, 1959), 176-87. 29 See the discussionof silverminingbelow and the sources cited in notes 65, 71, and 72. 30 For examples, see Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge,eds., Land and Labourin Latin America: Essays onthe Development ofAgrarian Capitalism inthe Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge,1977); Crist6balKay,El Sistema seniorial europeo y la hacienda latinoamericana (Mexico City,1980); Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense ofCommunity in Peru's Central Highlands: PeasantStruggle and Capitalist Transition,
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suggeststhat the colonial Latin American economy,though part of a European economic systemin transitionto capitalism,followed principles of economic evolution qualitatively distinctfrom those associated with a capitalistmode of production. The economic patternsdiscussed here can lead to conceptualtrapsand sterile, othersto circulardebates. One can emphasize some featuresto find"capitalism," mode of production). find"feudalism"(or "slavery," understoodas a pre-capitalist Neither characterizationsuffices.The dynamics of colonial labor relations, frombut in some subsistenceand markets, and technology were not onlydistinct senses antithetical to those of a capitalistmode of production.As conceptualized by Marx, a capitalistmode of productionis based on the sale of labor-powerfor a wage, not primarilyunder political,social, or cultural coercion but out of economic necessity. Separated fromthe lands and resourcesneeded to produce theirsubsistenceor itemsthatcan be exchanged for subsistencegoods, workers freely sell theirlabor-powerto earn a livingwage and withtheirwages constitute an internal marketforthesale of commodities enterprises.31 produced in capitalist and compliThis is a phenomenon quite recognizable,despite some ambiguities centuries and twentieth cations, bystudents of LatinAmericain thelatenineteenth but not in the colonial period. To call colonial Latin America "capitalist"thus and thecolonial obscuresthetremendous betweenthecontemporary discontinuity associatedwiththe transition economy,as well as the bittertraumasand conflicts to a capitalistmode of productionin more recenttimes. and itsassociated disasters Yet the intensity of colonial mercantile exploitation often tended to take on a destructive quality that partlyproletarianizedsmall producers and tended, also, to reduce laborers from human beings whose exploitationinvolvedtheirmastersin a many-sidedrelationshipof unequal but mutualobligationto mere human repositories of labor-powerused as short-term of mercantileinterestand bearing commodityvalue based on the instruments exchange value of theirexploitable labor. Slaves who were worked to death in booming tropicalexport sectorsand draftedpeasant laborerswhose rotationsat the mines pressed them to the limits of good healthand physicalendurance and subsistence rightsserve as obvious examples. virtually destroyedtheircustomary Thus to call colonial Latin America "feudal" or "seigneurial"or to equate Latin obscuresboth withearlierOld Worldslavery Americanor Caribbean slaveholding the intensity of mercantileexploitationinherentin the colonial systemand the subsistenceand market led to labor relations, degree to whichthisveryintensity with structure and dynamicsqualitapatterns,and technologicaldevelopments distinct fromthose of pre-capitalist Europe.32 tively
MexicanRevolution 1860-1940 (Princeton,NJ., 1983); John Womack,Jr.,Zapata and the (New York, 1969), esp. 41-54. Compare Arnold J. Bauer, "Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Review, 59 (February 1979): 34-63. Historical Peonage and Oppression," HispanicAmerican conceptualizations of capitalism, see Dobb, Studies, and non-Marxist 31 For a comparisonof Marxist Economic Formations, 1-32; compare Karl Marx, Capital,3 vols. (New York, 1969); Marx,Pre-Capitalist ed. E. J. Hobsbawm (New York, 1964). 32 It is by now a commonplace to observe thatworkand healthconditionsmeant thatthe African fromAfricaratherthan slave populationsof Brazil and the Caribbean were replaced byfreshimports
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then,is to walk and "capitalism," To accept a simplechoice between"feudalism" into a conceptual trap. Laclau's brief discussion of feudal-like relations of debate,to expose Frank's momentin an evolving productionserved,at a particular defects. But it did not really solve the deeper conundrum posed by the was rightwhen of the colonial economy.In thissense, Wallerstein interpretation he argued in 1974 that Laclau's was not the last word.33What is noteworthy, however,is the speed withwhich the Latin American literaturemoved beyond Laclau's initial statement.The 1960s and 1970s witnesseda boom in creative Before TheModernWorld-System joined Marxian scholarshipin Latin America.34 on of positions a series sophisticated the fray, colonial studieshad alreadyyielded feudalism,capitalism,and the world-economy. We may discernfour positions,each of whichsoughtto escape the conceptual of thecolonial trapoutlinedabove. One saw theoriginaland paradoxical features economy not as an "anomaly"to be explained away but as a basis for extending "categories."These scholars and enrichingour inheritedmode-of-production soughtto develop theoriesof "colonial" and "colonial slavery"modes of producA tionthatwould complementthe categoriesinheritedfromEuropean history.35
throughbiological replacementin America. Planterscommonlymade estimatesof life expectancy toensure produced byslavesbe sufficient exchange-valueofcommodities requiringthattheshort-term rates,I mean the rate rates.(By "net" fertility and low net fertility profitability despite high mortality In Bahia, Brazil,in the mid-eighteenth aftersubtracting out the rateof death in infancy.) of live'births itappears thatsugar plantersrecoveredthe costof purchaseand maintenanceof a slave after century, was in therange estimates had itthata slave'slifeexpectancy onlythreeand a halfyears.Contemporary thatmustbe made forinfant of seven to fifteen years,a revealingcalculationdespite the adjustments Formation Bahia, in the ofBrazilianSociety: SugarPlantations and child mortality. See StuartB. Schwartz, see also 346-78; and cautionabout suchcalculations, 1550-1835 (New York, 1985), 226, butforcontext and the Caribbean (New York, 1986), 154-61. On and HerbertS. Klein,African Slavery in LatinAmerica the commodification of forcedlabor in the minesof Spanish America,see SteveJ.Stern,Peru'sIndian ofSpanishConquest: Huamangato1640 (Madison, Wis., 1982), 84-89, 148-57; Peoplesand theChallenge 93 (November Enrique Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour in Late Colonial Potosi,"Past and Present, 1981): 98-136; Peter J. Bakewell, Minersof theRed Mountain:Indian Labor in Potosi,1545-1650 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1984), passim;and the discussionof silvermininglater in thisessay. 33 Wallerstein, World-System I, 126-27. withthe scholarshipof Latin Americansin the period 3 This is ratherobvious to anyone familiar and Bartra,Modosdeproducci6n. By "Marxian," and is quite evidentin Assadourian,Modosdeproducci6n; byor engaged strongly influenced I referbothto scholarshipself-defined as "Marxist"and scholarship withthat tradition.U.S. readers should withthe Marxisttradition but not necessarily self-identified about are oftenless timidthantheirU.S. counterparts note,however,thatLatin Americanintellectuals and debates of "Marxist"perspectives identifying theirworkas "Marxist"and that,given the variety orthodoxy impliedlittle about intellectual thatflourished fromthe 1960s on, such self-identifications of the period and originality or creativity. Finally,I should also mentionthe obvious. The creativity does not deny that it also witnesseda plethora of cruder Marxian publications.Every perspective generatesits share of pedestrianwork,and the Marxian corner was no exception. 35 See esp. Ciro F. S. Cardoso, "Sobre los modos de producci6n coloniales de America," in colonial 135-59; C. F. S. Cardoso, "El Modo de producci6nesclavista Assadourian,Modosdeproducci6n, en America,"in ibid.,193-242; C. F. S. Cardoso, "Los Modos de producci6ncoloniales: Estado de la 90-106. The firsttwo essays were cuesti6n y perspectivate6rica," in Bartra, Modos de producci6n, published in 1973 and the third originallypresented at a panel on modes of production at the InternationalCongress of Americanistsheld in Mexico City in September 1974. Compare Jacob colonial(Sao Paulo, 1978); Hector Malave Mata, "Reflex6essobre o modo de Gorender, 0 Escravismo colonial(Rio de producdo colonial latinoamericano"(orig. 1972), rpt. in Theo Santiago, ed., America of such conceptsin other "Third World" areas in the early Janeiro, 1975), 144-80. For the influence and Political Weekly Economic 1970s,see jairus Banaji, "For a Theory of Colonial Modes of Production," (Bombay), 7 (December 23, 1972): 2498-2502. For the subsequent evolutionof Ciro F. S. Cardoso's econ6mica de Historia see Cardoso and Hector Perez Brignoli, ideas on slavery and colonial production,
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second position, compatiblewithLaclau's theoretical stance,assertedthecentrality of American "feudalism" but carefullydelineated its particular features by stressing the specifichistoricalcontextthatjoined colonial feudalismto internationaland local mercantile ventures, to capital accumulation, and to othermodes of production.One versionof thisapproach explored the colonial economyitself as a complex articulationof various modes of production, a unique "whole" context.The most successful combined of various "parts"in a specifichistorical of the example of this approach is Enrique Semo's pioneering interpretation colonial Mexican formationas a systemthat brought feudalism, "embryonic capitalism,"and "tributary despotism" (the mode of production of indigenous withthe state)intodynamicand communities subjectedto a tributary relationship A thirdpositionstoodtheinherited theoretical unequal coexistence.36 assumptions on theirheads. This view held thatto search fora dominantmode of production in colonial Latin America is misleadingbecause the cornerstoneof the colonial economywas preciselythe dominance of commercialcapital over production.In aware historicalscholarshipis to thisline of analysis,the object of theoretically explore the wayscommercialcapitalorganized and exploitedvarious relationsof production,none of which served as the basis for a fullyconstitutedmode of productionin Latin America.37
e capitalismo escraviddo America Latina, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1979), vol. 1; C. F. S. Cardoso, Agricultura, Guiana Francesae e sociedade emdreascolonais perifericas: (Petr6polis,1979); C. F. S. Cardoso, Economia Pard (1 750-1817) (Rio de Janeiro, 1984). 36 See Pablo Macera,"Feudalismo colonialamericano:El Caso de las haciendas peruanas,"orig.pub. 4 vols. (Lima, 1977), 3: 139-227; Enrique in ActaHist6rica (1971), rpt. in Macera, Trabajosde historia, 1521-1763 (Mexico City,1973); compare Roger en Mexico:Los Origenes, Semo, Historia del capitalismo Bartra, "Sobre la articulaci6nde modos de producci6n en America Latina," in Bartra, Modos de (Mexico City,1976). More crisis de unsistemafeudal 5-19; Marcello Carmagnani,Formaci6ny produccion, enla NuevaEspafiadelsigloXVIII: recentpublications along theselinesincludeClaude Morin,Michoacdn en una economfa colonial(Mexico City,1979); Ruggiero Romano, "American Crecimiento y desigualdad Historical Review,64 (February 1984): 121-34; Margaret Villanueva, Feudalism," HispanicAmerican "From Calpixqui to Corregidor: Appropriation of Women's Cotton Textile Production in Early 12 (Winter 1985): 17-40. Some of the key ideas on Colonial Mexico," Latin American Perspectives, capacityto blend servile on thegreatestate'sresilient haciendasexpounded in thisliterature-especially in pioneeringstudiesby Eric Wolfand Sidney labor withproductionforthe market-were anticipated 6 Social and Economic Studies, Mintz,"Haciendas and Plantationsin Middle Americaand the Antilles," delosinquilinos de Chile 202-1 1; Mario G6ngora,Origen ShakingEarth, (1957): 380-412; Wolf,Sonsofthe Rule: A History ofthe Indians under Spanish central (Santiago de Chile, 1960); Charles Gibson,TheAztecs 1519-1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 326-34. The best studiesof hacienda profit oftheValley ofMexico, delmafz ycrisis cyclesare Enrique Florescano,Precios mechanisms over the course of fluctuating market of Class Conflict enMexico(1708-1810) (Mexico City,1969); Brooke Larson, "Rural Rhythms agricolas 60 (August 1980): 407-30. Historical Review, in Eighteenth-Century Cochabamba," HispanicAmerican A pioneering and influential contribution to the articulationconcept was Pierre-PhilippeRey, Les critiqueis presentedin Harold Alliances desclases(Paris, 1973); an overviewand rigoroustheoretical and Essays from Economy ofModesofProduction: in Wolpe, ed., TheArticulation Wolpe, "Introduction," Society (London, 1980), 1-43. El Sistema; Jose Carlos Chiaramonte,"El 37 See Assadourian,"Modos de producci6n";Assadourian, Problema del tipo hist6ricode sociedad: Critica de sus supuestos," in Bartra, Modos de producci6n, 7-21; 107-25; Juan Carlos Garavaglia, "Introducci6n," in Assadourian, Modos de producci6n, Garavaglia, "Un Modo de producci6n subsidiario: La Organizaci6n econ6mica de las comunidades in guaranizadas durante los siglos XVII-XVIII en la formaci6nregional altoperuana-rioplatense," 161-91. For subsequent work on this issue by these authors, see Assadourian, Modos de producci6n, delsistema sobre laformaci6n Assadourian,"La Producci6nde la mercanciadinero"; Assadourian,Andlisis Garavaglia,Mercado y economfa; Chiaramonte,Formasde sociedad colonial(Mexico City,forthcoming); de la yerba mate)(Mexico City,1983). colonial(Tressiglosde historia interno y economia
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Despite the discrepanciesbetween these positions,theyshared an important common denominator: each was quite critical of Frank's vision of colonial capitalism,and by 1974 each had advanced a theoretically sophisticatedand carefully researchedalternative thatwentwellbeyondthe termsof Laclau's initial critique.Equally telling, perhaps,is thatthepioneeringworksassociatedwiththese positionscirculatedwidelyin Latin America but not in English translation.38 A fourthposition, almost certainlya minority view among Latin American intellectuals, assertedthe "capitalist" characterof thecolonial economy.But here, too, the best workswentbeyond the termsstakedout in the initialFrank-Laclau exchange. In 1973, for example, Angel Palerm argued vigorouslythat Spanish Mexico had constituted a "colonialsegment"of the capitalist mode of production. His argument, however, relied not only on demonstratingcolonial Mexico's adjustmentto, and commercialexploitationby,the world capitalisteconomybut also on a closelyreasoned and well-informed Peter critiqueof Marxisttheory.39 J. Bakewell's researchon the silvermines of Zacatecas convincedhim by 1971 of the "capitalist nature" of seventeenth-century New Spain, an economy that generally paralleled "contemporaryEuropean design."40 But he based this conclusionnot on Mexico's commercialexploitationby the world-system, whose buton carefulhistorical gripon Mexico had weakened in theseventeenth century, labor relations,and capital studyof silverproductionin Mexico-its technology, investments-and its significance for the colonial Mexican economy as a whole. It is against the backdrop of this debate that historians must gauge the of Wallerstein's significance,for Latin American historyand historiography, historical on the modernworld-system. Latin Americanshad already publications in the worldexpended great intellectual energyon theirunequal participation 1 before the of Volume of TheModern in 1974. The system publication World-System of thedebate, itsfastdevelopmentbeyondthefoundations intensity laid by Frank and Laclau, the crystallization of relatively theoreticalpositionsby sophisticated
38 I have in mind here especially Assadourian,"Integraci6ny desintegracion regionalen el espacio colonial: Un Enfoque hist6rico," orig. pub. in the Chilean journal EURE: Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Urbanos Regionales in 1972 and well knownin South Americain xerox and mimeographform before its rpt. in Lima in 1982 in El Sistema, 109-34; Assadourian,Modosde produccio'n, orig. pub. in Argentinain 1973, and in itsninthprinting by Siglo XXI (Mexico City,Buenos Aires, Madrid) as of 1982; Bartra,Modosdeproducci6n, orig. pub. in Mexico in 1975 and republishedin a Peruvian edn. in 1976; and Semo, Historia delcapitalismo, orig. pub. in 1973 in Mexico,where it had reached itstwelfth printing as of 1983, and also pub. in a Cuban editionby Casa de las Americasin 1979. The important essaysby Ciro F. S. Cardoso included in Assadourian,Modosdeproduccion, were also pub. in Brazil in 1975, in Santiago,America colonial, 61-143. It is not an exaggerationto say thatonly Ernesto Laclau's celebratedarticlecirculatedwidelyin both the United States and Latin America. 3 Angel Palerm, "JUn Modelo marxistapara la formaci6ncolonial de Mexico?" rpt. in Palerm, marxismo (Mexico City,1980), 65-88 (see also 89-145); Fernando A. Novais,Estrutura e Antropologlay dindmica do antigo sistema colonial (st'culos XVI-XVIII) (Sao Paulo, 1974), whichhas much in commonwith Williams,Capitalism and Slavery; Kalki Glausser R., "Origenes del regimende produccion vigenteen Chile," in Glausser R. and Luis Vitale,Acerca delmodo deproduccion Latina (Medellin, colonial enAmerica 1974), 5-158. Palerm'sthoughtful and relativereceptivity critiqueof theory to discussionsof colonial capitalismbear comparison withtwo importantessays by Sidney W. Mintz: "The So-Called WorldSystem:Local Initiativeand Local Response," Dialectical Anthropology, 2 (November 1977): 253-70; "Was the PlantationSlave a Proletarian?" Review, 2 (Summer 1978): 81-98; compare Mintz,Sweetness and Power:ThePlace ofSugar in ModernHistory (New York, 1985). 40 Bakewell, Silver Mining,225.
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the early to mid-1970s, the tide of criticism that labeled Frank's thesis simpleminded and theoretically naive,all perhaps contribute to explaining"the surprisinglyfaintresponse"4' to Wallerstein's volumes in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. This is not to say that Wallerstein'simportantbooks went unnoticed, We maynow be especiallyby U.S. scholarsof Latin Americaand the Caribbean.42 the of a of witnessing delayed beginnings flurry responses. But, for Latin Americansespecially, the temptation to viewWallerstein as Andre Gunder Frank in more erudite garb musthave been great.It was as ifWallerstein had appeared too late, after Latin Americans had staged their exhausting debate on the world-system and modes of production,after they had staked out innovative positionsthathandled reasonablywell the paradoxes of colonial Latin America's idiosyncratic participationin the world capitalistsystem.And the idea of Latin America's historicdependence and manipulationby an externalcapitalistforce, in theintellectual environment so much a partof lifein Latin America,so current To put itanotherway, of the 1960s and 1970s, no longerconstituted a revelation. to execute his thenovelist GabrielGarcla Marquez need not have read Wallerstein of the brilliantportrayalof dependence in El Otofto del patriarca(1975) (Autumn Patriarch):a Caribbean dictator,hounded by foreign creditors and the U.S. ambassador, finallyrelents to their pressure to export the Caribbean sea to Arizona, where the desalinated water will irrigatethe desert! This magnificent moment of high humor and insightoccurs in a work whose very language of subjectionto plundering powers and underscores the long-termcontinuity century capitalists.Garcla Marquez interspersedthe escapades of the twentieth withpassages liftedverbatimfromthe diaries of ChristopherColumbus.43
41 Halperin-Donghi, "'Dependency Theory' and Latin American Historiography,"129, whose argumenton this point is in certainrespectssimilarto mine. 42 For explicit engagement by students of Latin American or Caribbean historyof key ideas from, say,engagementof Andre Gunder Frank I (as distinct in World-System formulated byWallerstein econ6mica, see C. F. S. Cardoso and Perez, Historia or various branchesof the dependency literature), 1: 152-58; Jorge Chapa, "Wage Labor in the Periphery:Silver Mining in Colonial Mexico," Review, Holism and 22-24; JohnR. Hall, "World-System interno, 4 (Winter1981): 509-34; Garavaglia,Mercado Research Review,19 (1984): LatinAmerican Colonial Brazilian Agriculture:A CriticalCase Analysis," Mintz,"Was the Plantation";Angel Palerm,"La Formaci6n 43-69; Mintz,"So-Called World-System"; y colonial mexicana y el primersistemaecon6mico mundial" (orig. 1976), rpt.in Palerm,Antropologia "Indian Labor and New and Capitalism, marxismo, 59-66; StuartB. Schwartz, 89-124; Roseberry, Coffee World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in NortheasternBrazil," AHR, 83 (Berkeley,Calif., 1982), (February 1978): 43-79; Eric R. Wolf,Europeand thePeoplewithout History ThatNeverWere) Revolutions 21-23, 297-98; Maurice Zeitlin,The Civil Warsin Chile(or theBourgeois by studentsof the Spanish Border(Princeton,N.J., 1984), 220-37. For engagementof Wallerstein lands, see Tomas Almaguer, "InterpretingChicano History: The World-SystemApproach to 4 (Winter1981): 459-507; and David J. Weber,"Turner, the Review, Nineteenth-Century California," Boltonians,and the Borderlands,"AHR, 91 (February 1986): 81 n. 71. This listis not the productof a systematic, but I believe that it reflectswell the state of responses to exhaustive investigation, veryfewof the respondentsare Latin Americans.Second, Three pointsstand out. First, Wallerstein. a clustering of the response was ratherdelayed; not untilthe 1980s does one even begin to identify The is a qualitativematter. especiallyby Latin Americans.Third, and just as important, commentary, commentsby Latin Americanson Wallersteinlack the intensity-as measured eitherby the heat of appraisal-that were common in the response to Andre polemics or by the pursuitof a systematic Gunder Frank in the late 1960s and early 1970s. trans.GregoryRabassa (New York, 1976), Patriarch, ofthe 4 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, TheAutumn 187-88, 208, 225, 229. The genius of Garcia Marquez's humor,to a Latin American eye, lies in the thisepisode is no exception.Afterall, colonizersin Spanish America wayit is not all thatfar-fetched;
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NONETHELESS, IT WOULD BE
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A MISTAKE TO AVOID A SERIOUS EVALUATION OF
Wallerstein's work fromthe angle of Latin Americanhistory. To say that,in the historiographic and intellectual contextof Latin America,the tendencyto slight a priori or dismissWallerstein is understandableis notto saythatitis advisable.For workmerits severalreasons,Wallerstein's a more systematic assessment.First, his impressivecommand of the historical on Europe especially,makes his literature, work far too rich and deep to be brushed offlightly. Wallerstein's awareness of in the earlymodern "core" and "semiperiphery" historical complexity surpasses thatof mostworksadoptinga dependencyor world-system perspective.44 Second, Wallerstein's is the mostsystematic and forceful argumentthatthe proper unitof historical analysissince the sixteenth century is neithera state,nor a region,nor a people, but the European world-system as a whole. The challenge of this argumentis not met by ignoringit. And the argument,if correct,has enormous implications forthe wayshistorians conceptualizeand practicehistorical research on Latin America. Third, Wallersteinpresented a directand innovativeresponse to the FrankLaclau debate. His conceptualization of capitalism does not merelyrestateFrank's position,and Wallersteindid not dispute the compatibility, up to a point, of feudalismand marketactivity. To Laclau's assertionthatLatin America'sservile relations of production corresponded to the feudal mode of production, Wallersteinresponded thatthe totalcontextsurroundingparticularrelationsof productionexertsa decisiveinfluence on theirreal dynamicsand widerfunctions ("laws of motion,"fromthe standpointof Marxisttheory).For thisveryreason, capitalismis bestunderstoodnot as thereplacementof coercivelabor relationsby freewage labor but ratheras the rise of optimalcombinations of freeand coercive labor relations beneficial to the capitalistsystemas a whole. This is why, in Wallerstein's the positionof serfs view,a vastqualitativedifference distinguished in medievalEurope fromthatof sixteenth-century "serfs"subjectedto feudal-like relationsof productionimposed by the capitalist world-economy. The reasoning behind Wallerstein's replyto Laclau is worthquoting at length: thedifference between theglebserf of the MiddleAges and theslaveor worker on an encomienda insixteenth ora "serf" in[sixteenth-century] century Hispanic America, Poland, was threefold: the difference between assigning "part"of the surplusto a market and "most ofthesurplus"; assigning thedifference between production fora localmarket and a worldmarket; thedifference between theexploiting theprofits, classesspending and beingmotivated to maximize them and partially reinvest in them... As forinvolvement a capitalist world market accentuating feudalism, precisely of this so,but"feudalism" new variety. The point is that the"relations ofproduction" that define a system are the"relations of of thewholesystem, production" at thispointin timeis the European and the system
dug out, processed,and shipped offtheinsidesof greatsilvermountains to turnthewheelsof economic lifeand obsessionsin Europe. I am grateful to mycolleague in Spanish Americanliterature, Professor JillNetchinsky, Tufts University, fordrawingmyattention to Garcia M'Arquez's use of the Columbus passages. 4 See in thisregardtheinstructive comments of Zeitlin, CivilWars, 227-28 n. 15, on World-System I; compare my commentson World-System II in note 5 above.
and theWorld-System Capitalism, Feudalism,
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butnotfreelabor feature of capitalism, Freelaboris indeeda defining world-economy. used for of laborcontrol Freelaboris theform enterprises. throughout the productive whereascoercedlabor is used for less skilledworkin skilledworkin core countries areas.The combination thereof is theessenceof capitalism.45 peripheral It is for this very reason that Wallersteinconsidered "feudalism"a misleading context and referred to servile labor under concept in the sixteenth-century capitalism as "coerced cash-crop labor."46To equate Wallerstein and Frank sidestepsthisargument. supportto Wallerstein's Fourth,theCaribbean experiencelends some historical theoreticalstance on units of analysis and capitalistcombinationsof free and coercive labor. The historyof Caribbean plantation slavery complicates the modes of productionfounded on servilelabor distinction between non-capitalist and a capitalist mode of productionfoundedon freewage labor. In some extreme instances, the sugar plantationislands have seemed less like societiesin theirown right, whose material base rested on a non-capitalistmode of production "articulated" to the capitalist mode, than likeoutpostsof Europe. Their absentee partof thebourgeoisiein themetropolis, rulerslivedand investedas an integrated thathandled the includedplantation of investments enterprises and theirportfolio of labor-powerto be replaced upon death or depletion repositories slavesas finite even Eugene D. Genovese, Under thesecircumstances, byfresh Africanimports.47 One could write a scholarsquarelyaligned withDobb and Laclau, equivocated.48 offthe major sugar islands as an "extremecase" provinglittle.But extremecases do sometimes expose otherwise hidden tendencies and relationships, and thatthe U.S. South isjust as "extreme"an instance Genovese argues persuasively To considerthe Caribbean less in the comparativehistory of Americanslavery.49
8-17, I, 126-27; compare Wallerstein, CapitalistWorld-Economy, 4 Wallerstein, World-System 147-49. 46 Wallerstein, I, 91. World-System 47 Several discussionsby Sidney W. Mintz are fundamentalto considerationsof capitalismand 253-70; "Was the Plantation," in the Caribbean context:"So-Called World-System," non-capitalism and Power,55-61, 65-66, 180-86, etpassim;Review of Stanley M. Elkins' Slavery, 81-98; Sweetness see Orlando 63 (June 1961): 579-87. On earlyJamaica as a "pseudo-society," Anthropologist, American Analysis of the FirstMaroon War, 1665-1740," "Slaveryand Slave Revolts:A Sociohistorical Patterson, Americas (2d edn., Baltimore,Md., in the RebelSlave Communities in Richard Price,ed., MaroonSocieties: English PlanterClass in the 1979), 246-92; compare Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: TheRise ofthe discussion and thesophisticated 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972);James,BlackJacobins; WestIndies, ofa TheGenesis colonies in FranklinW. Knight,TheCaribbean: colonies and exploitation of settlement (New York, 1978), 56-66. The danger of the "pseudo-society"concept, of Nationalism Fragmented course, is that it mightencourage one to slightthe ways even the most extreme plantationislands witnessedthe eventualdevelopmentof a social and culturallifethatmade themmore than deformed avoided thisdanger). On the slavesas culturebuildersfromthe outpostsof Europe (Pattersonhimself see the seminal essay by Sidney W. Mintzand Richard Price, earliestmomentsof theirenslavement, (Philadelphia, 1976). Perspective Past: A Caribbean Afro-American Approach tothe An Anthropological (New York, 48 Eugene D. Genovese, The WorldtheSlaveholders Made: Two Essaysin Interpretation 1969), part 1, esp. 16-17, 22-34; compare Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits (New York, 1983), ofCapitalism RiseandExpansion inthe Property andBourgeois Capital:Slavery ofMerchant 22-23. Made, part 1. In Part2 of the same book, Genovese argued that, the Slaveholders 4 Genovese, World example of the as an ideologue, George Fitzhughis an illuminating because of his extremism precisely sometimesobscure philosophical directionin which the master class of the antebellum South was heading.
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than the equally "extreme" U.S. South or historically significant theoretically assumption.Moreover,Brazil has shared more would be to make an ethnocentric the sugar century, featureswiththeCaribbean thanmeettheeye. In thesixteenth narrowcoastal plantationswere much like "islands"of commercialexploitation, strips of effective Portuguese control surrounded by the sea and by frontier In the coffee belt of southern Brazil in the nineteenthcentury,the territory. dynamic Paulista fractionof the slaveholding class acted much as Caribbean investments combinedfreeand whose portfolios of real and prospective capitalists slave labor.50 the prior debate in Latin America, and its considerable Notwithstanding idea demands seriousand Wallerstein's versionof theworld-system sophistication, of LatinAmericaand theCaribbean. For systematic appraisal fromtheperspective historians,criticalevaluation requires that we compare case studies with the Yet to selecta case studyat general scheme proposed in TheModernWorld-System. would contribute little to thisprocess.Few will random,regardlessof significance, to an exclamationsuch as, "Aftersix yearsof carefulstudy,my listenattentively conclusion is definite:Wallerstein'smodel does not apply well to the case of sarsaparillaexportsfromSanta Rosa de la Fronterade la Oscuridad!" The closer our case studies come to the heart of the thesis,the more telling the critical evaluation. I propose thatwe focus on the silvermines and sugar plantationsof America.These twocase studieshave severaladvantages.Silverfrom early -colonial Spanish Americaand sugarfromPortugueseBraziland theCaribbean constituted the two mostimportant exportsprovidedby America to Europe during the long Not surprisingly, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesstudiedby Wallerstein. silverand sugar sectorsof Iberian Americaand the Caribbean also drew the most sustained and intense attentionof metropolitanofficials.In short, these case studies belong to the verycore (if I may appropriate the term) of Wallerstein's vision of the world-system's operation in colonial Latin America and the Caribinterpretation, bean. If thesecase studiesexpose major problemsin Wallerstein's world-system his entireparadigm is at risk.If, on the other hand, Wallerstein's relations, about the periphery, and core-periphery provides us genuine insights these insightsshould become especiallyevidentin a studyof the world-system's highestAmerican priorities. On a descriptive level, does Wallersteinprovide an adequate approximation,in the cases of silver and sugar, of the elementshe himselfconsidered essentialto his argument?In other words,does the tripartite divisionof international labor-free labor in the and "coerced and forcedlabor (slavery core, sharecroppingin the semiperiphery, themain featuresof the cash-croplabor") in theperiphery-succeed in describing labor systems associatedwithsilver On an explanatory level, and sugarproduction?
THE KEY QUESTIONS CONCERN DESCRIPTION AND EXPLANATION.
50 See the contrasts drawn betweenthe westernPaulista plantersand those of the Paraiba Valley in Viottida Costa, Da senzalaa colonia, passim;Viottida Costa, TheBrazilianEmpire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1985), 152-53, 157-59, 168-69, 222-23, 227-28.
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does Wallerstein'smethod or reasoning account convincingly for the rise of he himself In otherwords,are the main featuresof patterns consideredstrategic? production, labor,and commercein the silverand sugar sectorsbestexplained by theirfunctional value to theworld-system, thatis,as theresultof optimalsolutions imposed eitherby the world-system or by Americancapitalists respondingto the dictatesof the international market? Let us begin with silver, the legendary American export during the long sixteenthcentury.The most importantsource of American silver during this period was Potosi,the greatsilvermountainon the arid Bolivianaltiplano.5l Until recently, the conventionalinterpretation of labor in Potosi provided an almost classic illustrationof Wallerstein'sthesis. The earlier account runs along the following lines.DiscoveredforSpanish colonialpurposesin 1545, Potoslfirst drew an anarchic rush of colonial entrepreneurswho tyrannizedthe Indians they reduced to slavery.As the initialplunder of richore sputteredin the 1560s, the colonial state moved to organize Potosi's more rationalexploitation.Under the leadership of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569-1581), the technologyand relationsof silverproduction changed dramatically. Enormous sums of capital financed the building of an infrastructure of lakes, dams, aqueducts, and refineries;mercury amalgamation replaced simple smelting techniques and allowed for large-scalerefining of lower grade ore; and the infamousmitalabor a rotatingdraftof Indian laborers,compelled some 13,000 peasants to system, workin the minesat a stipulated"wage" each year.The mita "wage" was so paltry, thatit representeda compared to the purchases and debitsimposed on workers, kind of legal fiction ratherthan a means of sustenance.In earlierhistoriography, this form of "forced paid labor" constitutedthe strategiclabor relation,both because it provided the bulk of the labor force in the mines and because it The thecheap costsof productionthatunderwrote Potosi'sprosperity. established mitafixedconditionsof work,productivity, and paymentin a coercivemold that drafted underpaid laborers,drewa subsidyfromthepeasanteconomysupporting laborers,and maximizedthesurpluscapturedbysilverproducersand merchants. And theoriginaldesign of technology and labor relations engineeredin the 1570s held up well against the forcesof erosion and secular decline. The mitawas not abolished in Peru-Boliviauntil 1812.52What betterexample could one findof a
51 See Richard L. Garner,"Long-Term SilverMiningTrends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysisof Peru and Mexico," AHR, 93 (October 1988): 898-935, thisissue. 52 of mitalabor in Potosi,see Jorge Basadre, "El to the history For important early contributions delPerui (Lima, 1939), 187-203; Alberto Regimende la mita,"inJose Manuel Valega, ed., El Virreinato (Lima), 22 (1955-56): 169-82; Marie Helmer, Crespo Rodas, "La 'Mita' de Potosi,"Revistahist6rica de Historiadel Derecho,10 "Notas sobre la encomienda peruana en el siglo XVI," Revistadel Instituto (1959): 124-43; George Kubler, "The Quechua in the Colonial World," in Julian Steward, ed., D.C., 1946-59), 2: 371-73; John H. Rowe, Indians,7 vols. (Washington, Handbook ofSouthAmerican Historical Review, 37 (May 1957): HispanicAmerican "The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions," antelas leyes la realidad socialde los indigenas 172-76. Compare Manuel Vicente Villaran,Apuntes sobre 16 (April deIndias(Lima, 1964), 101-45; David L. Wiedner,"Forced Labor in Colonial Peru,"Americas, 1960): 357-83. On the prevalenceof the "classic"pictureas of the early 1970s, see the commentsof Brading and Cross,"Colonial SilverMining,"557-60; compare R. C. Padden, "Editor'sIntroduction," in Bartolome Arzans de Orsuia y Vela, Tales ofPotosi,ed. Padden, trans.Frances M. L6pez-Morillas IndianLaborin Mainland Juan Villamarinand JudithVillamarin, (Providence,R.I., 1975), xvii-xxiii;
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system thatexploited"coercedcash-croplabor"in theperiphery to servetheneeds of the European world-economy? Yet recentresearchcorroborates onlysome partsof thisearlierpicture.The new workdoes notquestionthemajorinvestments and engineering ventures to revamp thetechnology of silverproductionin the 1570s,theinadequacyof themita "wage" to supportlaborers,or the mita's economic role as a subsidyto silverproduction. But, on the question of labor, the conventionalaccount breaks down. A more subtleand well-researched history of Indian minelabor in Potosiis now available, and it recasts the mitalabor relation into a role more modest and unintended.During Potosi'sfirst threeoverlappingstagesemerge in the century, history of minelabor. In a phase lastinguntiltheearly1570s, whatwas remarkable was the dependence of European silverproducers on conditionsof work and technology definedlargely byIndians. Indian minelaborerswereeitheryanaconas, individualIndians who had cut or loosened tieswithnativeethnic-kin groups,or encomienda Indians, membersof ethnic-kin groups "entrusted"by the Crown to For the most part, the yanaconas particular Spanish colonizers (encomenderos). floatedindependently fromemployerto employerand, in effect, leased rights to mine particular veins in exchange for providing a share of the ore to their employers. Theyanaconas assumed responsibility fororganizing, provisioning, and Indians, theoretically a more paying their own work parties. The encomienda subject group, in practiceturned over the silverneeded to pay tributesto their encomenderos and kepttherestforthemselves. In thisearlyperiod,thecollaboration of the encomienda groups withtheirwould-be masterswas in any event a fragile matter that limited the Europeans' coercive powers. Moreover, the Indians controlledthe smelting of silver.Literally thousandsofguayras, smallwind ovens, dotted the greatsilvermountain,and it was throughthe Indian ore marketthat crude ore was bought,refined,and resold as silver.To acquire pure silver,the or as "shares"back to Indians.53 Spanish had to sell theore theyreceivedas tribute As Juan de Matienzo, a keen and reliable observer,noted in 1567, the Spanish could only regain a large share of refined silver indirectly, by attemptingto
ColonialSpanish America (Newark,Del., 1975), 2, 17, 19-20, 74-79. On the technicalaspects and scale of production,see Brading and Cross, "Colonial SilverMining,"547-56, 568-79; Bakewell,Minersof theRed Mountain,8-32, 137-51; Bakewell, "Registered Silver Production in the Potosi District, 1550-1735," Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 12 (1975): 67-103; Bakewell,"Technological Change in Potosi: The SilverBoom of the 1570s," ibid.,14 (1977): 60-77. Older worksstillusefulare Modesto Bargallo,La Amalgamaci6n de losminerales de'plata(Mexico City,1969); Bargall6, La Mineriay la metalurg a en la America espanoladurante la epocacolonial(Mexico City,1955), esp. 107-66; GwendolineBallantineCobb, "Potosi and Huancavelica: Economic Bases of Peru, 1545 to 1640" (Ph.D. dissertation, of California,Berkeley,1947). University 53 For recent research on social relationsin Potosi during the early years,see Assadourian, "La Produccionde la mercanciadinero,"223-92; Bakewell,Miners oftheRedMountain, 14-19, 33-60;josep M. Barnadas, "Una Polemica colonial: Potosi, 1579-1584,"Jahrbuchfiir Geschichte vonStaat,Wirtschaft undGesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 10 (1973): 16-70. For theoverallcontextof earlycolonizationin Bolivia, hist6ricos deuna sociedad colonial (La Paz, 1973). On the fragility seejosep M. Barnadas, Charcas:Origenes ofearlynative-white relations, and thelimits thisimposedon European power,see SteveJ.Stern,"The Rise and Fall of Indian-WhiteAlliances: A Regional View of 'Conquest' History," HispanicAmerican Historical 61 (August 1981): 461-9 1. A major researcheffort Review, to revampour understanding of the history of mininghas been undertakenby the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and is described in Carlos Sempat Assadourian,etal., Mineriay espacio econ6mico en losAndes, siglos XVI-XX (Lima, 1980).
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dominate the provisionof coca leaf to Potosi. Annual coca sales absorbed about a million pesos of silver, representingroughly half the value of all market purchases.54 The reorganizationof technology and labor in the 1570s ushered in a second phase, which dramatically altered productionlevels and the balance of SpanishIndian power. In thisperiod, the mitadraftindeed served as the cornerstoneof a profitable laborsystem. The mita rotations sentthousandsoflaborersto themines and refineries fora one-yearstint of poorlyremuneratedworkassignments. The draftalso facilitated the growthof a "reservearmy"of voluntary laborers,since the mitayos (Indians on mitaduty) broughtrelativeswiththem for theiryear of service,and since the mitaitself alternated"work"and "rest"cycles(theoretically, one weekworking, twoweeksresting) under wage and priceconditions thatforced "resting" mitayos to volunteerto sell theirservicesin thelabor market.In the 1570s and 1580s, "coerced cash-croplabor" workedwondersindeed. Silverproduction more than quadrupled, the peasant economysupplied workersand subsidies to the silvereconomy,and the European sectorescaped its earlier dependence on conditionsof workand smelting definedin large measure byAndean individuals and ethnic-kin windovens of the Indians, inferior to mercury groups. The guayra amalgamationexcept in cases of high-gradeore, slipped into a secondaryrole in refining.55 themita Yet,as earlyas theturnof thecentury, assumed an alteredrole in overall production.The mitadeclined in importanceas a laborrelation providingworkers to the silverminesand refineries but grewin importanceas a subsidy,or formof "rent,"that cheapened the cost of free labor. For, even as Toledo organized a state-sponsored system of forcedlabor,therearose a more spontaneoussystem of drew voluntary hiring.The supplyof minga Indians, or volunteerlaborers,at first on the temporary but a close reading greatly "reservearmies"createdbythe mita, of the evidence suggestsan increasingly permanentsupply of mingalaborers by the 1600s.56The divisionof labor tended to allot more primitive, dangerous, or mined ore to the surface,to the mitayos, repugnanttasks,such as carrying freshly and more "skilled" and highly rewarded tasks, such as ore cutting,to the volunteers.By the early seventeenthcentury,and perhaps earlier, the mingas accountedforbetter thanhalfthelaborsupplyin thePotosiminesand refineries.57 Moreover, Indian groups and individuals, and Spanish entrepreneurs,had iftheIndian workedout arrangements mita whereby quotas weredeclared fulfilled communities deliverednot laborersbut sums of moneyneeded to hire substitute
54 Juan de Matienzo,Gobierno delPerui (orig. 1567), in GuillermoLohmann Villena,ed., Travauxde l'Institut FranCaisd'EtudesAndines,11 (Paris, 1967), 132-33, 162-64; compare Assadourian, "La Producci6n de la mercancia dinero," 231-32. 55 See esp. Bakewell, Minersof theRed Mountain, 17-18, 65-120; Bakewell, "Registered Silver IndianLaborin theAndes Production";compareJeffrey A. Cole, ThePotosiMita, 1573-1700: Compulsory (Stanford,Calif., 1985), 1-19. For the interconnected and in certain respects parallel case of the Huancavelica mercurymines,see Stern,Peru'sIndian Peoples,81-89, 106-09. 56 Bakewell,Miners oftheRed Mountain,132-34. 57 See Assadourian, "La Producci6n de la mercanciadinero," 253-56; Bakewell,Miners Red ofthe Mountain,127-28; compare Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour," 101.
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The practiceprobablyaccounted forbetterthan half mingas to replace themitayos. labor intomita mita quotas as earlyas the 1630s. The conversionof mita the official mita quotas (due to populationdecrease and theIndians' rent,thedeclinein official own use of the legal system),the stubbornresistanceof Indian groups to full physical compliance with the mita,and the interestof colonial employers in theirlabor supply,and in acquiringincomessubsidizing expanding or stabilizing of themita as a provideroflabor but theirenterprises-all reduced thesignificance income,thatreduced risks as a formof rent,or tributary increaseditssignificance in the Potosi mines.58 and enhanced profits Running throughoutthis evolutionof labor was a consistentdrive by Indian of forcedlabor and of wage labor intoa relation mine laborersto convertrelations resembling sharecropping.In theearlyyears,European social controlwas fragile, Indian smelterscontrolledthe productionof refinedsilver,and Indian traders yanaconasand encomienda dominated the ore market.Under the circumstances, and theirshare in the to establisha share system, Indians did not findit difficult product constituted the primary incentive for collaboration with European mineowners. The quid pro quos inherent in such arrangements began to in the 1560s, and, notsurprisingly, thoseyearswitnessed more serious disintegrate When, in the 1570s, system.59 interest by colonizersin a rationalizedforced-labor the colonial stateconsolidatedits power, reorganizedthe mines,and institutionalized forced labor on a massive scale, Indians nonethelessasserted a rightby the piece of ore conceded laborersto a share in the ore theyproduced. The corpa, found its part of their"wage," inevitably to mingaIndians as the most attractive likemingas, to the "right" establisheda customary system. Mitayos, wayintothemita best pieces of ore encounteredduring the course of work,and the laborers sold considered theircorpapieces in the qhatu, the Indian ore market.What the mitayos sometimes labeled a "right" thatmade theirlaborsmorebearable,themineowners wage rate to be withViceroyToledo on the official "robbery." But, in negotiations the European miners themselvesconceded that such "theft"had paid mitayos, the become a permanentand grudgingly accepted practiceand thatitconstituted forits mostimportant theypressed accordingly remuneration; partof themitayos' In the case laborers.60 inclusionin the calculationof total"wages"receivedbymita of the mingas,a similar dialectic counterposed "right" and "robbery." What
58 See Bakewell,Minersof theRed Mountain,123-31, 134-35, 16 1; Cole, The PotosiMita, 32-44, 56-57, et passim;Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz,Indiosy tributos en el AltoPerui(Lima, 1978), 69-149; Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour," 102-03. Tandeter, 98-136, performedan economic analysisof mita rent for the late eighteenthcenturyand demonstratedconvincinglythat it was central to profitability in this period. For comparison withthe fate of the mitaand the evolution of labor in Huancavelica, see Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples,116-31, 140-57; compare Luis J.Basto Gir6n,Las Mitas de Huamanga y Huancavelica (Lima, 1954), 5-6, 10-13; Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Las Minas de XVI yXVII (Seville, 1949), 103, 107, 120, 144-45, 160-61, 178, 185-86, 222, Huancavelicaen lossiglos 242-43, 251-60, 266, 284-85, 285 n. 31. 59 See Bakewell, RedMountain, 36,43-59; compare Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples, 71-79; Minersofthe GuillermoLohmann Villena, "Juande Matienzo,autor del 'Gobierno del Peru' (su personalidad y su obra)," Anuariode Estudios Americanos, 22 (1965): 767-886. 60 Luis Capoche, "Relaci6ngeneraldel asientoy Villa Imperialde Potosi . . ." (orig. 1585), published in Biblioteca de Autores Espainoles, 122 (Madrid, 1959), 166-67; Assadourian, "La Producci6n de la mercancia dinero," 268-71; Bakewell,MinersoftheRed Mountain, 79, 75.
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conceded as a rightto a daily piece of good ore grew into mineownersoriginally appropriationby laborersof high-gradeores capable of being a more systematic windovens. This more aggressiveappropriationof ore, smeltedin the traditional led to a major by theiremployers, and "theft" considered a "right"by the mingas about corpa rightsand the Indian ore market in the early 1580s. controversy the qhatu. in part by eliminating Mineownershoped to roll back the corpasystem, of total percent some 25 for And no wonder. The Indian ore marketaccounted right customary themingas' century, productionof silverore. By thelate sixteenth household the involving to appropriate shares had grown into a key strategy economyas a whole. The women receivedhigh-gradeore fromtheirmen when theybroughtthemfood at midweek.The womenthenproceeded to smeltthebest (by now theguayrasectorwas run by women) or to trade ore ores in theirguayras in the qhatu.61 worked at tasks and under coercive Compared to mingalaborers,the mitayos theircapacityto enlarge their"share" in the product of pressuresthatrestricted into the forced theirlabors. They could injectan elementof share arrangements it. In the case of minga labor relationship,but they could not reallytransform sharply:"experiencehas shown thebalance of powercontrasted Indians,however, de cedula]is of a highergrade than that [indios thatthe metal mined withmitayos This observation by a well-informed worked by mingas [indiosmingados]."62 if it is to be believed,castsdoubt on the common assumptionthat contemporary, to mineowners a supplyof skilledlaborersmore attractive the mingas constituted is crude because too than rotations of "unskilled"draftlaborers.The assumption between"optimal"solutionsin low-gradeversushigh-grade it failsto distinguish minesand because itfailsto accountforthewaythatlack of labor disciplinemight in practice undermine the theoreticaladvantages of "skilled"labor. In Potosi's the mingasdeveloped a reputationas a notoriouslyindemines and refineries, to discipline,accustomedto appropriatinga share pendent labor force-difficult assertiveabout the hours and conditionsof their of ore or silveras their"right," work-that was grudginglyaccommodated by employers for lack of a better The mingas, alternative.63 especiallythosewho workedin theundergroundmines, desiredbytheir employers initially the"wage relation" did succeed in transforming
61 Capoche, "Relaci6n general," 109, 150-67, 174; Barnadas, "Una Polemica colonial," 16-70; Red Mountain, Assadourian, "La Producci6n de la mercanciadinero,"269-70; Bakewell,Minersofthe see the famous century, in the seventeenth 123, 140-41. For the continuationof smeltingin guayras beneficio en que se enseia el verdadero de losmetales, workby the Potosi priestAlvaro Alonso Barba, Arte yplata ... (1637; facs.rpt.of 1770 edn., Mexico City,1925), 130-31, 139-41 (Book 4, chaps. delosdeoro, 1, 6). regarded (69-189) is one of the mosthighly 62 Capoche, "Relaci6n general," 150. Capoche's treatise used documentson early Potosi. and frequently 63 Capoche, "Relaci6n general," 173-74; compare Antonio de Ayans, "Breve Relaci6n de los agraviosque recibenlos indios que ay desde cerca del Cuzco hasta Potosi. . ." (orig. 1596), published de Indias (Lima, 1951), 39-40, 66; Bakewell, en asuntos in Ruben Vargas Ugarte,ed., Pareceresjuridicos drafts Mita,62-63. On the preferenceforthe mita Red Mountain, 121-22; Cole, ThePotosi Miners ofthe over otherformsof labor, froma narroweconomic pointof view,in anotherAndean miningregion, see Stern,Peru'sIndian Peoples,192, 260 n. 10.
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into a "share relation."64 Indeed, sometimeduring the late seventeenth century, when Potosi's secular decline was well advanced and the mineowners'position weak, the mingas expanded theirrightto appropriate a share of product into a formof partialpossession in the mines. They establishedthe practiceof kajcheo, weekend raidsbybands of Indians who minedforthemselves theparticularly rich ore sections they had encountered during the work week. Kajcheo grew into a customary rightthatplagued the mines throughout the eighteenth The century. ore was processed not in the larger water-poweredrefineries(ingenios), kajcheo whichhandled mostof Potosi'sore, but in crude, human-poweredmills(trapiches) located in the Indian fringes of thecity. At theheightof thisactivity, in 1759, some 4,000 weekend raidersaccounted foronly 3.3 percentof the totalore processed in Potosi,but thistinyfraction of ore in turnyielded38.1 percentof totalrefined silverproduced in Potosi. The "opportunity cost"of the kajcheo to mineownersis this obvious and dramatic.For veryreason, argued Enrique Tandeter, it was the brutalintensification of thelabor regimeimposed on mitayo laborersthatmade the in Potosi's profitability crucial difference and risingsilverproductionduring the late eighteenthcentury.65
How FAR WE HAVE TRAVELED FROM the interpretation provided by Wallerstein's is bynow obvious.The paradigmappears badly misleadingon both world-system descriptiveand explanatorygrounds. During most of the long sixteenthand seventeenth fit Potosi'slabor relations centuries, poorlyin themold of a periphery international divisionof assigned "coerced cash-croplabor" bythe world-system's labor.This was thecase even thoughthecolonialstateand mineowners had indeed to making"coerced cash-croplabor" the centerpieceof directedenormous effort the labor system.Except for a brief period, however,the labor systemis best described as a fluctuating combinationof wage relations,share relations,and forced-laborrelations in which voluntaryshare relations predominated-both because such relations were the most numericallyfrequentand because their influencetended to "distort"or "twist" other labor relationsin the directionof does not deny the importanceof the mitaas "4sharecropping."66This description
64 Note that,even when employersinitially conceded a single piece of good ore per unit of work as part of the "wage," employersheld an interest in definingthe ore concession as a "wage," a fixed standard of payment according to work performed,rather than a "share," a right of fractional appropriationin the product of the workperformed.Thus the issue is complex, since the distinction between"wage" and "share" is not, strictly speaking,identicalto thatbetweenpaymentin silvercoin or unprocessed ore. The mingasessentiallytransformedore conceded as part of a "wage" into customaryrightsof appropriationand even possession in the mine and its product. 65 Enrique Tandeter, "La Producci6ncomo actividadpopular: 'ladrones de minas' en Potosi,"Nova 4 (1981): 43-65 (production figuresare on 51); Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour," Americana, 98-136. In 1778, Miguel Feijo6 de Sosa's report to Viceroy Guirior calculated that kajcheoores accounted for 53 percent of the refined silver recorded in Potosi's Banco de Rescates (official silver-purchasing bank) during the period 1773-77. Feijo6 de Sosa to Guirior,Lima, September 10, 1778, printedin Melchor de Paz, "Dialogo sobre los Sucesos variosacaecidos en este Reyno del Peru" (orig. 1786), rpt. in Luis Antonio Eguiguren, ed., Guerra separatista, 2 vols. (Lima, 1952), 2: 350-51. 6 This statement is more certainfortheminesthanthe refineries, about whichinformation is more sparse. But the refineries hardlycorroborateWallerstein's pictureeither,since the question, for the is whether"wage" or "share" relationswere more dominant. case of the refineries,
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of Potosiin the 1570s, or its a coercivelabor relationcrucialto the reorganization labor relationand as a formof "rent"subsidizing as a complementary significance because share century onward.Indeed, precisely the minesfromthelate sixteenth relationswere so dominantin the organizationof labor, and so damaging to the rent and coerced labor someof tributary institutions of entrepreneurs, profits betweengood difference the marginal provide They could greatly. mattered times and poor profits,and entrepreneurshad every reason to squeeze their mita as possible. But if scholarsmust staywithinthe descriptive privilegesas brutally labor in Potosi more on close inspection, world-system, categoriesof Wallerstein's of the "periphery." than that the "semiperiphery" of the pattern closelyresembles also farespoorly.To explain framework theworld-system In explanatory terms, or to to the world-system, in termsof theirutility the rise of share arrangments market,would miss the point American capitalistsadapting to the international of wage and forcedlabor in the directionof share relations The twisting entirely. and it bolsteredan Indian and officials, disturbedcolonial entrepreneurs greatly marketof production,consumption,and speculationthatdeveloped a lifeof its own, one not easily molded by the preferencesof the colonial state,American The colonizers'schemesto beat back share elites,or the European world-system.67 arrangementsand to controlor even eliminateindependent Indian marketing was to such attempts because theresistance partly victories, yieldedat mostfleeting so unyieldingand the risksof a concerteddrive against customarypracticesso unsettling.68 withinthe silver To set the case of Potosi in context,consider its significance economyof Spanish America as a whole. I have already pointed out its position as theleading centerof silverproductionin theearlycolonialperiod. Two further it observationsare in order. First,because Potosi's riches drew high priority, among the range of major silvercenters,the example most likelyto constitutes, corroborateWallerstein's analysis.Potosi and Huancavelica (Peru), whose mines receivedpreferential foramalgamation, providedan Americansource of mercury the statewas least In these centers, in the organizationof corvee labor. treatment labor. Elsewhere,labor systems in thevagariesof voluntary disposed to place trust in the mines moved more rapidly toward private arrangementsunassisted by centerearly corvee labor. Oruro (Bolivia), forexample, a major silver-producing in the seventeenthcentury, drew some 10,000 laborers by 1617-1618, and this
67 The most innovativework in Andean economic history has emphasized the rise of internal into a forcewitha logic of its own, sometimes markets, American markets,especiallyinter-regional more importantin commercial terms than the internationalflow of trade. See Assadourian, "La esp. 109-34, 277-321; Stern, Producci6n de la mercancia dinero," 223-92; Assadourian,El Sistema, colonial. y economia "New Directions,"134-39, 142-43; compare Garavaglia,Mercadointemno 68 The strongest to deal withthe issue came during 1579-84 organized effort and mostpolitically and is presentedin Barnadas, "Una Polemica colonial," 16-70; Capoche, "Relaci6n general," 150-67; compare Assadourian, "La Producci6n de la merCanciadinero," 254-55, 268-70. It is obvious from the sources, however,that Indian share arrangementsand marketingwas a problematicissue that of means to limitthe damagefestered beforeand afterthisperiod and thatcolonizerstrieda variety forced workersor by intensifying and independence of voluntary rights by curtailingthe customary 46-54, 84; Cole, Red Mountain, see Bakewell,Minersofthe labor in the mines. For helpfuldiscussions, The PotosiMita, 23-25, 52-53; Tandeter, "Forced and Free Labour," 104-05; compare Matienzo, Gobierrno del Peru, 16-20, 134-35; Stern,Peru'sIndian Peoples,74-75.
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made labormorescarcein Potosi.Yet itrarely competition receivedany apparently mitaquotas fromthe state,and such allotments as it received (550 mitayos) were insignificant.69 In Mexico, mostof whose best silvermineswere situatednorthof the denselypopulated Indian heartland, corveelabor playeda minorrole in silver production.In the northern mines,"coerced cash-croplabor" almostalwaystook the formof Indian or Africanslaveryand accounted forverysmall shares of the labor force. The overwhelming majority of laborers were hired Indians
(naborias).70
Second, the drive by laborers to establish customaryshare arrangements appeared notonlyin Potosibutin virtually centerof Mexico and everymajor silver Peru-Bolivia. The Mexican case is particularly well documented, and scholars agree that,formostof the colonial period, the laborers'shares (knownin Mexico as pepenasor partidos, depending on time,place, and the particularrules of ore division)in the ores theyproduced constituted a farmore important rewardthan fixed money wages. In Mexico, as in Potosi, the share systemdeveloped in the context of a notoriouslyunruly labor force whose appropriations of ore and general independence loweredthe profits of mineowners. In Mexico, as in Potosi, divertedparticularly rich ores to theircrude smeltingovens and pettyrefiners probablybenefited fromtheindependentore tradefacilitated bytheshare system. In muchof Mexico,apparently unlikePotosi,mineowners and thestateeventually rolled back the laborers' customaryshare rights.Beginning in 1766, a strong, repressive campaign, backed by militaryforce, curtailed and in some mines eliminatedthe shares of the workers. The labor system moved in the directionof "forcedpaid labor" (forinstance,round-upsof "vagrants" and "idle" laborers)or combinations of forcedand wage labor.7' David Brading'smeticulousstudyof the miningeconomyargues thatthesilver boom ofthelateeighteenth century derived in part from this successfulcampaign to discipline labor.72Before the 1760s,
69 Bakewell,Miners ofthe Red Mountain,113-14. The importanceof ore shares in the privatelabor systemthat developed in Oruro is underscored in a fine studythat appeared afterthis articlewas drafted:Ann Zulawski,"Wages, Ore Sharing,and Peasant Agriculture: Labor in Oruro's SilverMines, 1607-1720," HispanicAmerican Historical 67 (August 1987): 405-30, esp. 411-20. Review, 70 See Bakewell,Minersofthe Red Mountain,182-83;Bakewell,SilverMining; Enrique Forescano, "La Formaci6nde los trabajadoresen la epoca colonial, 1521-1700," in Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, ed., La Claseobrera en la historia deMexico, Tomo 1: De la colonia al imperio (Mexico City,1980), 72-74; Chapa, "Wage Labor," 509-34. For theeighteenth see David Brading,Miners andMerchants century, inBourbon Mexico,1736-1810 (Cambridge, 1971); Morin, Michoacan, 92-101. One of the most original and significant pointsin Bakewell's studyof Potosi is thatthe conventionalcontrastbetweenfreelabor in the Mexican mines and forcedlabor in the Andean minesis greatly overdrawn.See Minersofthe Red Mountain,179-86. 71 See Bakewell, Silver Mining,121-29, 145-46, 189, 193, 199-201, 209-10; Brading,Minersand Merchants, 147-49,157,197,233-38,274-78,282,284-91;and Chapa,"WageLabor," 523-28.Luis Chavez Orozco has publishedseveralcollections of documentsilluminating theimportant laborconflict at Real de Monte in 1766: Conflicto de trabajo conlosmineros deReal deMonte, Anio de 1766 (Mexico City, delminero 1960); La Situaci6n asalariadoen la Nueva Espana afinesdelsigloXVIII (1935; 2d edn., Mexico en Mexicodurante City,1978); Los Salariosy el trabajo el sigloXVIII (1960; 2d edn., Mexico City,1978); compare Manuel Arellano Z., ed., Primera huelga minera enReal deMonte, 1766 (Mexico City,1976); and the commentson Doris Ladd's book in note 72 below. 72 Brading,Miners andMerchants, 156-58, 274-78,284-91. A finebook by Doris Ladd, TheMaking ofa Strike: MexicanSilver Workers' inReal delMonte, Struggles 1766-1775 (Lincoln,Neb., 1988), appeared afterthisessay was drafted.In her splendid analysisof labor conflicts over share rights, Ladd argues thatthe workersof Real del Monte successfully convincingly defended theirpartidos (although new
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however,in the major minesof Mexico as wellas in Potosi,share relationsproved stubbornly difficult to resist.Mineownersmightcontrol the damage but could rarelymusterthe politicalwill needed to establishan enduring alternative. The more closely the case of silver is examined, the more limited is the world-system's power to explain either the historyof labor or the division of surplusbetweenlaborerand employer.This is not to argue forthe irrelevanceof the world-system. Afterall, Europe did establishan enormous silverproduction a colonial surplus,and sectorin Americaon termsthatprovidedtheworld-system thisaccomplishment rightfully constitutes an important chapterin the history of European capitalism.To slightthe world-system, or the impactof capitalismon Spanish America, is to ignore the obvious. The point is, however, that the world-system constitutedonly one of several great '"motorforces"that shaped the patternsof labor and economy in the periphery;it did not alwaysconstitute and the various limitations decisivecausal forceeven in sectorsof high priority; on the world-system's power help to explain the chasm, on a descriptivelevel, it purportsto illuminate.In the betweenthe world-system model and the reality or thedivision case of silver, labor system, anyadequate explanationof theshifting of the economic pie, would have to grantindependentcausal weightnot only to and assertionof the world-system and itsneeds but also to the laborers'resistance and to the rise in America of regional and inter-regional marketsand "rights," elites whose "logic" and interestsdid not always coincide with those of the world-system.73 We have, then, three great motors-the world-system, popular
rules of ore mixing reduced the quality of partidoores claimed by the workers). Brading's more when she implied(92,96-97, 120, 124) thatLadd erred,however, comprehensivestudydemonstrates that customary share rights continued to prevail in Mexico's other silver mines. Especially in zone in the late eighteenthcentury,attacksagainst Guanajuato, the most importantsilver-mining and successfully enforcedthan at Real del Monte. laborers'customaryrightswere more ruthlessly 73 The focusof thisarticle's is on labor,and an extended world-system assessmentof Wallerstein's whose own logic sometimesdiverged fromthat of analysisof American marketsand elite interests existson thispoint. For the Europe is out of place here. But a rapidlyexpanding secondaryliterature logic of the Americanmarketplacein Andean South America,see the sourcescitedin note 67 and the of Peru in theSeventeenth following:Kenneth J. Andrien, Crisisand Decline: The Viceroyalty Century Larson, "Rural sobrela formacion; (Albuquerque, N.M., 1985), esp. chap. 2; Assadourian, Andlisis in Bolivia: Transformation andAgrarian 407-30; Brooke Larson, Colonialism Rhythms of Class Conflict," 1550-1900 (Princeton, N.J.,1988); Olivia Harris,Brooke Larson, and Enrique Tandeter, Cochabamba, XVI a XX (La en losmercados social,siglos indigena surandinos: eds., Participacion Estrateg'sy reproduccion Paz, 1987); compare Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples.For worksthatilluminatethe internaldivisionsand metropolitan power in Habsburg South America the Americanization of bureaucracythatconstrained ofQuitoin the centuries,see John Leddy Phelan, TheKingdom during the sixteenthand seventeenth and Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison, Wis., 1967); Andrien,Crisis Seventeenth Bureaucratic Century: de indiosen el Periubajo los Decline; Cole, The PotosiMita; Guillermo Lohmann Villena, El Corregidor in theSpanishIndiesundertheHapsburgs Austrias (Madrid, 1957); J. H. Parry,The Sale ofPublic Office (Berkeley,Calif., 1953); Stern,Peru's Indian Peoples,93-102, 115-32; compare Stuart B. Schwartz, 50 (November 1970): American Historical and Societyin Colonial Brazil,"Hispanic "Magistracy Review, 1808-1826 (New York, 1973), chap. 1; John 715-30; John Lynch,The Spanish-American Revolutions, in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, Wis., 1978). Revolution and the King: TheComunero Leddy Phelan, ThePeople debate is the decline of Spain; forstimulating The wider imperialcontextformuch of thisliterature see Henry Kamen, "The Decline of Spain: A on the subject and orientationto its historiography, Historical Myth?"Past and Present, 81 (November 1978): 24-50, and the debate in 91 (May 1981): and Olivares Richelieu (New York, 170-85. For further of context and issues,seeJ. H. Elliott, clarification in an AgeofDecline(New Haven, Conn., 1986); TheCount-Duke TheStatesman ofOlivares: 1984); Elliott, and theHispanicWorld, 1606-1661 (Oxford, 1982); Carla Rahn JonathanI. Israel, TheDutchRepublic
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the periphery, and the mercantile and of resistanceand survivalwithin strategies Observe,in addition,that eliteinterests joined to an American"centerof gravity." affectedthe political WesternEurope's own internaldivisionsand competitions and that, withinSpanish America, coherence and will of the "world-system," thatsometimes colonial elitesand authorities pursued multiplegoals and interests divided them against themselvesdespite their shared general interestin silver production.74 of labor historical explanationthatreduces patterns Under thesecircumstances, of the capitalistworld-system is and economy in the peripheryto a reflection most for the world-system's silver, early one-dimensionaland misleading-even valued American treasure.
FOR REASONS OF SPACE AND LOGIC, my examinationof the sugar plantationsector willspare the reader the degree of detail presentedfor silver.The case of silver is sufficient to establish alone, givenitsstaturein the earlymodern world-system, are severelyflawed when that the fundamentalsof Wallerstein'sinterpretation viewed fromthe American periphery.From the narrowpoint of view of merely or "discrediting" Wallerstein, the analysisof silvermakes a detailed "affirming" redundant.From a largerpoint reviewof sugar unnecessary-or, more precisely, thecase ofsugarmerits some discussion.It would be illuminating ofview,however, to know whethersugar representsa more felicitousexample of the validityof or whether it also raises major problems for the Wallerstein'sinterpretation "sympathetic" world-system paradigm. Sugar, moreover,offersan indisputably testof the paradigm.As mentionedearlier,thegreaterCaribbean regionincludes some examples of a nearly "pure" periphery-islands of slave plantations ruthlesslymolded to serve the interestsof absentee capitalistrulers, colonial outposts utterlydependent on fresh infusions of African slaves and unable in theirown right. What to function or reproducethemselves as societies otherwise whose global betterexample could one hope to findof a capitalistworld-system of local unitsof analysisand whose characteristic impactunderminesthe validity free labor in the core and patterncombines,in a single,interlockedstructure, forced labor in the periphery? paradigm side of Wallerstein's Let us grantfromthe outsetthatthe descriptive thateventually emerged in major sugar regions applies betterto the labor systems than to thoseassociatedwithsilver.In the main,Africanslave labor produced the
Phillips, "Time and Duration: A Model fortheEconomyofEarlyModern Spain,"AHR, 92 (June1987): 531-62. 74 Wallersteinhimselfdid a masterful internalrivalrieswithinEurope in job of demonstrating I and World-System II and saw hegemonywithin the core of the capitalistworld-economy World-System as relatively rare (World-System II, 38 etpassim; Politics compare Wallerstein, ofthe World-Economy, 37-46). of his conceptualframework is not thoroughly in my What thismayimplyforthe validity scrutinized, judgment. On Spain and Portugal'sdependence on rivalEuropean powers,see theclassicessaybyStein and Stein, Colonial Heritage;compare the emphasis on Malthusian limitsin Phillips, "Time and Duration." For a specificexample of the way multiplenarrowgoals and interests could serve,within in waysthatthwartedrealizationof the general Spanish America,to divide elitesagainstthemselves interest unitingthem,see Stern,Peru'sIndian Peoples, chap. 5. Compare the sources on bureaucracy cited in note 73 above.
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sugar thatsweeteneddietsand profits in Europe. There stillremains,however, the questionof explanation.Why did African slavelabor come to playthisrole in sugar production?Does a line of explanationderived fromthe world-system provide a sufficient answer to thisquestion?The issue becomes all the more complex when in thesugar zones we note thatcolonizersactuallytriedout severallabor strategies and that African slave labor was not at the outset a foregone conclusion.75 labor in Wallerstein's scheme mayapply betterto theoutcomesthatcharacterized the sugar zones than to the processesleading to and explaining such outcomes. Recognition of theearlydiversity in sugarlabor requiresthesuspension,at least of twoentrenchednotions:thatAfrican temporarily, slavery was fromthestart the preferred, optimal,or only labor relationadaptable to large-scalesugar production; and that patternsin the Atlanticsugar islands colonized by Portugal and Spain in thefifteenth century predetermined thelabor model (African slavery) the Iberianswould laterapply to sugar productionin America.Recentscholarshipon the Atlantic sugar islandsis producinga somewhatmore differentiated pictureof labor. If it is true thatslave labor predominatedon PortugueseMadeira, it is also true that on the Spanish Canaries, European sharecroppers,especially Portuguese, appear to have constituted the bulk of the labor force in sugar.76In the well Spanish Caribbean as as PortugueseBrazil,colonizersand Crown attempted to establishthriving sugar-producing zones,and, in bothcases, Africanslave labor at first labor strategies. constituted only one of several significant The ascent of sugar in the sixteenth-century Spanish Caribbean is a storyless in the 1580s) than well known (perhaps because the boom aborted precipitously thatof Brazil, but,by the 1560s, the island of Espafiola supported several dozen thelargerones staffed sugar plantations, byseveralhundred slave laborerseach.77 By then,Africanslavery constituted thenearlyexclusivesourceof non-managerial In theearly labor. But earlier,mixedlabor relations and strategies wereimportant. 1500s, Indians as wellas blacksworkedin the primitive and sugar mills(trapiches),
7 The most careful and nuanced discussion of the varietyof labor relations linked to sugar indebtedin the productionin the Caribbean is made by SidneyW. Mintz,to whom I am considerably 85-90; 256-57,260-61; "Was thePlantation," following discussion.See his "So-Called World-System," Sweetness and Power,52-54. 76 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, theConquest: TheMakingofa ColonialSociety The Canary Islandsafter (New York, 1982), 84-86, 202. Compare the sugar-relatedcontractsin in theEarlySixteenth Century 1507-1508 (La Laguna deJuanRuiz deBerlanga, delProtocolo Manuela MarreroRodriguez,ed., Extractos the de Tenerife, 1974), esp. Contracts13, 14,61, 107, 114, 127, 185, 186, 237, 255. If read carefully, en las intensively researched studyof slaveryon the Canaries by Manuel Lobo Cabrera, La Esclavitud the impressionthat (Tenerife,1982), confirms moros y moriscos) canaruas orientales en el sigloXVI (negros, Africanslavery was of modestconsequence in productionon the islandsbeforethe 1520s and perhaps or import-export as a waystation, of theearlyCanaries mainly after.It also underscorestheimportance market,for slaves destined for Europe and America. See 141-65, 205-13, 232-37. The evidence in in thisperiod thatlaboron sugarplantations thepossibility, however, Lobo Cabrera'sworkalso suggests laborwithsmallnumbersofslavesborrowed, mayhave oftenreliedon a mixof European sharecropper loaned, rented,or owned by the sharecroppers. 77 See Lic. Juan de Echagoian, "Relaci6n de la isla Espafiola. . ." (orig. 1568), pub. in Boletin del Archivo Generalde la Naci6n (Trujillo, Dominican Republic), 4 (December 1941): 441-61, esp. 446; delnegro enSantoDomingo Sweetness andPower, 32-35, esp. 34; Carlos EstebanDeive,La Esclavitud Mintz, (1492-1844), 2 vols. (Santo Domingo, 1980), 1: 51-102; MervynRatekin,"The EarlySugar Industry in Espafiola,"Hispanic American Historical Review, 34 (February1954): 1-19. For a good overviewof the Main (Berkeley,Calif., 1966). early Spanish Caribbean, see Carl 0. Sauer, TheEarlySpanish
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in 1512, thecollapse of the Indian populationled one official of theCouncil of the Indies to propose thatthesharecropping system of the Canaries be transferred to Espafiola.78The recommendationmeshed well with the critique of SpanishAmerindianrelationsby Bartolomede Las Casas, among others,and the Crown did experiment somewhat with European-based labor in America. But this strategy proved unrealistic, and the Indian population continued its downward plunge.79Even so, the importationof Africanslave labor occurred slowlyand fitfully, hampered by vagariesof price,supply,and royalpolicy.As late as 1520, when the new governor,Rodrigo de Figueroa, superviseda major expansion of thesugar sector,his reportsto theCrownunderscoredthecontinuing significance of Indian labor. At a timewhenAfrican slaveswerein shortsupply,Figueroa used Indian labor grantsas wellas generouscreditto commit colonizersto constructing One of Figueroa's most intriguing fortynew, substantialsugar mills (ingenios). commentsreferredto Indians who had "come fromoutside of this island" and workedas naborias, an ambiguouscategory(in thecontextof the earlyCaribbean) of nativeindividuals and who who wereseparatedfromtheir originalcommunities presumablyreceiveda wage.80The role of importedIndian labor (whetherfree freenaborias nabortas, slaves,or theoretically subjected to slaveryin practice)is a topic on which useful researchand statistics are unavailable. But it is suggestive to recall that slave raiding was common in the greater Caribbean region, that Amerindianslave exportsoccasionallyreached as faras the Canaries, and thata massiveIndian slave tradetookhold in Nicaragua and Honduras in the 1520s and
1530s.81
knowfartoo little Historiansstill about earlylaborin theSpanish Caribbean. But we know enough to suggestthat the inability to subject European colonizers to and the comparativeadvansharecroppingor other peasant-basedlabor systems tages and disadvantages of imported Indian labor must loom large in the explanation of nearly complete reliance on African slavery-a form of labor replete with its own disadvantages,including heavy initialoutlays,continuing and thefearof revolt lossesdue to flight, And byan Africanmajority population.82
78 See Jose Antonio Saco, Historia de la esciavitud de la raza africana en el NuevoMundo... , 4 vols. (Havana, 1938), 1: 204; Fernandez-Armesto, Canary Islands,85 n. 81. 79 For the politicaland ideological contextof experiments with European colonizers as agriculturalists, see Lewis Hanke, TheSpanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest ofAmerica (Boston, 1949), esp. 54-71; Sauer, EarlySpanishMain, 203-06. On the related issue of European images of Indians, see AnthonyPagden, TheFall ofNaturalMan: TheAmerican Indian and theOrigins ofComparative Ethnology (New York, 1982). 8 Figueroa to Carlos I, November14,1520, in Irene Wright, ofthe Cane ed., "The Commencement Sugar Industryin America, 1519-1538 (1563)," AHR, 21 (uly 1916): 773, 772 (quotation). Compare Deive,LaEsclavitud,1: 71; Sauer, EarlySpanishMain, 201-02,212; Hugo Tolentino Dipp, Raza ehistoria enSantoDomingo: Los Origenes delprejuicio racialenAmerica (Santo Domingo, 1974), 160-6 1; FrankMoya Pons, Historiacolonialde SantoDomingo (2d edn., Santiago, Dominican Republic, 1976), 72. 81 Sauer, Early Spanish Main,passim;Fernandez-Armesto, Canary Islands,173-74; Lobo Cabrera,La Esclavitud, 141; David R. Radell, "The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua during the SixteenthCentury," in WilliamM. Denevan, ed., TheNative Americas Population ofthe in 1492 (Madison, Wis., 1976), 67-76; compare Murdo J. MacLeod, SpanishCentral America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley,Calif.,1973), 50-52; WilliamL. Sherman,Forced NativeLabor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln, Neb., 1979), 20-82. 82 On the fearof revolt, see Deive, La Esclavitud, slave revolt 2: 437-41,602-04. The first important on the island occurred in 1522.
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to explain the relativedisadvantagesand eventualfailureof European and Indian labor invariablyreturnsthe discussion to local conditions-among them,geography, disease, power, and conflict-thatmolded the options, constraints, and opportunitiesfaced by the "world-system."83 It is for the case of Portuguese Brazil thatwe enjoy the best analysisof these issues. In a fascinatingand meticulousstudy,Stuart B. Schwartz charted the shifting patternof labor in the earlysugar colony.84 Three findings are especially pertinent. First, forbetter thana half-century after theirturnto sugarin the 1530s, the Portugueseexperimentedseriously withfivelabor strategies. Four focusedon Indian labor: barter relationsto acquire native labor; outrightenslavementof Indians; "peasantization,"wherebyIndians who were settledin villages run by Jesuits could providelaboroutsidethevillages;and wage labor. Not untilthe 1580s did the labor strategy of the Portuguese sugar plantersshiftdecisivelytoward Africanslavery.Second, Schwartzpointedout that,even afterthe 1580s, Indian labor played a far more important continuingrole than once suspected. On the Engenho Sergipe,forexample, Indian slavesoutnumberedAfricans bytwoto one in 1591, and the baptismal record listed 50 percentmore Indian mothersthan Afro-Brazilianmothers during 1595-1608.85 For Bahia as a whole, Schwartz estimatedthatIndian slaves outnumberedAfricans by three to one on the sugar plantationsin the 1590s. Village Indians, some of them presumablyavailable to outnumberedslave Indians by two supplementthe workforceon the plantations, to one. In Pernambuco,the othermain sugar region,Indian slaves outnumbered theirAfricancounterparts by two to one in the mid-1580s.The overwhelmingly of Brazil's Afro-Brazilian labor forceusuallyassociatedwiththe sugar plantations Northeastdid not appear untilaround the 1630s.86 Third, the strongpreference forAfrican of Indian labor in the 1560s slavelabor tookshape in responseto a crisis and 1570s. Epidemic disease struckhard in 1562-1563, and a general Indian rebellion rocked Bahia in 1567. These local conditions,in turn, aggravated that within the Portugueseworld(a conflict politicaldisputesabout Indian slavery sometimesaligned Jesuitsand Crown against planters).The Indians' decline in raised questionsabout numbers,and theiremphaticand even violentresistance, of Indian labor and, in any event,widened the the politicaland economicviability of Indian and African labor.The widerthegap, gap betweentheexpectedbenefits the more justified the comparativelyheavy investments required to purchase
83 For an especially carefuland perceptivediscussionalong theselines fromwhich,as usual, I have 253-70, esp. 255-57, 267-68 n. 11. benefitedsubstantially, see Mintz,"So-Called World-System," 84 The argumentis presentedsuccinctly in Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations," 15-72. The pioneeringworkon SugarPlantations, 43-79, and in revisedand fullerformin Schwartz, to Africanslave labor is Alexander Marchant,FromBartertoSlavery: Indian labor and the transition ofBrazil,1500-1580 (Baltimore,Md., and Indiansin theSettlement TheEconomic Relations ofPortuguese ofthe 1942). For Portuguese-Indianrelationsas a whole, see John Hemming,Red Gold: The Conquest BrazilianIndians,1500-1760 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). 85 Schwartz, 67 (Table 3-5), 61 (Table 3-3). Mycalculationof mothersdeletesthe SugarPlantations, given in Table 3-3, because Schwartzindicatedthistermwas applied to categoryof "Negro/crioulo" Indians as well as Africanson the chapel register(ibid.,516 n. 31). 86 Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 70-71; Stuart B. Schwartz, "Colonial Brazil, c. 1580-c. 1750: vol. 2 (New History ofLatinAmerica, in Leslie Bethell,ed., TheCambridge Plantationsand Peripheries," York, 1984), 437.
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Africans.To be sure, the world-system and itsmarketsalso played an important role in such calculations,since high prices forsugar on the international market in theearly1600s increasedstill thedisparity further betweentheexpectedreturns on African versus Indian labor. But it was the earlier conjunctureof disease, violent resistance,and political conflictthat threw into doubt the continuing of Indian labor on a large scale and transformed Africanslaveryinto practicality the forthoselookingintothefuture. As Schwartz optimalstrategy remarked,"The of labor and the natureof the labor forcewere determinednot onlyin the system court at Lisbon or in the countinghousesof Amsterdamand London but also in the forestsand canefieldsof America."87 The conclusion is inescapable. Hindsight-the knowledge that Brazil's great ended up depending mainlyon Africanslave labor-has led us sugar plantations to assume a more rapid and completetransition to Africanslavery thanisjustified bythehistorical record.Not untilthe 1620s or 1630s, nearlya hundred yearsafter of Brazil,can researchers the Portugueseset out to establishsugar as themainstay justifiably slaveswereoverwhelmingly African expectto findthatsugar plantation or Afro-Brazilian.Most important,the world-system's needs and theoretically optimal labor pattern,while important, do not suffice to explain the outcome of the labor systemin the sugar plantationperiphery.At the heart of the labor question were conditions that made local Indian and European populations insufficiently exploitable,compared to Africanslave populations,forthe purpose of sugar plantationproduction.In the interplay betweentheselocal conditionsof and opportunitiesderived from the international production and the interests marketlies a more powerfulexplanationof the rise of socioeconomicstructures overwhelmingly dependent on Africanslavery. This argumentis consistent withwhat historians know about the earlyhistory of slave plantation societies in British America. From sugar in Jamaica and Barbados, to ricein South Carolina,to tobaccoin Virginia, colonizersat first relied on indenturedservant labor to produce commodities forthe international market or on a mixed labor strategy thatsometimes blurredthedistinction betweenwhite servantand blackslave. On the mainland,Indian labor was in some instancesalso significant. the European and Indian populations proved insufBut, eventually, ficiently exploitable,compared to Africanslaves importedfromafar,to serve as the foundationfor plantationproduction.The reasons for thisturnthe analysis once more to local conditionsthatshaped the productivity of labor and the limits of social control. Such conditions included not only patterns of health and but also the real and fearedeffects of popular resistance mortality and the refuge given to such resistanceby poorly controlledfrontier zones. Given these local conditions,and attractive commodityprices on the internationalmarket,elites came to centertheirstrategies on Africanslave labor. But thisoutcome occurred
87 Schwartz, SugarPlantations, 72. Equally critical, albeitfroma different theoretical perspective, of theexplanatory value of theworld-system forthecolonialBraziliancase is Hall, "World-System Holism and Colonial Brazilian Agriculture," 43-69.
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onlyover time,throughthe trialsand tribulations createdby lifein America,and at first seemed neitherobvious nor especiallyoptimal or desirable.88 One mightobject that roughlysimilaroutcomes in the plantationtropicsof Spanish, Portuguese,and BritishAmerica demonstratethe overridingforce of macro-levelcauses, in thiscase the world-system. But such an argumentviolates historicalaccuracy and commitsa logical fallacy.The argument is inaccurate because outcomes were only "roughly" similar,and obsessions with eventual outcomes may obscure vast differences along the way. The labor relationsand techniques of control in Brazil in 1580-where Indian slaves and recently constituted peasants supplied the bulk of the labor force,and where a good deal of productionreliedon sharearrangements betweenlargeplantersand smallcane growers(lavradores de cana) who owned a few slaves-differed enormouslyfrom the organizationof sugar productionand labor byitsmain Americancompetitor, slave Espafiola. Espafiola had moved more quicklyto the classic Afro-American plantation model. The argumentis also logically flawed, sinceone mayjustas easily explain roughly similar outcomes in terms of roughly similar local variables (patternsof indigenous culture,population and health trends,indigenous and European resistance to plantation labor, the proximityof frontiers)as by determination on an international level.My pointhere is one of methodand logic. marketor of the needs It is not to argue for the irrelevanceof the international to capitalism.The of a European world-system eithercapitalistor in transition prices for specificcommoditieson the international market,and the efforts by European imperial statesand merchantsto organize and benefitfrominternahad an important hand in tionaltrade in prized commodities, includingAfricans, defininglocal incentivesand the expected returnson African slave labor. An as one is as limitedand reductionist explanation that ignores the world-system derived fromthe world-system. the problem For the case of sugar, as forsilver,the more closelywe scrutinize of explanation, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that the logic and fail to account for the while important, necessitiesof the capitalistworld-system, remainsimportant evolutionof labor. In both cases, the emergingworld-system as a concept explainingAmerica'ssubjugationto mercantile exploitation.But its power to reduce the peripheryto a functionally optimal role servingthe core of
88 The literature butthebestwork mixis voluminous, on earlyBritish Americaand theservant-slave thatled to increasedreliance includingsocialconflict, and the local conditions, on earlylabor strategies The Ordealof Colonial American Freedom: Slavery, on Africanslaves is Edmund S. Morgan, American Virginia (New York, 1975). For Barbados, Jamaica,and South Carolina (the most "Caribbean" of the especiallyuseful:Dunn, Sugar Americanmainland),I have foundthe following colonieson the British Plantation: TheHistory and Slaves,esp. 59-74, 212-23; Michael Craton and James Walvin,A Jamaican of Worthy Park, 1670-1970 (Toronto, 1970), esp. 20-21, 32, 51-52; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: theStono Rebellion (New York, 1974). For a recent 1670 through in ColonialSouthCarolina from Negroes White Indenoverview,see Hilary McD. Beckles, "PlantationProductionand White Proto-Slavery: 41 (January tured Servantsand the Colonisationof the English West Indies, 1624-1645," Americas, earlystatement by Oscar Handlin and Mary 1985): 21-45; compare the pioneeringand controversial 3d ser., 7 (1950): and Mary Quarterly, F. Handlin, "Origins of the Southern Labor System,"William America,and for of Indian slavery in British significance 199-222. On the sometimesunderestimated (Englewood Cliffs, ofEarlyAmerica andBlack: ThePeoples see GaryB. Nash,Red,White, generalcontext, N.J., 1974), 111-14, 145-53.
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internationalcapitalism proves more contingent-more constrained,buffeted, and driven by the force of independent causal "motors" and by internal contradictions-than is suggestedby Wallerstein's theoretical framework. Ironically,in his specific historical analysisof sugar and labor in Volume 2, Wallerstein demonstrated his awarenessof and agreementwithmuch thathas been said. But he avoided seriousanalysisof the implications of such findings fortheoverarching framework proposed in Volume 1.89 Even on the level of description, for whichthe case of sugar fitsWallerstein's thansilver, schemebetter afarmaybe somewhatdeceiving.The appearances from term"slavery"has limiteddescriptive value, since it has been used to describe a of social and economicrelations.It arouses debate even as an abstract wide variety and theoretical To evaluatethedescriptive category.90 of theworld-system validity framework for the case of sugar thereforerequires a closer look at the specific social relationsand customs that defined the meaning of African "slavery"on American sugar plantations.For, as Sidney Mintz has argued so eloquentlyand the slaves oftencarved out, even under extremeand dehumanizing persistently, a sphereof activities conditions, and customary rights thatin certainrespectsmade them "proto-peasants." in slaves the Often, Caribbean not only grew theirown food (a concessionthatserved the interests of plantersso long as it was narrowly constrained)but also sold food to the freepopulation,invaded the sphere of petty marketing by the thousands,and controlledas much as 20 percentof the coin in regionalcirculation. Similarpatterns were known,althoughperhaps less frequent or pronounced, in the sugar regionsof Brazil. In both areas, the slaves asserted of possessionin plantation rights lands and in thefruits of theirlabors in waysthat bore some resemblanceto peasant adaptationsand thatimplicitly challengedtheir formalcondition as chattelproperty.It is this "proto-peasant"dimension that enabled plantationslaves to metamorphosequicklyintoa "reconstituted peasantry"(to use Mintz'sapt term)afteremancipation.9'The descriptive and theoretical
89 See Wallerstein, World-System II, 171-75. For moredetailedreferences, see note5 above; compare Cooper, "Africaand the World Economy," 10, 59-60 n. 36. 90Recent episodes in thescholarly debate about thefundamental meaningof "slavery" include Igor Kopytoffand Suzanne Miers, "African 'Slavery' as an Institutionof Marginality," in Miers and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, Wis., 1977), 3-81; Orlando Patterson,Slavery and SocialDeath:A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); compare FrederickCooper, "The Problemof Slaveryin AfricanStudies,"Journal ofAfrican History, 20 (1979): 103-25; Gerda Lerner, The Creation ofPatriarchy (New York, 1986), 76-100. David Brion Davis has illuminatedthe changingmeanings,symbolism, and implications of the slaveryconcept,especiallyin the contextof Westerncivilization, in severalimportant books: TheProblem ofSlavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966); The Problem ofSlavery in theAge ofRevolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); and Human Progress Slavery (New York, 1984). A sense for the varietyof slave experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean may be gained fromthe recentoverviewby Klein,African and the Slavery and its excellentbibliographical Caribbean, essay. 91 These themes run throughoutMintz'swork on the Caribbean. See "Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries,"in Michael Craton, ed., Rootsand Branches: Current in Slave Studies(Toronto, Directions 1979), 213-42; "From Plantationto Peasantriesin the Caribbean," in Mintz and Sally Price, eds., Caribbean Contours (Baltimore,Md., 1985), 127-53; Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974), part 2; "Was the Plantation," 91-96. The estimatethat20 percentof the coin in circulation was controlledby slaves is from Jamaica in the late eighteenth century (citedin ibid., 95). Compare David BarryGaspar, BondmenandRebels:A Study of Master-SlaveRelations inAntigua, withImplicationsforColonialBritishAmerica
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issues merge in the following question: how wide a "breach"in theirconditionas slaves need Afro-Americans have opened, how much like peasants and petty commodityproducers need theyhave become, before it becomes misleadingto describe plantation slavery as a capitalist labor design by, for, and of the world-system?92 The descriptive gap betweenWallerstein's international divisionof labor on the one hand and the history of labor and surplusextraction on the otheris less easily discerned in the case of sugar than in thatof silver.This is especiallytrue as one moves past the early years in the formationof labor strategies.But the gap is as an nonetheless significant, a symptom of the limits of the world-system explanatory concept or organizing principle. The explanatory prism of the of certain world-system (like all such prisms)mayblind the eye to the significance the kinds of descriptivedata. In the cases of sugar and silver,unfortunately, consequences of such blind spotsare serious.Even forlabor,a topiccentralto the whole framework, the world-system paradigm takes as its point of departure a inaccurate. descriptionthatis at best somewhatmisleading,at worstthoroughly
THE FOREGOING ANALYSES OF SILVER AND SUGAR IMPLY THAT we mustreturnto the academic drawing board. The state of affairsis even more dismal than may be apparent thus far. The failureof Wallerstein's Europe-centeredparadigm-does and alternative models fare not necessarily mean thatestablishedlinesof criticism betterupon applicationto America.As we shall see, the standardline of criticism similardescriptive fromwithin a Europe-centeredframework runs intocuriously as serious,and and theoretical in LatinAmericaand theCaribbean.Just difficulties not unrelated, the standard critiques fail to rescue and reinterpretsome of of our inheritedcategories, among Wallerstein's genuine insights about the limits in colonized America. My purpose in thisand them"feudalism"and "capitalism," the concluding section is twofold:to explain more fullywhyhistoriansmust go back to the drawingboard and question our mostbasic organizingprecepts,and to sketchthe outlinesof a new model. Along theway,I willhave occasion to single in Wallerstein's workbut to situatethemin a new context. out significant insights three main deficienciesof Let us begin by reviewingand drawingout briefly Wallerstein'smodel for Latin America and the Caribbean. First,the paradigm historical failed to describeand to explain reasonablywell itstwomostimportant "testcases," thoseof silverand sugar,even thoughcritical analysisin thisessayhas a topicrightfully testedthe model on itsown termsbyfocusingon labor patterns, centralin Wallerstein's own presentation. Second, thesetwotestcases hintat major theoreticalproblems.The analysesof silverand sugar provided above establish thatlocal conditionsof production, broadlyconceived,had centralimportancein and constraintsfaced by entrepreneurs. The specific defining the choices
(Baltimore, Md., 1985), 145-49; Schwartz,Sugar Plantations,157, 159, 252-53, 458 (but for a 241-67). colonial, view of Brazil's sugar zones, see Gorender,0 Escravismo contrasting 92 For a provocativestatement on the "breach" and its limits,see C. F. S. Cardoso, Agnicultura, 133-54. escravidao e capitalismo,
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that shaped the protechnologies,social relations,and subsistencepossibilities of capacity laboringpopulationsto resistgreater ductionprocess,and the shifting subjugation,set contoursof power and strugglethat limitedsocial controland recast what was desirable or even possible from the point of view of capital to the rise of a accumulation. In this perspective,assigningtheoreticalpriority desirableversionsof worldmarketthatspawned variedbut functionally capitalist This criticism in theperiphery mesheswell is fundamentally misleading. capitalism with the Marxist emphasis on the theoretical importance of the mode of production-the dynamic combinationof technologiesand social relationships that distinguishone kind of productive system from another-rather than feature of capitalism.A profit-oriented exchange relationsas a distinguishing further theoretical problemarises when we look more closelyat the characterof the "world market."In Spanish America especially,the miningbooms and the and incentives interests whose market urban centersgave riseto America-centered market. The weight rivaled or even dwarfed those linked to the international problemof reconciling thesediverseand sometimescompetingcentersof gravity directedfrom in theworldmarketplace withthepictureof a singleworld-economy the European core raises thorny theoretical issues as yet unresolved in Wallerstein's paradigm. of earlycolonial America as a mere variantof world Third, the interpretation misleadingif one adopts a perspectivethat-looks capitalismbecomes historically ahead to the nineteenthand twentieth centuries.Two anomalies or paradoxes from the later period would require explanation. One of these I have already mentioned. The classic picture of transitionsto capitalism, wherein earlier are replaced bywage labor and and coercivelabor strategies subsistence strategies growinginternalmarketsfor basic subsistencegoods, is recognizable in various centuries.Concepand twentieth regionsof Latin Americain the late nineteenth tualizing colonial Latin America as "capitalist"masks the rupture and strife A second paradox derives from the provoked by this great transformation.93 apparent "involution"or "regression"of some agrarian regions earlier in the dynamicin colonial Regions commercially nineteenthcenturyinto feudalism.94
that the bitterconflict over mine labor in Mexico in the eighteenthcentury 9 It is significant stemmedfromattempts of entrepreneurs to convertshare relationsinto straightforward wage labor. Given the laborers' capacityand determination to resistthe new scheme but theirinability to defeat labor reformsaltogether, the outcome increased the role of forcedpaid labor in the mines. On this specificcase, see the sources in note 71 above; fora more theoretical discussionof the limitsof free wage labor in a colonial context, and thestructural contradictions thatforcedentrepreneurs to pursue freeand coercivelabor strategies see Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples,138-57, esp. 155-57. simultaneously, 94 The phenomenon is quite well knownto students of southernAndean regions. For Cuzco, see Luis Miguel Glave and Maria Isabel Remy,Estructura agrariay vida ruralandina: Ollantaytambo entre los siglos XVIyXIX (Cuzco, 1983), 291,341-87 (esp. 369,371), 402-03,455-97 (esp. 488-89), 515-22. For Ayacucho, see Lorenzo Huertas Vallejos, "Historia de las luchas sociales de Ayacucho, 1700-1940" (unpublished manuscript,1974); Huertas Vallejos, "Pr6logo," Revistadel Archivo Departamental de 1 (1977): 52-53; Antonio Diaz Martinez,Ayacucho: Ayacucho, Hambre y esperanza (Ayacucho, 1969); compare Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples.For Cochabamba, see Larson, Colonialism and AgrarianTransformation.Compare the more general commentsin Assadourian, Minertay espacioecon6mico, 15-16; Halperin-Donghi, Historia contempordnea, 134-59, esp. 142-43; Heraclio Bonilla, "The Indian Peasantryand 'Peru' during the War with Chile," in Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and in theAndean Consciousness PeasantWorld, 18thto20thCenturies (Madison, Wis., 1987), 220-21. Wolfand
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times--characterized by considerable commodityproductionon haciendas and and reinvestment of liquid wealth obrajes (primitive textile factories), byinvestment in agrarian enterprise, and by falteringsubsistence economies allowing for ensembleof labor relationsinfusions of temporary wage labor intoa diversified turned toward greater insulation from market forces, deterioration and decapitalizationof haciendas, fuller dependence on rent and forced labor by residenthacienda peons. However we conceptualize the colonial economy,and aspectsand itscapacityto whateverrespectswe pay to itsdynamicprofit-oriented a theoretically reduce human beingsto mererepositories ofexploitedlabor-power, valid conceptualization must incorporate the historical potential of dynamic regional economies to "regress" into a pattern more closely resembling nor his critics conceptualizecapitalismas a kind feudalism.95 NeitherWallerstein of economic system or organization that responds to crisis by lapsing into feudalism.Layoffs, and reorganization, technologicalinnostrikes, bankruptcies and vation, political turmoil,welfare measures, attemptsat self-employment, or secular crisesin a undergroundeconomies-all thesewe associatewithcyclical capitalisteconomy. Reversionsto feudalismwe do not. To do so would make capitalisma concept so elasticas to border on meaninglessness. If Wallerstein's world-system runs aground on issues of substanceand theory, critical alternatives however,so do thestandardalternatives. The mostprominent intoan international and of diverseterritories dispute the notionthatintegration basis forconceptualizing profit-driven commercialsystem constitutes a sufficient The criticism is valid, but the the economy of such territories as "capitalist."96 alternativetheses proposed or implied in such critiques are not-at least not necessarily. The problemarises because we remaintoo dependent on theoretical concepts derived from the experience of WesternEurope. In this experience, to the thesisof capitalism feudalismpreceded capitalism.The naturalalternative the other key mode of slavery, becomes the thesisof feudalism(or alternatively, productionthatpreceded capitalismin the European experience).The attractive theoreticalcritique of emphasis on "commercialcapitalism"draws on Marx to in the sphere of production account far more argue firstthat transformations distinctive featuresof than commercialchanges for the historically successfully conservative insofaras the and also thatmerchantcapitalis inherently capitalism, mode of productionis concerned. Merchantcapital, in this argument,exploits
characteristics to thedistinctive 380-412, pointedprecisely Mintz'sclassic"Haciendas and Plantations," of haciendas (as compared to capitalistplantations)thatenabled themto survivethroughinvolution during depressed timesand to open outward in more dynamicwaysduring prosperous times. more to "feudalism"by Wallerstein's corresponding 9 Note thatI referhere to economic patterns own definitionof the contrastbetween the "serfdom"associated with feudalism and the "coerced World-System I, 91, 126-27. cash-croplabor" associated withcapitalism.Wallerstein, 96 The alternative approach can be traced back at least as faras the Dobb-Sweezydebate and the the more recentcycleof such discussion, classicessaybyHobsbawm citedin notes23-24 above. Within Made; the Slaveholders order) Genovese,World worksinclude (in chronological outstanding particularly Laclau, "Feudalism.and Capitalism," 19-38; Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure,"30-75; Brenner, "Origins of Capitalist Development," 25-92; and Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Fruitsof Merchant yetsteps work thatuses the mode of productionconcept seriously, significant Capital.An extremely History. Peoplewithout outside standard Europe-centeredcategories,is Wolf,Europeand the creatively
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already existing modes of production by manipulating terms of trade and but it has no interestin the dynamic harnessing them to the world-economy, The key transformation and modernization of archaic productive systems.97 intellectual innovation thataccountsfortheparadox thatarchaictechnologies and of to relations were harnessed that social production European capitalismargues archaicmodes of production(mainlyfeudalism as a system, articulated capitalism, or slavery)in America with a capitalistmode of production in Europe. In this of heterogeneous"parts"(modes of production)into a argument,the integration systemic"whole" dominated by capitalism does not imply that the internal structure and laws of each and every"part" were themselves capitalist. to Wallerstein, The Europe-centeredalternative then,leads almost"naturally" to the followingfour alternative the colonized American periphery theses: first, or archaicratherthancapitalist;second, social relations was feudal,pre-capitalist, of productionmattermore than marketsor the profit principlefor establishing of the economy; third, the capitalistor non-capitalist laws,or internaldynamics, merchant capital was both profoundlyconservativeand parasitic because it to siphoningoffa surplusfromrelatively limiteditself backward characteristically and staticmodes of production;and fourth, the most perceptivetheoretical way to interpret thecolonialeconomyin itsinternational context is throughtheconcept of articulation between archaic and capitalistmodes of production. In myview,only the second of these four thesesholds up under scrutiny, and thatmaybe rescued from problemswiththeotherthreepointto particular insights Wallersteindespite the failureof his paradigm as a whole. At bottom,Europeof capitalismdoes not centered theorycriticalof Wallerstein's conceptualization resolve any better the paradoxical featuresof the colonial economy discussed earlier (see pages 839-42). That earlier discussion pointed to several patterns to reconcilewiththe feudal thesis:the centralto colonial economiclifeyetdifficult pervasive power of mercantileinterestsand the profit-investment principle to transformregional economies, that is, to restructurethe technologies,social relations,and outputs that defined production; the destructive, partlyproletarianizingimpactofmercantile exploitation on smallproducersand theirsubsistence of dynamiceconomicsectorsto reduce human beingsto economies; the tendency of labor-power;and the rise of urban and short-term, exchangeable repositories miningcamp regionscharacterized by significant internalmarketsand somewhat freerformsof labor, includingrelationsresembling wage labor.
I agree withthe first 9 As should be clear frommyearlieranalysis, part of the twofoldargument drawnfromMarx. The second partis in myviewmoreproblematic and reductionist bothas a historical tool of analysisand as an interpretation of Marx. Marx's discussionof commercialcapital in Capital, liketheentirediscussionof capitalism, slidesback and forth betweentwolevelsof analysis:a theoretical leveldesigned to showthattheinner"secret"ofcapitalaccumulationrestsnoton commercialexchange and gouging as such but on the distinctive social relations and forces of production that enable even if theypay a "fair" marketprice for labor-power;and a entrepreneursto accumulate profits historicallevel of analysis that looks at capitalism as it actually emerged and existed and that of markets, acknowledgesmore readilythe historical importance merchantcapital,and colonialismin the creationand expansion of capitalism. Those who drawon Marx to stresstheinherentconservatism of merchantcapital seem to me to have conflatedthese twolevelsof analysisand to have sidestepped Marx's own unresolved ambiguities.
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To these general points may now be added a further "anomaly." The technologiesand workpatterns associatedwithsilverand sugar productionoften gave theseleading sectorsa precociously "industrial" character.Independentlyof one another,the most distinguished studentsof silverand sugar all seem struck by the emphatically"industrial" aspects of production: the massive scale of investments in machinery and engineeringworks,the complexity of the division of labor and the alienationof laborersfromthe productionprocess,the intensely regimented and time-conscious work rhythms normally associated with nineteenth-century factories.98 The "industrial"aspects of the silverand sugar sectors would matter little if these constitutedsecondary appendages to the colonial economy at large or if theyconstituted "enclaves" sharplydemarcated fromthe restof the economy.Alas, history is not so cooperative.Silverand sugar were centralto the organizationof regionaland supra-regional economic spaces, and silver,especially,exerted profound secondaryconsequences even in distant agrarian hinterlands.99 In short,criticalalternatives wedded to the rise of feudalismor other archaic modes of productionin colonial America are grosslymisleading,and theygloss over "anomalies" central to colonial economic life as a whole. The notion of articulationof heterogenous modes of productionin a wider economic system remains theoretically promising but is weakened if the dominant "mode" in America is assumed to be "feudalism."'00 In the end, Wallersteinhomed in on two specific worthunderscoring insights despite the problems with the general interpretation.First, under colonial whichallied merchant conditions, capitalwithimperialpoliticalpower in the fluid or "outpost," environment of a frontier merchant capitalcould exertan aggressive, organizing,and transformative impact on technologiesand social relations of in the colonized peripheryis at odds with production.This historicalpossibility of merchant "classic"Marxian viewsof theconservatism capital. It cautionsus not to assume too rigidly,under colonial conditions,that local social relations of production constitutethe point of departure for analyzing the trajectoryof merchantcapital or its impact on methods of production.Second, the colonial problem exposes the limited historicalapplicabilityof our Europe-centered was rightto reject Wallerstein categories,especially"feudalism"and "capitalism." "feudalism"as a meaningfulcategoryforunderstandingperipheriesdrawn into
98 See Bakewell, RedMountain, 13, 137-40, 152-54; Bradingand Cross,"Colonial Silver Miners ofthe 142-45, 152-55. and Power,46-52; Schwartz,Sugar Plantations, Mining,"549-51; Mintz,Sweetness 99 See Assadourian,El Sistema, 109-221, 277-321; Stern,"New Directions,"134-40; Stern,Peru's 239-41; SugarPlantations, IndianPeoples, 47-50, 74-75, 80-113, 138-61, 185-86; compare Schwartz, and the commentin note 100 below. 100 It is quite instructive thatscholarswho stressthe predominanceof feudalismin colonial Spanish aware of the complicating"capitalist"featuresevidentin the silver America but are simultaneously byseeingtheminesas a kindof economicappendage or enclave whose mineshandle the contradiction agrariansociety.For a prominentearlyexample secondaryeffects were minorin an overwhelmingly statement econ6mica y social.Modernized into a theoretical fromMexico, see Chavez Orozco, Historia on the articulation of modes of production,the same approach leads to the conclusionthatcapitalism by a dominantfeudal model of production.A prominentand was "embryonic," joined to and stifled del capitalismo. sophisticatedexample is Semo, Historia
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worldof the sixteenth the radicallytransformed century. He was less illuminating into when he responded to our limited conceptualchoicesbyrevising "capitalism" a concept so elasticand omnipotentthatthe resultssimplyadd to the theoretical of labor in the confusionand fail to describe or explain successfully the history periphery.But at least he understood the nature of the conceptual dilemma. A thirdinsight, thoughone not intendedby Wallerstein, may be derived from in his insistencethatthe underlying logic of an economymay be rooted precisely its tendencyto combine diverserelationsof productioninto an optimal package. In Wallerstein's vision,thisis a definingfeatureof the capitalistworld-economy as a whole and explains why forced labor in the periphery, intermediate in the semiperiphery, and freelabor in the core are unifiedin the arrangements single logic of capitalism.We have already seen thatthe scheme breaks down in the American periphery.The irony,however,is that the principle ascribed by Wallersteinto the world-economy as a whole comes closer to definingeconomic within theAmericanperiphery. patterns Repeatedlyin colonialLatin Americaand the Caribbean, one encountersa shifting combinationof heterogenousrelations of production in a pragmatic package. This heterogeneity of labor relations occurred withinsingle unitsof productionand applied to the bulk of low-status physicallaborers(not merelyto the more obvious and commonplace distinctions between supervisoryemployees and skilled experts on the one hand and "unskilled"physical laborerson theother).Again aridagain, scholarsof themines, of colonial America find that entrepreneurs haciendas, plantations,and obrajes fused a diversearrayof labor relations, includingapproximationsof wage labor, complicatedtenancy, share and debt-credit arrangements, and forcedlabor drafts into a single productiveprocess.'0' One mightgo so far as to assert and slavery, that what is distinctive about the economic logic of colonial and neo-colonial situationsis preciselythe entrepreneurial tendencyto combine variegatedlabor strategies-considered somewhatmore antithetical, mutuallyexclusive,and se101 This characteristic is so familiar empirically thatalmostany colonial scholarwho has researched the documentsof particularenterprises willrecognizeit. Especiallyvaluable on thispoint is Macera, "Feudalismo colonial," 171-204. For a fullersamplingof researchon Mexico and Peru demonstrating varied labor relationseven on agrarian enterpriseswhose labor regimesmightseem less internally heterogeneousfromafar,see the following: D. A. Brading,Haciendasand Ranchos in the MexicanBajio: Le6n,1700-1860 (New York, 1978), 31-38,75-76,95-114; Nicolas P. Cushner,Lordsofthe Land: Sugar, Wine,and JesuitEstatesof Coastal Peru, 1600-1767 (Albany, N.Y., 1980), 81-86, 89-91; Enrique Florescano,ed., Haciendas,latifundios yplantaciones enAme'rica Latina (Mexico City,1975), passim;Glave and Remy,Estructura agrariay vida rural,133-38, 341-69; Herman W. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in ColonialMexico:Santa Lucia, 1576-1767 (Stanford,Calif., 1980), 222-36, 246-54, 318-23, 326-30; CherylEnglish Martin,Rural Society in ColonialMorelos(Albuquerque, N.M., 1985), 121-53; Morin, Michoacdn, 257-83;Jorge Polo yla Borda G., LaHaciendaPachachaca:Autobastecimientoy comercializaci6n (segundamitad delsigloXVIII) (Lima, 1976), 50-69; Stern,Peru'sIndian Peoples,141-46, 155-57, 191; JohnTutino, "Hacienda Social Relationsin Mexico: The Chalco Region in the Era of Independence," HispanicAmerican Historical Review, 55 (August 1975): 496-528; Eric Van Young, Haciendaand Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico:TheRural Economy ofthe GuadalajaraRegion,1675-1820 (Berkeley,Calif., 1981), 236-64; compare Van Young, "Mexican Rural Historysince Chevalier:The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," LatinAmerican Research Review, 18 (1983): 23-24. The literature on labor has also establishedthatCharles Gibson'scriticisms of the classicimage of debt peonage were correct.See Aztecs underSpanishRule, 252-56; Bauer, "Rural Workersin Spanish America,"34-63.
871
quential in a Europe-centeredcontext-into a unifiedpackage.'02 The material to insure to maximizeprofits, werethreefold: such a strategy inspiring motivations labor of laborderivedfromanyparticular in thesupplyor benefits againstsetbacks of "divide socialcontrolthrougha structure and perhaps also to facilitate strategy, may speak not onlyto the the labor force.This "law of diversity" and rule" within to colonial life particular and contradictions opportunities, materialuncertainties, ethos,and politicalculturethatdifferentiated in morality, but also to distinctions colonyfrommetropolis.In any event,it adds yetanother"anomaly"to those that to Wallerstein. make questionable the standard Europe-centeredalternatives
a new model,or at theleast GREAT CHALLENGE HISTORIANS FACE is to construct to render meaningfuland explicable penetrating a new perspective, sufficiently the apparent paradoxes and anomalies of colonial economic life. This new approach needs to incorporate the genuine insightsof currentlycontending but it must also succeed in incorporating the models and interpretations, yetcentral straitjacket bya Europe-centered neglectedor trivialized idiosyncracies of colonized America.This dauntingtaskis beyond to the socioeconomichistory the scope of thisessayand the currentcompetenceof itsauthor. At this juncture, historical analysis, points.On thelevelof specific I can onlypropose some starting earlier-the European we willneed to take seriouslyall three"motors"identified of resistanceand survivalwithinthe periphery, popular strategies world-system, It and the mercantileand elite interests joined to American"centersof gravity." interplaybetween these three grand motors,and in the is in the contradictory internalto each of them,thatwe will findkeysto a divisionsand contradictions of the structures, deeper understanding changes, and drivingforcesof colonial economic life.'03On the level of theoryand basic categories,we would do well to
THE
102 See Stern,Peru'sIndianPeoples, 155-57; compare Cuauhtemoc Velasco Avila,"Labour Relations in Mining:Real de Monte and Pachuca, 1824-74," in Thomas Greavesand WilliamCulver,eds.,Miners of sugar exceptionis thetendency andMiningintheAmericas (Manchester,1985), 47-67. One important duringboom periods.But such cases wererarerthanoften slavery on African to relymainly plantations 260-61. It is assumed, and the contrastmay be one of degree. See Mintz,"So-Called World-System," is misleadingand also possible,of course, thatthe conventionalreading of labor in European history of the kind discussed here were that,during a "long" earlymodern period, variegatedlabor patterns far more prevalent in Western Europe than usually assumed. The literature on "(protowith the in Europe perhaps points in this directionand resonates interestingly industrialization" comparisonof the informedand systematic colonial Latin American experience, but a theoretically literature withresearchon labor and economyin colonial Latin of the proto-industrialization findings America lies beyond the scope of this essay. I hope to take up the matterin a future essay. On The First Phase of the see Franklin Mendels, "Proto-Industrialization: "proto-industrialization," 32 (1972): 241-61; Hans Medick, "The IndustrializationProcess," Journal of EconomicHistory, Family Economy: The StructuralFunction of Household and Family during the Proto-Industrial 3 (October 1976): 291-315; TransitionfromPeasant Societyto IndustrialCapitalism,"Social History, Rural Industrialization: before Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and JurgenSchlumbohm,Industrialization Landlords andMerchant (New York and Paris, 1981); Kriedte,Peasants, ofCapitalism in the Genesis Industry Analysis,"23-26. and DuPlessis, "PartialTransitionto World-Systems Capitalists; 103 Beyond a certainpoint,such a methodcalls on the historian and political to merge social history economy perspectives.To arrive at a deep understanding,for example, of "popular strategiesof resistanceand survival"in a colonial context may require a well-rounded considerationof social gender, or religion more commonly relationsand cultural ideals, raising topics such as ethnicity, unansweredquestionsabout the role the pertinent assigned to "social history." Consider,forinstance,
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largelyneglectedin the United States, the earlierinnovations, examine carefully of our Latin American colleagues. Particularlysignificantare two of their ofcolonialmodes of production a theory thatwe considerseriously proposals: first, thatthe foundationof the and, second, thatwe consider seriouslythe possibility colonial economywas the dominance of commercialcapital over productionand the correspondingabsence of a consolidated mode of production in the usual sense.'04 In the encounter between historyand theory,our Latin American colleagues have in thisinstanceled the way.We should engage theirworkand, to of the peripheryinto the core of our put it another way, move the intellectuals discussion.
in thestructure and evolutionof thePotosisilver economy of genderrelations and household strategies suggestedby the earlierobservation(p. 853 above) thatwomen labored as the smeltersand vendors For more contemporary examples of ores appropriatedbymale minga laborersin sharearrangements. illustrating thismethodologicalpoint for the case of the Bolivian tin mines,which replaced silverin preeminence in twentieth-century Bolivia, see June Nash, We Eat theMines and theMines Eat Us: inBolivianTinMines(New York, 1979); DomitilaBarriosde Chungara, with Dependency andExploitation trans.VictoriaOrtiz Moemma Viezzer,LetMeSpeak!Testimony ofDomitila, A Woman oftheBolivianMines, (New York, 1978); GuillermoDelgado P., "IndustrialStagnationand Women's StrategiesforSurvival at the Siglo XX and Uncia Mines," in Greaves and Culver,Minersand Mining,162-70. 104 A thirdinnovation, the proposal thatwe conceptualizethe colonial economyas a complex and of various modes of productioninto a unique "whole," is more well historically specificarticulation and draw known.But ittoo has largelyescaped the rigorouscritical engagementneeded to test,refine, out its promise or limitations. withthe mode of I am well aware that,by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a certaindisillusionment on the left,includingLatin Americans,who had productionconcept set in among some intellectuals once used the conceptmore readily.Indeed, I would argue that,in partbecause the conceptpassed out of scholarlyfashion,theoreticalinnovationson colonial Latin America proposed in the early 1970s generally escaped the sustained criticaland empirical appraisal they deserved. The shiftof the winds was linked to a broader disquietabout general theoryand about Marxism derived intellectual schemesand categoriesthat fromdissatisfaction bothwithclassicalorthodoxy and withthe theoretical proliferatedin the 1960s and 1970s. The old universal theories were replaced not by conceptual schemesand politicalagendas breakthroughs commandingbroad assentbutbya plethoraoftheoretical whose rapid multiplication and varied quality reinforceda sense of intellectualfragmentation and limitedcomprehension.In myview,the perceived"crisisof theorv"was a kind of mirrorimage of the as well as Marxistscholarship.Among and it affectednon-Marxist perceived "explosion of theory," to thissoberingrethinking intellectuals on the left, ErnestoLaclau himself has contributed importantly of theory. See Laclau, Politics andIdeology inMarxist (London, 1977); Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Theory and Socialist Towards a Radical Democratic Politics Hegemony Strategy: (London, 1985).

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Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean Author(s): Steve J.

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

Laclau, "Feudalism and Capitalism,"35.

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

and theWorld-System Capitalism, Feudalism,

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

and theWorld-System Capitalism, Feudalism,

and theWorld-System Capitalism, Feudalism,

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

Feudalism, Capitalism, and theWorld-System

and theWorld-System Feudalism, Capitalism,

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