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Unearthing the economy of bondage

PJM

EmpireofCotton:AGlobalHistory
Sven Beckert
Vintage, $17.95 (paper)
TheHalfHasNeverBeenTold:SlaveryandtheMakingofAmericanCapitalism
Edward E. Baptist
Basic Books, $35 (cloth)
RiverofDarkDreams:SlaveryandEmpireintheCottonKingdom
Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press, $35 (cloth)
ThePriceofEmancipation:SlaveOwnership,CompensationandBritishSocietyattheEnd
ofSlavery
Nicholas Draper
Cambridge University Press, $34.99 (paper)

A decade before his assassination at the hands of a nationalist in 1914, French socialist Jean
Jaurs completed a historical work that radically changed the study of the French Revolution.
Where others had focused on disputes over politics and political ideology, Jaurss fourvolume HistoiresocialistedelaRvolutionfranaisetook as its subject the transformations
wrought by an emergent capitalism, foregrounding irruptions within the French economy.
Through a Marxist lens, Jaurs emphasized the conflict between the ancien rgime and the
newly empowered bourgeoisie and excavated from the archives of the revolution the
struggles of French workers and peasants.
Though discounted by later scholars anxious to distance themselves from Jaurss Marxism,
the Histoiresocialiste was history from below avantlalettre. Its analytical concerns also
anticipated those of a historical subfieldthe history of capitalismnow taking off on this
side of the Atlantic. An energetic startup within the U.S. historical profession, the history of
capitalism has grown rapidly over the past few years and won media attention most
academics only dream of. Its popularity was sparked in part by the 2008 financial crisis,
which renewed doubt about capitalisms promises, and it emerges in the long wake of the
demise of identity politics and the cultural turn within U.S. scholarship. It looks beyond
supposedly narrow, sectarian concerns with particular groups left out of mainstream history
women and workers, peasants and slaves, blacks and gays. Some scholars have indeed
argued for the capacious, democratic, and inclusive capabilities of this new field; others have
been at pains to demonstrate that it is not a recapitulation of social history centered on the
white male worker or business history fetishizing the white male capitalist. Even so, its
institutional and ideological biases often shine through in its favored subjects and its
anointed practitioners.
Jaurss vision of economic questions as the primary engine of social and political change, his
linking of capitalism with modernity, his casting of elites as historical actorsall these
concerns resurface in recent histories of capitalism. But perhaps most striking about the field
is the way it both rehashes and disavows the radical intellectual tradition to which Jaurs
belongs, one that derives historical questions as much from political commitments as from
academic concerns. Jaurs shared this tradition with black writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois
and the Trinidadian theorist and historian C. L. R. James, who wrote from within what
Cedric Robinson has called the black radical tradition. Their interest in capitalisms history
was not merely academic: it was an integral part of the modern project of emancipation.
Therein, perhaps, lies the problem. How does scholarship suffer when it disowns the radical
originsand usesof its inquiries?

The new history of capitalisms disavowal of radical scholarship is clearest in its treatments of
slavery, which, for more than a century, has been a principal concern of scholars within the
radical tradition. Jaurs, for instance, drew a line connecting the profits from the slave trade
to the growth of the industries and ideologies of capitalism.
C. L. R. James reprised these claims in TheBlackJacobins:ToussaintLOuvertureandthe
SanDomingoRevolution(1938). The book placed both Caribbean and European masses at
the center of the Haitian Revolution, using it as a model for what James saw as the coming
movement for African decolonization and sovereignty. James chastised Jaurs for
insufficient attention to French colonialism, but still he cited from a twenty-two-page section
of Histoiresocialiste to demonstrate the economic importance of the Caribbean colonies to
Frances early industrial growth. James quoted from Jaurs a statement capturing the
apparent historical contradiction through which African enslavement led to European
freedom: Sad irony of human history. . . . The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by
the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to
human emancipation. A similar provocation appeared in Jamess AHistoryofNegroRevolt,
a short monograph on global black resistance also published in 1938: Negro slavery seemed
the very basis of American capitalism.
Such sad ironies were given fuller historical form by Jamess ambitious former pupil Eric
Williams, who would become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams
defended his Oxford dissertation in 1938; it was published as CapitalismandSlaverysix
years later.Although, as Caribbean political philosopher Aaron Kamugisha has described,
James and Williams later diverged on political matters, Williams credited BlackJacobins for
influencing his claim that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire was a result of
economic rationalizationsnot humanitarianism and moral persuasion. Williams also
asserted that the capital accumulation wrought from slavery financed the domestic expansion
of agriculture, the growth of banking institutions and insurance firms, and the development
of Englands early industrial infrastructure.

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While James and Williams were writing in Europe, Du Bois was coming to similar
conclusions concerning the impact and nature of slavery in the United States. His Black
ReconstructioninAmerica:AnEssayTowardaHistoryofthePartWhichBlackFolk
PlayedintheAttempttoReconstructDemocracyinAmerica,18601880, published in 1935,
centered African Americans within the drama and aftermath of the Civil War. For Du Bois,
black freedom was not the gift of white benevolence; emancipation came about in large part
through the resistance and struggles of black people. Recasting the slave as a worker, Du Bois
demonstrated continuities between the organization of American slavery and the
consolidation of American capitalism while dismissing beliefs, prevalent at the time, that the
failure of Reconstruction was due to black ignorance, dishonesty, extravagance, laziness, and,
ultimately, congenital inability for self-governance and a lack of preparation for freedomall
of which he deemed the propaganda of history. As Du Bois was well aware, Black
Reconstruction was a full-out assault on the U.S. historical profession and the position of
African Americans within American history.
These provocations were met with both doubt and anger. CapitalismandSlavery, while the
subject of much debate, was often dismissed by historians, and Williams and Du Bois
remained on the margins of professional scholarship (though it must be acknowledged that
Williamss real ambitions were in politics, despite the decade he spent at Howard University).
The segregation of higher education meant that Du Bois was marginalized within the U.S.
academy, and it took more than half a century for the basic premises of BlackReconstruction
to garner serious consideration; today, eighty years after its publication, it is invoked but not
read, cited but not mined, and noted but not engaged. In contemporary history of capitalism,
the work, ideas, and arguments of Williams, Du Bois, and other radical scholars are
selectively cited, completely ignored, or borrowed without acknowledgment of either the
authors or the political-economic contexts in which they were produced and to which they
responded. New books by U.S. historians Sven Beckert and Edward Baptist exemplify this
trend.

Beckerts EmpireofCotton:AGlobalHistoryiseasily the most celebrated of recent work in

the history of capitalism. It is a remarkable book in many ways. Writing in the genre of
commodity studies pioneered by Harold Inniss global histories of cod and Fernando Ortizs
and Sidney Mintzs research on sugar, Beckert retells the history of the modern world
through the political economy of cotton. The global in his subtitle is not mere pretense:

though he focuses on the expansion, rise, and fall of European domination of cotton
production, his history stretches back thousands of years to the earliest attempts at
domestication in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and China and the development of
spinning and weaving in South Asia, Central America, and eastern Africa. He describes the
growth of cotton cultivation and its early manufacturing technology and the shift from
household to commercial production.
Though for Beckert the Islamic world provides but a historical step to the European age,
EmpireofCotton stresses that cotton and capitalism were aggressively global from the
beginning, as the search for markets and the quest for raw materials and labor transcended
boundaries of land and sea. He supports this claim through an impressive mining of
transnational archives and an array of secondary sources. Without sacrificing attention to
local detail, whether that of Mexico or India, Western Europe or West Africa, Empireof
Cotton narrates the multiple and simultaneous processes of historical transformation and
conflict across the globe.
At the center of the book is an argument about what Beckert calls war capitalism. By this
term Beckert denotes the bloody preamble to the emergence of mature capitalism, an early
process of rawness and violence: wealth accumulation marked by African enslavement, the
expropriation of aboriginal lands, coercion and killing as means of labor control and
territorial conquest, and the rise of an imperial state whose laws and policies served an
emergent capitalist class. We usually think of capitalism, at least the globalized, massproduction type that we recognize today, as emerging around 1780 with the Industrial
Revolution. But war capitalism, which began to develop in the sixteenth century, came long
before machines and factories. He continues, When we think of capitalism, we think of
wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery.
We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based
as often as not on violence and bodily coercion.Beckert describes this stage as an important
but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism whose history has been
erase[d] by those craving a nobler, cleaner account.
Yet who is this disembodied, deracialized we? Certainly many black historians do not hold
such a view of capitalism. Perhaps Beckert had in mind the creation stories of scholars such
as Jared Diamond, but it is misleading simply to say that capitalisms illiberal origins have
often gone unrecognizedand to take credit for correcting cheerier accountswithout
probing the basis of such erasure. It is no coincidence that the many intellectuals who have

recognized the coercive violence of early capitalism have often put their scholarship to
political ends, yet these figures are left out of Beckerts narrative. He may have coined the
phrase war capitalism, and he does cite Williams and James in a few footnotes, but he fails
to acknowledge outright in the body of his text the radical origins of the concept. The notion
already appears fully formed in the final chapters of the first volume of Marxs Capital under
the guise of primitive accumulation:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of
the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of
Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production.

These idyllic proceedings, Marx continues, are the chief momenta of primitive
accumulation. So too were the rise of the factory system and the deployment of new legal
regimes that dispossessed peasants and workers of their land and labor. Geographer David
Harvey later described such processes as accumulation by dispossession. It is mystifying to
find major elisions such as these in a book otherwise so elegantly crafted, but it speaks to a
pattern of anxious engagement with radical historiography. The result is an oddly ahistorical
version of historical inquiry, one that ignores the racialized and politicized contexts in which
academic questions and concepts emerge.
My point is not to undermine Beckerts account of capitalism and slavery by aggregating the
names of scholars or books he didnt cite, for his claims, though hardly original, are well
argued and convincing. Nor do I mean to fetishize the radical as an abstract and ill-defined
oppositional force within a subterranean historical practice. But historiographical neglect,
erasure, and absence only further marginalize already marginalized subfields and the
intellectual communities that have nurtured them. What methodological limitations are
brought on by such neglect? What do we lose when we disown engaged scholarship? How
might a serious reading of Du Boiss BlackReconstruction and the tradition of radical inquiry
it represents have advanced both EmpireofCotton and our understanding of the history of
capitalism more generally? And what politics and engagements are concealed through the
pretenses of scholarly disinterestedness? Certain scholarly questions, perhaps, can only be
asked from the outside, and unless they succumb to the suffocating tyranny of the
mainstream, those on the margins of history and historiography are forced to consider new
archives, new methods, new approaches. For Du Bois and others within the black radical

tradition, this has meant stretching Marxism, as Frantz Fanon observed on the colonial
question, to apprehend the indelibly racial nature of capitalism.
Mirroring Beckerts deracialized historiography is his evasion of the role of race, racism, and
white supremacy in the emergence and organization of the empire of cotton. While Beckert
emphasizes the role of slavery in the rise of capitalism, he ignores the role of race in the
emergence of both. Yet from the outset, his descriptions of the global hierarchy of labor and
production that mark modern capitalism are clearly raced: his opening scene depicts white
men in Manchester chuffing over the scope and profitability of their global industry. Beckert
does not consider the significance of the whiteness of his white men; their race appears
incidental.
Moreover, in a powerfully argued chapter, Beckert shows how the Civil War provoked a
global crisis of cotton capitalism as it forced a desperate search for new land and new
sources of labor in India, Egypt, and Argentina. But the war, and emancipation, were as much
about the status of blacks in modern society as they were about a mode of economic
organization. Indeed, Beckert uses a long quotation from a December 1865 essay in the
London Economist that laments the fact of black emancipation. For the Economist, its
repercussions threatened not only the economicorder,but the racial order; white capitalists
would no longer be able to draw on a pliant pool of dark labourers to do their bidding,
under conditions of their choosing, and at prices they imposed. The Economist makes clear
that, for the capitalists of the time, the race question was not, to borrow from James,
subsidiary to the class question. These men of business understood that the protection of
their economic interests was tied to the protection of their interests as white men. Race and
capital were intertwined.
Similarly, more than once Beckert points out that white capitalists often saw black
emancipation in the United States as another Saint-Domingueanother assertion of black
sovereigntybut fails to draw out and analyze in detail the meaning of that analogy as
signifying a war of races, as one cotton worker interpreted it. In Beckerts telling, race and
racism are only marginal concerns, even as we continue to experience their legacies today.
They are explicitly invoked only a few times in Empires several hundred pages. In its
deracialization of so much evidence with obvious racial significance, the book unwittingly
shows that war capitalism, if we are to call it that, was undeniably a racial projectin effect,
what Cedric Robinson has called racial capitalism.

At the heart of Edward Baptists TheHalfHasNeverBeenTold is the claim that the profits
and accumulations of slavery contributed to the formation of contemporary capitalism. Like
Beckert, he turns to the history of the cotton industry, though he focuses on the United States
from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War. Yet if Beckerts story is the world the slave
owners made, Baptists is the world made by the slave. Enslaved African Americans built the
modern United States, he declares, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both
obvious and hidden. We know the claim that enslaved African Americans built the modern
United States is not new. This half has, in fact, been toldmultiple times and more often
than not by black writers, some of whom are fleetingly mentioned in Baptists footnotes. But
the claim that African Americans built the world is simply wrong. Baptists book is marked
by such rhetorical excesses, which lend themselves to a blinkered and narcissistic American
exceptionalism. The result is an oversimplified view of capitalism and slavery that ignores the
historical contributions to modernity of Africans in the Caribbean and in Africa itself.
What is innovative about Baptists work is not the tale but the telling. TheHalfHasNever
BeenTolddeliberately tries to reach beyond academia to a wider audience. It is also
experimental; it aims to undermine and revise the typical practices of historical writing.
Baptist calls his style evocative history, intended to conjure through microhistorical
vignettes, anecdotes, and speculative scenes the febrile sensorium of black life under
capitalism and slavery. This narrative pastiche suggests a doubled layer of signification whose
meaning in some cases is cued through coy nods and subtle winks.
The chapters of the book are named after parts of the human body, from head to feet and
blood to seed; these are the tropes of Baptists historical analysis. Occasionally there is a
disjuncture between Baptists language and his subjects: slavery, coercion, violence. These
certainly do not require sanctimonious and overbearing prose, but at times Baptists frivolous
language and conversational, intimate toneincluding jarring shifts to the second person
undermine the gravity of his analysis. The chapter Seed, for instance, juxtaposes startling
scenes of sexual violence and the emergence of banking to make a claim about the
intertwined histories of fucking and finance:

When the enslaved men broke [the soil] open for the entrepreneur, he fucked this dirt with them as his
tool. He fucked this field. He might fuck their wives out in the woods, or in the corn when it is high. Or
their daughter in the kitchen. Then the next new girl he buys at New Orleans.

Baptists reading (if not his writing) draws on the radical work of black feminist literary
scholars and historians such as Hortense Spillers, Deborah Gray White, and Jennifer L.
Morgan to demonstrate the libidinal and erotic economies of slavery and the status of black
womens bodies in capitalisms history. But Baptists stylizations rest on shaky ethical
ground, and his occasionally over-aestheticized history precludes a more critical stance. His
discussions of racial and sexual violence, for example, come off as alarmingly light; his
repetition of the trope of a one-eyed man betrays a schoolboy puerility while masking an
extended joke about raping black women.
One of Baptists aims is to reclaim and represent the interior lives of black people living in the
past, to document historical black consciousness in real time. He is attempting not only to
center black people in the history of capitalism and of modernity, but also to recover their
voices, feelings, and thoughtsoften at a synaptic level. It is a noble task, though in many
ways a paternalistic one, and this style of historical interlocution risks sentimentality. It is
always hazardous to enter into territory mastered by black women novelists, including Gayl
Jones and Toni Morrison, whose incandescent letters have burned through an archive of
forgetting.
Baptists recovery of black consciousness is not the recovery of black resistance. Indeed, early
in the book he dismisses claims concerning the prevalence of slave revolts in the United
States. He also undermines arguments, popularized by historians such as Robin D. G. Kelley,
about the modes of hidden resistance and infrapolitics through which black people
survived the everyday trials of slavery, even if they were not moving to overthrow the system.
That disavowal of resistance consolidates a liberal assimilationist narrative for blacks within
the United States, whom Baptist positions as invariably becoming Americans. But what of
Africa? Contrary to accounts such as Sterling Stuckeys SlaveCulture:NationalistTheory
andtheFoundationsofBlackAmerica (1987) and Walter C. Ruckers GoldCoastDiasporas
(2015), in which Africa is claimed as an independent source of black culture and
consciousness, in Baptists portrayal of nineteenth-century black life in the United States,
Africa exists as an exotic trace.

If Beckert and Baptist evade the radical historiography of slavery, recent books by historians
Walter Johnson and Nicholas Draper approach it head on, showing how to build on its

insights in productive directions.

Johnsons RiverofDarkDreams claims indebtedness to the radical tradition and intervenes
directly into the capitalism-and-slavery debates. He argues that it is pointless to try to impose
a theoretically pure abstraction of capitalism on its actual iterations, asserting that what often
gets lost are the bare facts of what really happened:

A materialist and historical analysisa focus on what happened, rather than on how what happened was
different from what should have happened if Mississippi had, in fact, been a bit more like Manchester
begins from the premise that in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capitalism without
slavery. However else industrial capitalism might have developed in the absence of slave-produced cotton
and Southern capital markets, it did not develop that way.

For Johnson, race and white supremacy were essential to capitalisms historical
development.
Glossing Cedric Robinsons notion of racial capitalism, Johnson argues that the historical and
political-economic conflicts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mississippi Valley can
be viewed through the prism of slave-racial capitalisma phrase that captures how white
supremacy passes for an economic rationale, which in turn organizes a racial hierarchy. At
the center of this rationale is cotton. Adopting Marxs political-economic methodology for
deciphering the social hieroglyphic of commodities, RiverofDarkDreams describes the
grim transubstantiations through which men are converted into machines, flesh and land
turned into capital, and capital rendered as the very history of modernity.
Johnsons luminescent prose lends moral weight to the harrowed tribulations of the past, but
he also has a keen geographical imagination that captures the spatial upheavals, the recurring
conflicts and contradictions over land and water, that marked the history of slavery and
capitalism in the Mississippi Valley. Johnson writes of how the revolutionary transformations
of steamship technology continually pushed the possibilities of profit-making to the point of
saturation and collapse. He describes the ecological strafing through which the Mississippi
Valley was reordered and remapped onto the grid of capitalism. He narrates the creation of a
carceral landscape wherein the plantation became a panopticon, surveillance, punishment,
and policing forcing the black body into a constant state of furtiveness and fugitivity.

Of the body of the slave, Johnson writes with little romance: it was debased and violated at
the hands of whites as black women and black men became the vehicles and vessels for white
capital accumulation. This is not to say that Johnson elides black resistance. He gives it a
fuller treatment than Baptist does, and he asserts the fact of black agencya word, he
points out, that is fraught, misapplied, and abused. Resistance, for Johnson, takes the form of
revolt: the history of resistance needs to be written with a sense of its bruising satisfactions,
found in black accounts of defensive and emancipatory violence. But also, critically,
resistance emerges in and through labor itself, as the repetition of tasksno matter how
coerced, alienated, or mind-numbingproduced in the black worker expertise, knowledge,
and intellectual prowess necessary for survival. Even so, to the liberal query that wonders
whether whites saw blacks as humans during slavery, Johnson chillingly suggests that they
did. A better way to think about slavery, he writes, might be as a concerted effort to
dishumanize enslaved people. This dishumanization, this stripping of human power while
maintaining the humanity of the subject, seems doubly cruel, doubly invidiousworse even
than dehumanization.
Johnson writes against a liberal narrative of the Civil War that sees the South as a
homogeneous, spatially defined and geographically consolidated unit. Instead, Johnson
shows how, in the attempts to maintain slavery and white supremacyespecially against the
specter of race warSoutherners adopted an expansionist ideology. Economic and racial
crisis led to the emergence of Southern imperialism and attempts to incorporate Cuba and
Nicaragua into an empire of bondage as energetic and muscular as Jeffersons empire of
libertyitself, as Johnson points out, saturated by the ideology of white supremacy. This
imperial vision was most pronounced through Southern efforts to reopen the slave trade in
the 1850s. These failed efforts and the defeat of the Confederacy did not, however, guarantee
the prospects for black freedom after black emancipation.

The question of emancipation is at the heart of Nicholas Drapers ThePriceofEmancipation,

a book pivoting on a single moment in time: August 1, 1834, the date of emancipation in the
British colonies. Drawing on the archival holdings of the Slave Compensation Commissiona
government agency created to handle claims from slaveholders for the loss of their enslaved
property due to emancipationDraper studies the effects of slavery not on enslaved Africans
but on the mostly white gentry and elite in England. While the formerly enslaved received
nothing, the government bailout of slaveholders became the single largest state payout in

English history, amounting to more than 40,000 awards and 20 million (worth nearly 17
billion today).
ThePriceofEmancipation lends empirical and archival ballast to Williamss Capitalismand
Slavery by precisely demonstrating the value of slavery to the English economy. Draper is
methodical and deliberate; there is no rhetorical overreach, only careful dissections of the
arguments against and limits of Williamss thesis. He does not, for instance, claim that
slavery was a unique and unilateral force in spurring Englands industrialization and the
growth of English capitalism. Rather, he argues that it was important for the development of
parts of the modern economy. As such, ThePriceofEmancipation acts as a white paper for
the contemporary reparations claims of Englands West Indian former colonies, a charge led
by the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, historian Hilary Beckles.
Drapers research is part of a collective archival and historical project for both England and
the Caribbean. Alongside historian Catherine Hall and a team at the University College
London, Draper has created the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, an online database of
the Slave Compensation Commission records. In it, one finds not only the nature of
compensation claims but also the names and genealogies of slaveholders and the formerly
enslaved and a hoard of informationcontinually growing through crowdsourced
contributionson the history, culture, society, and political economy of nineteenth-century
life in the Caribbean and England. Neither speculative nor rhetorical, the database provides a
textured cross section of historical detail demonstrating both the enduring presence of
slaverys past in contemporary capitalism and the continuing importance of the questions
asked from within the radical tradition.