Through the Prism of Slavery

Labor, Capital, and World Economy

By (author) Dale W. Tomich

Publication date:

10 December 2003

Length of book:

226 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742529380

In this thoughtful book, Dale W. Tomich explores the contested relationship between slavery and capitalism. Tracing slavery's integral role in the formation of a capitalist world economy, he reinterprets the development of the world economy through the "prism of slavery." Through a sustained critique of Marxism, world-systems theory, and new economic history, Tomich develops an original conceptual framework for answering theoretical and historical questions about the nexus between slavery and the world economy. The author explores how particular slave systems were affected by their integration into the world market, the international division of labor, and the interstate system. He further examines the ways that the particular "local" histories of such slave regimes illuminate processes of world economic change. His deft use of specific New World examples of slave production as local sites of global transformation highlights the influence of specific geographies and local agency in shaping different slave zones. Tomich's cogent analysis of the struggles over the organization of work and labor discipline in the French West Indian colony of Martinique vividly illustrates the ways that day-to-day resistance altered the relationship between master and slave, precipitated crises in sugar cultivation, and created the local conditions for the transition to a post-slavery economy and society.

Part I: Slavery in the World Economy
Chapter 1: Capitalism, Slavery, and World Economy: Historical Theory and Theoretical History
Chapter 2: World of Capital, Worlds of Labor: A Global Perspective
Chapter 3: The "Second Slavery": Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy
Part II: The Global in the Local
Chapter 4: World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868
Chapter 5: Spaces of Slavery: Times of Freedom—Rethinking Caribbean History in World Perspective
Chapter 6: Small Islands and Huge Comparisons: Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist Modernity
Part III: Work, Time, and Resistance: Shifting the Terms of Confrontation
Chapter 7: White Days, Black Days: The Working Day and the Crisis of Slavery in the French Caribbean
Chapter 8: Une Petite Guinée: Provision Ground and Plantation in Martinique—Integration, Adaptation, and Appropriation
Chapter 9: Contested Terrains: Houses, Provision Grounds, and the Reconstitution of Labor in Postemancipation Martinique

The thoughtful essays in this volume address the large-scale relationships of slavery and early modern capitalism.