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

I would like to discuss the second slavery as an open concept that allows us to bring together and reinterpret things we already know within a new explanatory framework. By conceiving of American slave systems as parts of a world-economic division of labor, this perspective identifies the new geographic zones of slave commodity production (cotton in the US South, sugar in Cuba, and coffee in Brazil) that formed as part of the economic and geographic expansion of the world-economy during the nineteenth century. The emergence of these zones of the second slavery established new commodity circuits that were firmly anchored in an industrial division of labor. This broad process restructured the overall pattern of Atlantic trade. The zones of the second slavery coexisted and competed with new plantation frontiers in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia. From the perspective of the world-economy, the American zones of the second slavery appear to have played an important role in the diffusion of labor management practices, technology, and forms of plantation organization across the globe. Finally, the concept of the second slavery emphasizes the continuity of forms of coerced labor – including transnational labor migration, contract labor, tenancy and sharecropping, and processes of proletarianization, and peasantization -- in the economic and material expansion of the world-economy