The Plantation and Revolution

In the Epilogue to Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott stages a discussion between C.L.R. James and Hannah Arendt, who both published books on revolution in 1963. Arendt, Scott notes, echoed James’s arguments about the tragic dimension of revolution by insisting that the French had erred by sacrificing freedom to “abundance,” a new horizon of political action that, as Arendt notes in passing, had its origins in the exploitation of new world colonies. James, meanwhile, in his revised edition of Black Jacobins, emphasized Toussaint’s failure to move beyond “mere liberation from tyranny and oppression,” thus allowing the contingencies of the colonial past—the plantation, militarized agriculture, the need to produce abundance for a world market—endured beyond the revolution and into an independent Haiti, and indeed our historical present. This paper will elaborate on Scott’s brief re-enactment of the dialogue between James and Arendt with a view to developing a dialectical account of the relationship between the plantation and revolution, in which the possibilities for emancipation but also the persistence of colonial domination were immanent to the economic form of the plantation. In doing so, it will contrast recent approaches to the new history of capitalism with the older scholarship on plantation economies produced by the New World Group (Lloyd Best, Kari Polanyi Leavitt, George Beckford, among others). It will argue that this older literature, by explaining the historical trajectory of the plantation economy, is better equipped to account for both the origins of revolution and also the counter-revolutionary dynamics of capitalism and abundance. The aim of the talk is to explore new narratives and theories of revolution that point beyond the tragic accounts of James and Arendt, and beyond Scott’s “endless present” trapped in the colonial past.