Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy

by Dale W. Tomich

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.

Genres: History, Economics

226 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[Rallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dale's writing is compelling and his contributions to socio-scientific research is immense; a fairly rare combination.

[Jorge Seijo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tomich supera las unilateralidades de las posiciones marxistas sobre la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo. La cuestión de la transición no se trata en contraponer producción a mercado, ni agencia de clase a estructura, ni formaciones capitalistas externamente enfrentadas a otras pre capitalistas, se trata de concebir el mercado mundial capitalista como una totalidad concreta.

[Jonatas Vieira Pimentel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5*

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tomich’s book is a collection of previously published essays, divided into thirds which get progressively more narrow in scope. The first section is almost exclusively theoretical or conceptual, dealing with issues like the ways others have handled the distinctions between slave labor and free labor, and takes in the entire capitalist world system. The second section focuses on the Caribbean, still set against the world system as backdrop and with a mainly methodological emphasis. In the final section Tomich hones in on Martinique and deals in more depth with slave laborers’ work and resistance.

The book is quite theoretically sophisticated. In the early essays Tomich takes Wallerstein and Brenner to task by finding common aspects to their opposed positions. In doing so he draws upon Lukacs, Kosik, Dunayevskaya, and Rosdolski to name just a few. Given his use of those writers, Tomich’s approach can be construed as part of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, but Tomich doesn’t spend much time on larger theoretical or meta-theoretical questions beyond how to conceptualize the history (or histories) of slavery within the world system. Put simply, Tomich has an axe to grind about slavery, not dialectics.