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The Reckoning brings Robin Blackburn’s multi-volume history of modern slavery to its conclusion with the abolition of human bondage across the Atlantic world. An important contribution to historiography, the book should also be a powerful stimulus to theoretical reflection, for its central concerns—the nature of capitalism, the possibilities of social change, the relationship of human labour power, ‘free’ or coerced, to both of these—remain vital topics of our times. What I would like to do here is to draw out some of the themes addressed in this rich body of work to serve as grist to the mill of social theory.
First, though, it may be useful to set out The Reckoning’s approach to the ruptures and continuities of the Atlantic slave systems as they were reproduced—or overthrown—through the course of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Blackburn adopts and refines the idea of a distinctive slave-labour regime emerging in the early nineteenth century, joined at the hip with the nascent industrial-manufacturing capitalism—famously dubbed ‘the second slavery’ by the American historian Dale Tomich. For The Reckoning, the ‘second slavery’ is the first truly capitalist slavery, in that it produces commodity inputs for profit-driven industry and is itself dependent on profit-seeking loans from finance capital—the local bankers and factors, continually prodding plantation owners to whip their slave gangs to higher-speed work and longer days, to experiment with better seeds and tools, in order to fulfil the orders from the steam-driven mills and increase their own profits.
Here, the factory and the plantation become intertwined, two branches of one social system, distinct but mutually adapted, both shaped by the imperative to accumulate capital. In the Southern us, unfree chattel labour produced raw cotton for textile production by what Marx would describe as ‘doubly free’ mill hands in Lancashire and Massachusetts, while imports of slave-grown Brazilian coffee and Cuban sugar spurred the adaptation to new work rhythms. For Blackburn, then, as for Du Bois, 19th-century capitalism deployed a bifurcated working class, part enslaved, part doubly free. The Reckoning develops this conception on two different planes. At the level of financial accounting, Blackburn limns a systemic regime of accumulation, linking rationalization on the plantation to that in the factory. Insofar as the book’s title signifies moral accountability, he turns to politics, probing the effects of the new slavery-industry configuration on efforts to form and sustain historical blocs for abolition. The Reckoning offers important insights for social theorists on both levels, as well as on the linkages between them.
Blackburn provides several different characterizations of the relationship between slavery and capitalism. He writes of ‘slaveholder capitalism’, but also of ‘para-industrial slavery’. He emphasizes that the second slavery was deeply integrated into the capitalist world system, that the plantations operated on increasingly rationalized, profit-oriented principles, as slave-holders were locked into the orbit of industrial and financial capitals, which claimed increasing shares of the spoils. But he also asserts that the slave plantation was hybrid, that it contained, along with its capitalist face, a ‘precapitalist residue’, with slaves providing for their own subsistence. Finally, Blackburn claims that the second slavery was transitional, a bridge to ‘purer’ forms of capital accumulation.
These formulations point in two directions, of vital interest for social theory. On the one hand, they signal the idea that 19th-century landed capital’s resort to unfree labour was residual and transitional; on the other, they may suggest that it responds to deep-seated systemic pressures that continued after abolition. The question, in other words, is whether the bifurcated working class that Blackburn posits is specific to the factory-plantation complex of the nineteenth century—and thus, in principle, dispensable; or whether it remains an enduring feature of capitalist society in subsequent periods, per Du Bois.footnote1 Put differently: is there something in capitalism, despite its ideology of free contractual exchange, that loves (or even requires) unfree labour, racialization, primitive accumulation and a ‘global colour line’?
The Reckoning provides a great deal of food for thought about this question, in part through the sheer breadth of its approach. Blackburn distinguishes the ‘second slavery’ from its pre-industrial predecessor on several axes: economic, political, ecological and social-reproductive. It is worth unpacking these dimensions a little more.
To take the economic axis first. Blackburn situates the ‘first slavery’ in the colonial-mercantilist phase of early-modern history and the ‘second’ in the industrial-capitalist phase. He argues that colonial mercantilism is itself pre-capitalist, hence that only the second slavery is integral to a truly capitalist world system. But that claim is worth pondering. Granted, the first slavery was not tied into large-scale capitalist industry; and granted, too, it extracted more profit from mining than from agriculture. But it also produced commodities for the world market by siphoning surplus value from unfree labour. Why not conclude that both slaveries were capitalist? That each was integrated into its own, different regime of capital accumulation?footnote2