Reinaldo Funes Monzote

Dale W. Tomich

Carlos Venegas Fornias

Rafael de Bivar Marquese

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes--from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley--demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.

A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery

Paul E. Lovejoy

Traces the inner connections between the second slavery in the Americas, slavery in Africa, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, and the "Great Transformation" of the nineteenth century world economy. The Atlantic and Africa breaks new ground by exploring the connections between two bodies of scholarship that have developed separately from one another. On the one hand, the "second slavery" perspective that has reinterpreted the relation of Atlantic slavery and capitalism by emphasizing the extraordinary expansion of new frontiers of slave commodity production and their role in the economic, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth-century world-economy. On the other hand, Africanist scholarship that has established the importance of slavery and slave trading in Africa to the political, economic and social organization of African societies during the nineteenth century. Taken together, these two movements enable us to delineate the processes forming the capitalist world-economy, establish its specific geographical and historical structure, and reintegrates Africa into the transformations in the world economy. This volume explores this paradigm at diverse levels ranging from state formation and the reorganization of world markets to the creation of new social roles and identities. Dale W. Tomich is Professor of Sociology and History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar and editor of Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century, both published by SUNY press. Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor of History at York University, Canada. He is the author of many books, including Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa and Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions.

The Second Slavery and Beyond

The Atlantic and Africa

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.

Labor, Capital, and World Economy

Through the Prism of Slavery

Calls attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. This book presents a new approach to nineteenth-century Atlantic history by extending the analytical perspective of the second slavery to questions of empire, colonialism, and slavery. With a focus on Latin America, Brazil, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States, international scholars examine relations among empires, between empires and colonies, and within colonies as parts of processes of global economic and political restructuring. By treating metropolis-colony relations within the framework of the modern world-economy, the contributors call attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world. They reinterpret as specific local responses to global processes the conflicts between empires, within imperial relations, the formation of national states, the creation of new zones of agricultural production and the decline of old ones, and the emergence of liberal ideologies and institutions.

Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century

Atlantic Transformations

Calls attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. This book presents a new approach to nineteenth-century Atlantic history by extending the analytical perspective of the second slavery to questions of empire, colonialism, and slavery. With a focus on Latin America, Brazil, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States, international scholars examine relations among empires, between empires and colonies, and within colonies as parts of processes of global economic and political restructuring. By treating metropolis-colony relations within the framework of the modern world-economy, the contributors call attention to the political, economic, and cultural interdependence and interaction of global and local forces shaping the Atlantic world. They reinterpret as specific local responses to global processes the conflicts between empires, within imperial relations, the formation of national states, the creation of new zones of agricultural production and the decline of old ones, and the emergence of liberal ideologies and institutions. Dale W. Tomich is Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, Second Edition: Martinique and the World-Economy, 1830–1848 and the editor of The Politics of the Second Slavery, both also published by SUNY Press.

Dale W. Tomich

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