Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation

The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, this essay proposes that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas.