The Disavowal of Slavery’s Capitalism in Liberal Political Economy

• In Event: Racial Capitalism, Colonialism, and Democracy

Abstract

Eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal political economists embraced and supported anti-slavery thought and politics in their works. To criticize enslaved labor, they used the tools of political economy in order to show how this mode of production was pre-capitalist. In this paper, which is the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine the works of Adam Smith, José Antonio Saco, and J.E. Cairnes to trace how they supported the abolition of slavery based on a conception of enslaved labor as unproductive, expensive, and unskillful, conditions making it contrary to capitalism which required a constant increase of the rate of productivity to elicit an efficient and profitable productive process. Emancipating the enslaved became imperative so as to employ productive, efficient, and skillful free workers, who would ensure the satisfaction of the conditions necessary for the development and reproduction of a capitalist political economy. Despite conceiving enslaved labor as pre-capitalist, these thinkers fell into a paradox as they could not entirely deny its importance for the accumulation of capital in the transnational spaces of the Southern United States and the Caribbean. Namely, they knew that slaves made plantations tremendously productive, profitable, and efficient, enriching the slaveowners in the colonies and affording economic benefits to the metropole. Colonial commodities like sugar and tobacco inundated and enlarged metropolitan markets and increased the value of trade. Moreover, wealthy planters moved from the colonies to the metropole and used their capital to invest in the productive process in Europe.

I analyze this paradoxical theoretical position by following scholars like Adam Dahl, Sibylle Fischer, and Ulas Ince and bringing in the concept of disavowal. Such a concept allows me to explain how liberal political economists knew of the importance of slavery for the development of capitalism and yet actively negated this historical process by insisting on understanding slavery as a pre-capitalist form of labor. Rather than ignoring that the enslaved served as the main source of labor for the plantation economy, Smith, Saco, and Cairnes dismissed their laboring capacities and the increasing production and value of colonial commodities. My account of said disavowal proceeds in three steps. In the first section, I engage Smith’s pioneering reflections on the unproductivity, high cost, and unskillfulness of enslaved workers. The second section traces the unfolding of the disavowal as a transnational idea in the mid-nineteenth century by shifting the context to the Spanish Empire via Saco’s writings. Lastly, I interpret Cairnes’s work in the third section to elucidate how he introduced nuances in his political-economic critique of slavery so as to grapple with the extremely high productivity and profitability of the Southern American plantations.

A historical account of the disavowal of slavery’s capitalism in liberal political economy both builds on and contributes to scholarship in the traditions of Black Marxism, racial capitalism, and the new history of capitalism. Scholars as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Cedric Robinson, Kris Manjapra, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson, among others, have provided historical evidence that indicates how enslaved labor accumulated much of the capital that enriched and industrialized European empires, constantly increased the productivity, efficiency, and profitability of the plantations, opened new markets around the globe, and developed systems of labor discipline in the plantations that were then adopted in European factories. Despite the wealth of evidence and insightful analysis of the aforementioned scholars, conceptions of slavery as halting political-economic development remain strong in its historical imaginary. To further clarify the relationship between slavery and capitalism, I explain, interrogate, and uncover the theoretical maneuvers performed by anti-slavery liberals that rationalized a perception of enslaved labor as pre-capitalist. My paper thus adds an intellectual-historical dimension to the scholarship on slavery and capitalism by excavating the paradoxical positions that ground the anti-slavery thought of liberal political economists.

Author

• Ricardo Vega Leon, California Polytechnic State University