Attempts to imagine a shift beyond capitalism often tend to fixate on the terms of the old socialist calculation debate: plan versus market. At its deepest level, though, capitalism is not fundamentally a matter of the distribution of goods, for underlying this is the possession of land. In thinking about the end of capitalism it is thus useful to return to the question of its origin as the second agricultural revolution in human history. If capitalism finds its roots in an agrarian transition, we might also locate its supersession at this level—in a third agricultural revolution.

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The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.

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Historians and economists have increasingly identified capitalist patterns of behavior among antebellum slave owners, yet no consensus has emerged about the explanation for this finding. I argue that US slave owners were driven to behave like capitalists in part because of their dependence on credit. The ability of creditors to seize the land and slaves of insolvent debtors generated selection pressures that led to both aggregate patterns of capitalist development and the adaptation of individual slave owners to the logic of capitalist competition. I refer to this process as “credit market discipline.” In a case study of South Carolina in the 1840s, I show that the threat and reality of foreclosure was capable of stimulating recognizably capitalist behaviors among even the most aristocratic and “prebourgeois” slave owners.