Credit in the slave trade and plantation economies

Credit Market Discipline and Capitalist Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina

“…However, this ability emerged only during the transition to capitalism, and it first appeared in a British colonial context. In his survey of credit relations in the Atlantic slave colonies, Jacob Price (1991) distinguishes between a "Latin model" of creditor law, which protected the integrity of the estates of insolvent debtors, and an "Anglo-Saxon model," in which even unsecured creditors were given the right to seize land and slaves. According to Price, the Anglo-Saxon model originated in the reaction of British merchants to a number of debt-relief measures passed by colonial parliaments in the early eighteenth century.…”

Beyond and against capitalism: abolitionism and the moral dimension of humanitarian practice

“…The presumably economically inefficient and pre‐modern nature of slavery was an ideological trope, and thus inherently a moral statement, that the abolitionist project used in order to justify its goal, the abolition of slavery. It was at odds with economic and social facts: colonial slavery and the slave trade were generally highly profitable before their abolition; for the owner, the enslaved body had the double economic advantage of being capital and source of labour at the same time; in many settings slavery was compatible with industrial modes of production; and there is no indication that slavery was the predominant “ancient” mode of oppression (Drescher ; Fredrickson ; Price ; Starobin ; Wickham ). Yet Marx took this inherently moral statement and casually elevated it into an abstract principle of factual historical development.…”

Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States

“…Unlike the grainexporting lords of Eastern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose possession of land rested on non-market power, the master classes of the 'New World' did not have the option of withdrawing from the world market when prices fell below their costs of production (Brenner 1977, 70-5;Kula 1976, 100-20). To meet their debts and avoid the loss of their land and slaves, the planters were compelled to 'hold their place' in the world markets for sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, coffee and cotton through cost reduction (Price 1991;Woodman 1968, chapters 3-6).…”