Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States

Abstract

The relationship of plantation slavery in the Americas to economic and social development in the regions it was dominant has long been a subject of scholarly debate. The existing literature is divided into two broad interpretive models -'planter capitalism ' (Fogel and Engerman, Fleisig) and the 'pre-bourgeois civilization' (Genovese, Moreno-Fraginals). While each grasps aspects of plantation slavery's dynamics, neither provides a consistent and coherent historical or theoretical account of slavery's impact on economic development because they focus on the subjective motivations of economic actors (planters or slaves) independent of their social context. Borrowing Robert Brenner's concept of 'social property relations', the article presents an alternative analysis of the dynamics of plantation slavery and their relation to economic development in the regions it dominated.

Invisible chains? Crisis in the tea industry and the ‘unfreedom’ of labour in Assam's tea plantations

“…Plantation economies in general, and the tea sector in particular, have historically been associated with bondage and indentured labour systems, implying varying degrees of unfreedom for labourers (Raman 2010;Brass and Bernstein 1992;Post 2003). Notwithstanding the re-organization of the sector in response to changing market conditions and state intervention, there seems to be limited mobility of tea garden workers or their descendants in terms of diversification of sources of earnings and employment.…”

The Vanishing Free Market: The Formation and Spread of the British and US Food Regimes

“…For example, in the mid‐1800s US industrial segments of capital did not form a coalition with the powerful southern planters (who produced cotton) because while the former promoted trade barriers, the latter favoured free trade (Moore 1967). And, Post (2003, 327) adds that northern industrial capitalism and southern plantation slavery had ‘contradictory social requirements’ that hindered a North–South coalition (on this point, see also Moore 1967). Instead, class coalitions often cut across national boundaries.…”

A Cross-Cultural and Historical Survey of Tobacco Use Among Various Ethnic Groups

“…These included a monocultural plantation system, slave labor, transportation networks, credit mechanisms, and associated economic interdependencies (e.g., Breen, 1985;Kulikoff, 1988;Post, 2003;Clark, 2006: 17-19). In fact, it has been observed that White ethnogenesis, at least in the colonial Chesapeake, evolved as part of a capitalist socioeconomic system based largely on tobacco cultivation (Bell, 2005).…”