The plantation brought these disparate, unevenly generated forces of production together: English capital, American land and African slavery. This combination was historically unprecedented and distinct from prior forms of either slave labour or plantation production – a productive unit geared specif-ically towards capitalistic production. Plantations thus functioned as sites of significant capitalistic experimentations in agro-industrial combinations of productive forces,228 and are best characterised as ‘transitional forms’ of social relations combining complex amalgams of capitalist and non-capitalist relations, production techniques and practices – ‘dependent and hybrid socio-economic enterprises’.229 They were distinct from the form of agrarian and later industrial production based on wage-labour that predominated in England, and also different from European serfdom and the modes of slavery in Africa.
From top to bottom, these were societies where the ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’, the most ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’, were juxtaposed, overlapped, and fused in multiple and contradictory ways. The myriad constitutive contrasts making up this colonial mode of combined development are well illuminated by Robin Blackburn:
The social relations of colonial slavery borrowed from an ancient stock of legal formulas, used contemporary techniques of violence, developed manufacture and maritime transport on a grand scale, and anticipated modern modes of co- ordination and consumption. Slavery in the New World was above all a hybrid
mixing ancient and modern, European business and African husbandry, American and Eastern plants and processes, elements of traditional patrimonialism with up-to-date bookkeeping and individual ownership …. These borrowings necessarily involved innovation and adaptation, as new social institutions and practices, as well as new crops and techniques of cultivation, were arranged in new ensembles.230
These bundles of sociopolitical, economic and ideocultural processes and relations are perhaps best captured under the conceptual rubric of créolisation – a distinct and novel articulation of an uneven and combined development in the historically specific conditions of the New World. The term is particularly helpful in understanding the conditions of hybridity and combination forged through the New World experience, as the concept of créolisation is ‘organically linked to Atlantic slavery’. Though it was ‘initially designed to denote African slaves brought up in a master’s house’, the term was subsequently generalised
‘to refer to anything that, first introduced into the New World from elsewhere, managed to reproduce itself in its new setting’.231 From the African coastal depots to the reprovisioning points in the Atlantic islands to the American ports to the plantations, colonial marketplaces and backlands – from all these ‘new spaces’
came ‘new languages, new musics, new religions and new laws’, giving ‘birth to the creole, to mixtures of European, African and Amerindian elements’.232 Such processes of créolisation on the plantation economy and the concomitant hybrid social relations, identities and ‘new syntaxes of racial hierarchy’233 that were fashioned in the colonial crucible would come to cohere and develop in ways that escaped all extant European developmental models and forms. Such was the
‘melting pot’ of the Americas, founded on the some of the most vicious forms of exploitation, oppression and racism the modern world has known.
Insofar as European, Amerindian and African workers shared relatively equivalent experiences of the disciplinary work regime in the Americas, new potentialities for collective collaboration and resistance emerged. In addition to the forms of escape and resistance outlined above, the late 17th century saw uprisings against the ruling class in centres of the nascent plantation system, as exemplified by the Chesapeake rebellions in 1676.234 The sorts of solidarity fashioned in the early colonial system would eventually be disman-tled through the differentiation and stratification of certain groups within the workforce. Less onerous labour functions and greater privileges were assigned to white European workers, while African slaves were redefined as a legally abject section of the workforce.235 Subsequently, ruling class fears of revolt were directed less at ‘multiracial rebellions’, and more at exclusively slave revolts.
‘Negro insurrections’ became an object of fear among colonialists, reflected in two acts legislating against such revolts in 1680 and 1682. According to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, the transition to a racially hierarchised mode
of production ‘was completed with “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves”
(1705), which guaranteed the rights of servants and defined slaves as a form of property that would constitute the basis of production in Virginia’.236
With the defeat of these rebellions in the late 17th century came the recom-position of the plantation proletariat by the formation of class divisions between white and black workers through the ideology of scientific racism.237 As the cartographer and physician William Petty put it in ‘The Scale of Creatures’
(1676), ‘There seem to be several species even of human beings’ in the colonies and ‘the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned Africans in colour … but also … in natural manners and in the internal qualities of their minds’.238 Here we find in Petty’s works, which followed those of Francis Bacon, the development of ‘a new discourse, an ideological racism different in tone and methods from the racial prejudice of the overseer with a whip or the bully on the deck’.239 Such spurious biological arguments for ‘white supremacy’ were later redefined by the two titans of modern English philosophy, John Locke and David Hume, along with various English biologists. Similarly, the Church of England clergyman and missionary Morgan Godwyn explained the ‘inherent inferiority’
of black slaves – and black people as such – by their refusal to work, writing,
‘Surely Sloth and Avarice have been no unhandy Instruments and Assistants to midwife it into the World, and to Foster and Nurse it up’.240 Of course, as noted, such refusals to work were quite often part of slave strategies to resist colonial rule, rather than symptomatic of putative essential(ist) racial attributes.
The construction of racism as a class relation, and as an ideology legitimating divide and rule, was therefore central to the formation and reproduction of the colonial economy in the Americas.241 But its effects would prove consider-ably more wide-ranging, eventually constituting the broader development and reproduction of capitalism as a totality of socio-economic, political, legal and ideocultural relations. For at the core of the sociological amalgamations within the colonial plantations was the interlacing and systemic fusion of different relations of production. Slaves themselves were not directly subject to capitalist rules of reproduction and were often dependent on the ‘natural economy’ for subsistence. Rather than the market dependence of the wage-labourer, ‘slaves grew much of their own food and built shelter for themselves’. In fact, this allowed plantations a degree of self-sufficiency outside of the vagaries of the market, enabling them to better ‘survive times of war, revolution or commer-cial depression’.242 Due to this element of self-sufficiency, slavers themselves could temporarily withdraw from the market in ways that merchants and industrialists could not.
Nonetheless, plantations also mobilised modern techniques in crop special-isation, cultivation, book-keeping, packaging and shipping, signalling various developments in the productive forces. Such developments in the labour process made slavers considerably more responsive to market pressures than most
non-capitalist rulers or merchants.243 Being plugged into networks of interna-tional capital for both the supply of labour and the realisation of commodities produced also meant that slavers (and by extension slaves) could regularly turn to the market for food and manufactured goods traded in plantation products.
Consequently, specialised production in the plantation could operate on a permanent basis. To draw a contrast with 17th-century Indian cotton, where producers would often turn to subsistence production in times of famine leading to substantial decreases in cotton output, plantations were receptive and responsive to the market as a basis for reproduction and were thus not subject to the same limitations.244
Perhaps most importantly, market competition compelled plantations to operate according to distinctly capitalist rules of reproduction.245 The mainte-nance of the plantation was subject to costs and ‘market stimuli’ that constantly demanded renewed and expanding commodity production, where profit maxi-misation was the cardinal aim.246 As assets of fixed capital, slaves were ‘put to work’ in the name of profit, or else sold off to someone who would do so.247 Consequently, at least ‘nine tenths of American slaves were put to commodity production’,248 in which modern techniques of discipline and violence were deployed to concentrate and mechanise work, as well as accelerate its intensity.
Such features meant that the condition of slaves was considerably closer to that of the proletarians of England than that of the self-subsisting peasants of feudal Europe.249 Moreover, planters often made large investments in slave labour that could ‘enhance the productivity of future laborers’, as exemplified by South Carolina’s tidal rice plantations.250 Elsewhere slavers introduced labour-saving technologies, as in the case of the ginning machine, which in 1794 mechanised cotton cleaning.251
The intensification of cultivation – its increasing commercialisation, mecha-nisation and industrialisation – brought with it an intensification of exploitation for the slaves who worked the plantations. Notably, slaves working on plan-tations that were plugged into international networks of trade – for example, cotton – were considerably more exploited than those in other sectors.252 In short, the plantations showed all those features we would expect from a capitalist enterprise.253
What is more, as slave plantations were so thoroughly integrated into the world market, the evidence reveals a sharp convergence of average rates of profits and standardised methods of procedure, as we would expect from enter-prises operating on a fully capitalist market.254 These ‘transitional forms of social relations’ and ‘the trading links connecting them to Europe would form part of a network through which capitalist laws of motion could become opera-tive on a global scale, once the existing states system was overthrown’.255 Hence, against Charles Post’s claim that ‘plantation slavery, even when subordinated to a capitalist world-market, cannot be understood as a capitalist form of social
labour’,256 the plantations operated according to capitalist laws of motion, even if the slaves themselves were not subject to capitalist rules of reproduction.
This was a ‘combined’ social formation, imbued with entirely novel and distinct (amalgamated) social relations and processes of a complexity and richness that falls out of any neat modal classification as either capitalist or non-capitalist.
Such was the curiosity of the plantation as a combined capitalist enterprise that operations conducted in the American ‘periphery’ were often far in advance, in terms of production techniques and forms of labour organisation, of those found in the imperial metropole. These were ‘the most intensely commercialised farms in the world’,257 something particularly true of the Brazilian sugar plantations of the Portuguese Empire, where:
[t]he merchants who owned the plantations were involved in the process of produc-tion, from cultivation to processing to ultimate transportation to market, to an extent that they were very rarely in the metropolitan centre. And the same process would often happen in reverse with planters becoming merchants in their turn.
Plantations, although often smaller than the average area owned by landowners in Europe, occupied labour forces up to ten times as large. These were more akin to later factories than to the actual manufacturing as it existed in most of Europe at the time in the form of the largely unsupervised putting-out process.258
The plantation combined extensive land use with a labour force that was self-subsisting in reproduction but proletarianised in production, operating within an international market for the realisation of goods produced. Hence, we can indeed speak of the slave plantations in the Americas and West Indies as entirely novel ‘combined’ social formations, amalgamating different modes of production (Atlantic African slavery and European merchant capitalism) into new forms and modalities of development entirely distinct from those found previously in Europe, the Americas or Africa. These were, in other words, sui generis modes of combined development. And failure to grant explanatory
‘agency’ to these combined modalities of development born and nurtured in the Atlantic furnace is to externalise the intertwined histories of slavery, patriarchy, racism, colonial subjugation and exploitation so fundamental to the making of capitalist modernity.