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SLAVERY WAS CRUCIAL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM  
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Robin Blackburn, Owen Dowling
April 10, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that
provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World.
He spoke to Jacobin about the intimate links between the slave systems
in the Americas and the origins of capitalism. _

Boiling House at the Sugar Plantation Asunción, Cuba, 1857. , Justo
German Cantero / Wikimedia Commons

 

Interview by Owen Dowling.

Robin Blackburn, longtime editor of the _New Left Review_, is
probably the foremost Marxist historian of New World slavery working
today. In _The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848_
[[link removed]] (1988)
and _The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800_
[[link removed]] (1997),
Blackburn charts the construction and revolutionary downfall of the
slave systems of the colonial Atlantic.

These two volumes — complemented more recently by _An Unfinished
Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln_
[[link removed]] (2011),
and _The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights_
[[link removed]] (2013)
— together comprise a comprehensive transnational account of what
Blackburn’s newest book designates “the First Slavery.”

With _The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition,
1776–1888_
[[link removed]] (2024), the
historian provides the long-awaited concluding volume to his
chronological trilogy on racial slavery in the New World. Owen
Dowling [[link removed]] sat down
with Robin Blackburn [[link removed]] to
discuss the book, his now-completed trilogy as a coherent whole, and
what a Marxist perspective brings to the study of slavery, racism, and
capitalism in global history.

What Made the Second Slavery Distinct

OWEN DOWLING

Can you give an introductory explanation of what is meant by the
“Second Slavery”?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The Second Slavery is a concept that has been developed over the last
ten years or so by historians of the Americas, especially of slavery
in the nineteenth-century United States, Brazil, and Cuba. Slavery not
only survived the Age of Revolution — 1776 to 1848 — but
flourished, with slave-grown cotton, coffee, and sugar dominating the
world market.

Slavery not only survived the Age of Revolution — 1776 to 1848 —
but flourished, with slave-grown cotton, coffee, and sugar dominating
the world market.

The European slave colonies in the Caribbean proved vulnerable to the
slave revolts and upheavals of the revolutionary epoch. The leading
colonial powers — Spain, Britain, and France — each tried to
suppress the great slave uprising in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and
1804, but without success. The French colony was eventually replaced
by the independent black state of Haiti in 1804. This alarmed
slaveholders throughout the Americas and persuaded Britain and the
United States to end their open participation in the Atlantic slave
trade in 1807.

However, Anglo-American merchants continued to supply huge quantities
of “trade goods” — shackles, swords, implements, rum, tobacco,
guns, ammunition — to exchange for captives on the African coast.
This clandestine traffic carried off more than two million captives in
the years up to 1860, as Sean Kelley has shown in his new
book _American Slavers_
[[link removed]] (2023).

This initial species of “abolition” thus did not end the Atlantic
traffic, let alone free the millions of slaves mobilized on the
plantations. But it did disturb and discredit the slaveholders,
obliging them to build a more fortified “Second Slavery.” Events
in the Caribbean continued to have a double impact, inspiring
antislavery campaigning but also stoking a proslavery backlash and
encouraging an emergent doctrine of racial supremacy in the 1830s and
’40s.

These opposing ideologies pitted whites against blacks, the free
against the enslaved, males against females, the African-born against
the American-born. But they also informed interracial coalitions that
appealed to nonslaveholding whites and free people of color.

Britain’s largest slave colony, Jamaica, was the scene of a major
revolt in 1831–32
[[link removed]] that
was shortly followed by slave emancipation in 1833–38 and
“immediatist” antislavery societies. Jamaica was the most valuable
British colony, just as Saint-Domingue had been the most valuable
French plantation regime. In both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, slaves
had accounted for something like 80 percent of the population, so they
had massive numerical superiority — but it still took ten or fifteen
years for the movements to achieve a qualified emancipation.

Why did Cuba, Brazil, and the United States stand apart from the
debacle of the First Slavery? A key consideration was that the leading
slaveholders offered the white majority a stake in the constitutional
order large enough to produce and secure racial domination. Fear and
privilege all helped to cement proslavery and consolidate the “Slave
Power.” White privilege could include a horse, the vote, a gun,
“freedom of the range,” patrols, militia, and plantation
employment.

In Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, the leading slaveholders
offered the white majority a stake in the constitutional order large
enough to produce and secure racial domination.

The supposedly “democratic” and republican regime of the United
States managed to be even more unequal than the monarchical orders in
Brazil and Cuba. The slaveholding order of the United States was also
buttressed by constitutional provisions that notoriously counted the
slaves as three-fifths of a free person. They also made it virtually
impossible to end slavery by constitutional means. Combined with
first-past-the-post electoral rules and patriarchal exclusion, this
boosted the representation of slaveholders. The enslaved were not a
majority and even freedmen rarely had the vote, so there was an
important layer of white males to be flattered by gentlemanly
demagogues like Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson.

The characteristic feature of the slaveholders of Cuba, Brazil, and
the United States was that they had successfully established a mass
racial regime of white domination as a buttress to the slave
plantation regime. They also were globally rich and could buy in the
best military equipment, but they could mobilize the white population
in patrols and militias, and that was a sufficient guarantee of their
power. These became the heartlands of the Second Slavery, the
survivors of the Age of Revolution among the slave regimes of the New
World.

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the institution of
slavery, where it survived, seemed stronger than ever, an example of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum that what doesn’t destroy you, makes
you strong. The US victory over Mexico in 1848 clearly showed where
power lay in the hemisphere. The South boasted more millionaires than
the North, and exports of slave produce comprised 70 percent of the
national total. The expansion of the American “Slave Power” was
impressive but not entirely reassuring in that it was in some ways
better exploited by the new capitalism of the North and West.

 

OWEN DOWLING

In what critical ways did the “Second Slavery” of the
postrevolutionary nineteenth century differ from the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century “First Slavery”?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The slaveholders of the First Slavery were colonials, absentees, and
émigrés; those of the Second Slavery reveled in their sovereignty
and supplied leadership to an armed citizenry. They constituted the
Slave Power. They supplied a more far-reaching mobilization of race
and capital, a stronger — more perfected — regime of race and
capital, and therefore it’s all the more curious that it risked
everything by hazarding secession from the United States. The
slaveholders were dealt a strong hand but played it badly.

There were also important economic innovations, which I explore
in _The Reckoning_, including a new “Anglo-Saxon” credit regime
that answered a problem that all the regimes of slavery encountered: a
shortage of credit for the plantations. Any agricultural entrepreneur
faces all sorts of problems to do with microbes, pests, fire, flood,
and climate extremes. Under the First Slavery, there had been a
recurrent credit famine.

Planters needed considerable resources in order to produce the next
year’s crop; to buy provisions, equipment, seeds, and manure —
also reserves to bridge adversity or to profit from a good opportunity
(such as a neighbor’s bankruptcy). So slaveholders often wanted
extra loans. One particularly important financial change was the
lifting of the so-called Latin or Roman ban on using slaves as
collateral. This prohibition had long survived because it enabled the
estate owner to survive and prosper, but at the expense of a reduced
rate of colonial growth.

The larger merchants, bankers, and creditors lusted over an end to the
ban. Dutch entrepreneurs had tried to shake it off in early and
mid-seventeenth-century Brazil, but it was not until 1732 that the
British government formally ended its own ban. The Colonial Debts Act
of that year set the scene for a dramatic century of growth in the
British islands and enclaves. It was something that proved to really
unlock the credit system under the Second Slavery. The planters of the
United States inherited from their former master this key to unlocking
the prodigious potential of the slave plantations.

Slavery’s Expansion and the Domination of Capital

OWEN DOWLING

In _The Making of New World Slavery_, you discuss the ways something
beginning to approximate a kind of capitalist rationality was worked
out through and against older, “baroque” ways of organizing the
plantation. By the time of the Age of Revolution, there came almost a
crisis point, where lots of those older systems fell away in the face
of some kind of bourgeois-revolutionary process or other. Picking up
on your point about the perfecting of the system of race and capital
under the Second Slavery, does the removal of that prior fetter on
using slaves as collateral then represent the culmination of a dynamic
whereby these nineteenth-century plantations were now properly
integrated into the “commodity circuit,” whereas they were only
“half-integrated” previously?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

Yes, that’s a good summary of an important part of the argument.
There was something conservative about the old regime, the Latin
regime (really it comes from Roman law), which prohibited planters
from taking on too much debt. Very often it’s thought that
widespread debt among planters was a great sign of weakness. In a way
my analysis — I’m getting part of this from John Clegg
[[link removed]] — is that on the contrary,
this signified the vitality of the new plantation system.

The planters had already been allowed to use their future crop as
collateral, but not their slave crew. Like the planter’s home and
hearth, the slaves were protected from the vagaries of the market.
Debt turbocharged the system, since the planters went out and borrowed
up to the hilt. But capitalism has always been dogged by a trade
cycle, boom and bust, panics: there was the great panic of 1819, and
then 1837, and then 1857.

There is a great range of these credit crises: they create a bubble
economy, and then the plantation is so good at burying its
conservative defenses that it actually exposes itself to market
crisis. There were always bound to be problems — terrible weather,
pests, 101 things that can go wrong — but under the older
conservative regime, the “Latin” regime, at least the planter
still had his crew of slaves and his equipment and so forth.

OWEN DOWLING

You’ve written in previous books about the capacity of slave
plantations, in times of hardship, to essentially retreat into the
“natural economy” as a sort of shell under which to hide until
market conditions improved. I assume that under the Second Slavery
this wasn’t the case — if all of a planter’s slaves were now,
legally, collateral assets, he couldn’t just retreat during hard
times into being a sort of serf-lord, since his slave crews would just
be seized by the bank? Was there, then, an element of
intra-ruling-class contestation between the slaveholders and financial
capitalists? Was finance seen, as well as being a boon to plantation
expansion, as a threat to the patriarchal status of a slaveowner
within the community, if his plantation and his slaves could be taken
off of him by moneymen?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

You are right to observe a narrowing of the planter’s options; for
example, whether to retrench or to gamble on expansion. There was a
special layer of “factors,” who were like financial advisers to
the planter. The factor would live in the big trade centers, whereas
the planter was on the plantation, where he wasn’t able to follow
what the market was doing day by day, so the factor would oversee the
timing of sales and charge a small commission.

In one sense, the planters and the merchants were a unified class, but
in another they were a divided one, especially when things started
going wrong.

Standing behind the factors were the banks and the big merchant
houses. So there was an element of intraclass conflict — though only
intraclass insofar as they were all under the regime of capital. In
one sense, the planters and the merchants were a unified class, but in
another they were a divided one, especially when things started going
wrong.

John Clegg has carried out a thorough investigation of tens of
thousands of foreclosures in South Carolina during the 1830s and
’40s in a 2018 article
[[link removed]] in _Social
Science History_. It shows that, once the ban on collateralizing
slaves had been overcome, there was a ready market in slaves (very
positive from the slaveowners’ point of view): slaves could be quite
quickly “turned” into capital to get rid of debt, and to transfer
slave “assets” from less efficient producers to more efficient
ones.

That gets back to your point about divisions within the ruling class:
some of that division was a question of less efficient producers
getting squeezed out by more efficient ones. Of course, what we are
really talking about here is that a _purer_ form of capital, a more
dynamic form of capital, was supplanting a more conservative one.

OWEN DOWLING

Talking of the capacity of new credit relations to underwrite new
waves of expansion, how important was settler colonialism to the new
wave of plantation production under the Second Slavery?

 

ROBIN BLACKBURN

European migration played a significant foundational role in the First
Slavery, but free migrants tended to avoid the slave plantation zone
because slaveowners were uncomfortable neighbors. Some immigrants
secured employment on the plantations, but they often aspired to own
their own farm. Others would migrate to the West or even North.

European migration played a significant foundational role in the First
Slavery, but free migrants tended to avoid the slave plantation zone
because slaveowners were uncomfortable neighbors.

The role of settlers was strategic; in these slave regimes, it was
really important that the social relations were not just between
slaveholders on one hand and slaves on the other. There was a large
population in Second Slavery countries who were neither slaveowners
nor slaves: including farmers either unable to afford slaves or not
desirous of owning them. These layers were able to provide some
solidity and some guarantees or defenses to the slave regime.

But things could go wrong. The free people of color within this
nonslaveowning populace could get very restive; they were denied the
civic equality they naturally would have liked, and you got the
development of associations and the emergence of antislavery forces in
society. These included many free people of color, but also free
whites, many of whom found the prospect of life side by side with
slaveowners very unattractive. The settler element could become
unstable under certain conditions, which included the economic crises.

Territorial expansion, entailing settler colonization, was probably a
necessity for the Second Slavery in the United States, and for Cuban
and Brazilian slavery, too. They were expanding and colonizing new
territory the whole time, with new crops developing in new areas.
Prior to 1790, there had been very little cotton produced in the
United States, and that was mainly down on the coast, which wasn’t
suitable for industrial uses.

The cotton that turned out to be important for Britain’s industrial
revolution was a new Mexican variety that was best grown in the upland
interior. Between 1790 and 1860, planters and merchants organized the
forcible migration of nearly a million slaves from Virginia and the
North to the South and Southwest. This notoriously entailed the
breakup of slave families.

The “Indian presence” in these new territories remained quite
significant well into the nineteenth century, in spite of the
atrocious treatment of the indigenous peoples. They didn’t just
disappear; they receded into the forests and mountainous areas, but
they were still there. Resistant Indians and slave fugitives sometimes
made common cause, as did Red Sticks and Seminoles.

In a way, indigenous resistance unfortunately helped to “toughen
up” and racialize the slave regime by scaring the white settler
colonists, who were frightened of “the Indians” as well as of
“black insurrection” — of slave insurrection. The German Coast
Insurrection of 1811 showed how slave plantations could foster a new
type of class struggle.

It was really important to the slaveowners that white men had some
motive to make them enlist in the patrols and the militias.

It was really important to the slaveowners that white men had some
motive to make them enlist in the patrols and the militias. As you can
imagine, going out on patrol two or three times a week and sometimes
being the target for black animosity, they needed reasons to support
the planters. Fear of “the blacks” began to create a whole
political culture as a buttress for the slaveowners — what we’re
really talking about now is_ racial capitalism_, which demanded a
popular mobilization among whites to maintain it.

In that context, the fact that there was Indian resistance going on
also helped to mobilize whites behind the existing slave regime.
It’s very important not to blame the victims here, but it was of
course essential for the slave system that the white settlers were
mobilized in this way to defend the racial regime.

OWEN DOWLING

How important were the new forces of production yielded up by the
industrial revolution, like steam power and railways and canals, to
the technical side of the revolution in plantation production during
the Second Slavery?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

I would say very important. That’s part of the argument of the
Second Slavery historians — for example, _The Reinvention of
Atlantic Slavery_
[[link removed]] (2017)
by Daniel Rood supplies a vivid account of the industrialization of
sugar production in Cuba and Louisiana, and for developing new markets
in Rio de Janeiro. The sugar planters with their “vacuum pans”
drew upon, and contributed to, the chemical revolution. By the 1840s,
US planters had invested in over a thousand steamboats, Cuban sugar
lords owned over 350 ultramodern sugar mills, and Brazilian railways
brought coffee grown in the interior to Santos and Rio de Janeiro.

OWEN DOWLING

In _The Making_, you chart the genealogy of antiblack racialization
throughout the centuries. How did the ideology of racial slavery
change during the Second Slavery period? I ask partly with a mind to
the abolitionist challenge during the Age of Revolution, which you
explore in_ The Overthrow_.

ROBIN BLACKBURN

I think there was a strand of abolitionism going back to the American
Revolution, often expressed by those with a Quaker background.
Emancipation in 1780 in Pennsylvania reflected this impulse at a time
when the independence war was still ongoing. Often it was those
influenced by the Quakers, rather than Quakers themselves, who acted.

Those who adopted the patriot ideology with its watchwords celebrating
liberty could sometimes be shamed into supporting particular
abolitionist measures. In New England, Brazil, and Spain, those who
called themselves liberals could support “free womb” laws that
freed children born to slave mothers once they reached twenty-five
years of age.

The exclusion of slaves from the US northwest by the Ordinance of 1787
was a different phenomenon, expressive of hostility to blacks whether
free or enslaved. While the racial order of the First Slavery had been
based on racial domination, that of the Second Slavery was based on
racial exclusion.

OWEN DOWLING

In terms of the subjectivity of enslavement as a laborer on these
plantations, was that experience one of an intensification of the work
regime under the Second Slavery?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The answer is that there was an intensification, with refinements of
gang labor and task labor both playing a part. There is some dispute
about its characteristics, but I think the evidence shows there was a
fourfold increase in the per-capita productivity of slave-grown
cotton, which was fairly dramatic over a half century from 1803 to
1861. That’s now accepted by different sides of the debates.

While the racial order of the First Slavery had been based on racial
domination, that of the Second Slavery was based on racial exclusion.

Edward Baptist argues
[[link removed]] that
widespread adoption of torture was responsible for this productivity
leap. His view is not found in all historians of the Second
Slavery. James Oakes [[link removed]], an
outstanding analyst of the slave regime, has an
interesting discussion
[[link removed]] of
Baptist’s book in the journal _International Labor and
Working-Class History_ from 2016. He queries whether large advances
in labor productivity can be explained by just one variable.

Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode contend
[[link removed]] that
this productivity increase was all down to better seeds and a new type
of short-staple cotton. This was certainly what the manufacturers
wanted in Manchester and the English industrializing districts — to
get their hands on as much of this new type of cotton as they could,
because it was adaptable to the industrial system. Cotton was also
good because it was not so easily attacked by pests.

It is widely accepted that there was a fourfold increase in the
productivity of slave labor between 1803 and 1861. During this time,
the area dominated by slavery actually grew very considerably, and it
was the new and more desirable upland cotton that was demanded by the
textile manufacturers. The increase in the productivity of labor
really came from their leaving the coastal district, which was not
suited for the good type of cotton, to the new territories. As I have
noted, nearly a million slaves were sold from the more northerly
states down to the Mississippi basin and Georgia.

You could say the move was down to three considerations: firstly, the
adoption of better varieties of cotton; secondly, the movement of
slaves from the low to the highly fertile soil of the upland regions;
and thirdly, the intensification of gang and task labor. These factors
could very well have contributed. Each depended on the powers and
ability of the slaveowner to control and direct his labor force.
Moreover, each may have led to extreme violence when the slaveowner
found himself being obstructed by an unwilling slave community.

OWEN DOWLING

In your conclusion to _The Making_, you have a long chapter where you
relitigate the thesis of Eric Williams
[[link removed]] in _Capitalism
and Slavery
[[link removed]] _(1944)
and offer your own assessment of the significance of colonial slavery
for the inception of primitive accumulation, capital accumulation, and
ultimately industrialization in Britain — broadly coming down on the
position that it did play a consequential role. With British
industrialization, and specifically the mechanization of cotton
spinning and then weaving in Lancashire providing a substantial fillip
for the nineteenth-century expansion of plantation cotton in the
Americas, was this a dynamic in which the First Slavery had a
significant role in engendering the British industrial revolution,
which then reciprocally played an important role in creating the
conditions for the Second Slavery?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

That’s very much a position I would take. There has been a shift
since the publication of _The Making_. I’m not claiming it came
about as a result of the book’s publication, but I did begin to
supply new evidence for this role, along with at least a dozen other
historians. I think one would say now, and others have said, that
supporters of the Williams thesis have the better of the argument at
the moment.

The victory of the American Revolution may have been bad for the
self-regard of the British, but actually it didn’t do them much
economic damage.

What really seems to have been decisive is that the British merchants
and manufacturers had a monopoly of the new Atlantic markets. It
really was the British Atlantic Empire, the informal as much as the
formal one, that supplied outlets as well as inputs. The empire of
free trade was highly complementary to British industrialization. The
victory of the American Revolution may have been bad for the
self-regard of the British, but actually it didn’t do them much
economic damage. The United States remained an ideal commercial
partner for industrializing Britain, because it supplied both raw
cotton and the market that British industrial development required.

Of course there was no industrial revolution as such in the United
States up to about 1840, and then the country did start to
industrialize — belatedly compared with the British. It remained
awkward that the governments of the Second Slavery were so intimately
involved with a supposedly pariah institution.

Antislavery Resistance

OWEN DOWLING

What was the significance of the nineteenth-century US radical
abolitionist tradition in bringing about the terminal crisis of the
Second Slavery in that country?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The US slaveholders really seemed to be in an impregnable position in
1860. The United States was the richest state in the New World, and it
was richer than many European states. Property was sacred, and the
slaves were property. The so-called Free States were prepared to see
the continuation of slavery — all they wanted to stop was the
expansion of slavery at their expense. I think that what drove the
southern slaveholders to revolt was fear of insurrection, and fear in
particular of white politicians who couldn’t be trusted with the
defense of slavery.

What drove the southern slaveholders to revolt was fear of
insurrection, and fear in particular of white politicians who
couldn’t be trusted with the defense of slavery.

The antislavery movement created enough unrest among their slaves to
prey on the lurid imagination of the slaveholders, with the
Underground Railroad being a keen source of concern. The political and
financial “panic” of the late 1850s brought matters to a head. The
significance of John Brown
[[link removed]]’s intervention
at Harpers Ferry, itself a key development, seemed all the greater
coming on top of the collapse of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe
in 1848, the whole preceding antislavery agitation, and (above all)
the actions of the fugitive slaves.

British colonial slavery had been considerably weakened in the 1820s
and ’30s when there seemed to be slave revolt in the Caribbean,
combined with the pressure of the Reform movement and the antislavery
movement outside Parliament. In _The Overthrow_ I give an account of
this process, which I think is important because even the most radical
black nationalist accounts — I’m thinking of the otherwise
excellent _1619 Project_
[[link removed]] —
really deny any significant role to the abolitionist movements
[[link removed]]. I
don’t think it is at all plausible to argue that slave emancipation
could have happened without those antislavery agitations, without the
Antislavery Society, without the tireless lecturing
[[link removed]] of
Frederick Douglass, without the Underground Railroad, without the
slave narratives, without the Civil War and without Reconstruction.

Undoubtedly the antislavery campaigners were often very moderate and
patronizing — they weren’t as abolitionist as they thought they
were. Their opposition to slavery was stronger than their opposition
to racism, and they were not uncompromising in supporting all forms of
black resistance. These limits were egregious.

However, the abolitionists gave a platform to black writers and
lecturers, and some of them were very radical, such as the Secret Six
or those meeting and training with John Brown. Frederick Douglass was
a towering figure, of course, in developing the antislavery movement.
He was backed by Gerrit Smith, an immensely wealthy and quite
revolutionary figure. All things considered, the slaveholders
weren’t just panicking needlessly — they had some solid grounds
for it.

OWEN DOWLING

You write in your conclusion: “The defeat of the slaveholders in the
US Civil War was the decisive event in the overthrow of the Second
Slavery, just as the Haitian Revolution and British slave emancipation
has spelled the end of the colonial slave regimes.” Could you
elaborate a little about the wider continental significance of the
defeat of the Confederacy for post-1865 abolition in Cuba and Brazil?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The victory of the North and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) led
fairly quickly to free womb laws, first in Spanish Cuba (1870) and
then in Brazil (1871). Slave emancipation proper was delayed by nearly
two decades. Slavery only survived thanks to the greed of the planters
and the feebleness of the Spanish state.

The slave regime was associated with a political order that was no
longer capable of defending itself. In the case of Cuba in particular,
there was a national liberation movement that was sufficiently strong
to cause huge losses to the Spanish colonial power, and eventually
slavery was abolished by both the rebels and the colonial power. By
1886, it was finished.

Events in Cuba between 1868 and the 1880s, the so-called Thirty
Years’ War, were interwoven with antislavery themes.

Events in Cuba between 1868 and the 1880s, the so-called Thirty
Years’ War, were interwoven with antislavery themes. If you look at
the soldiers in the rebel army, the _mambises_, about half of them
were African or people of African descent. This was not just the rank
and file, but also the generals. About half the generals in the Cuban
liberation army, men like Antonio Maceo and his comrades, were people
of mixed race or of African origin.

After an armistice that was not accepted by Maceo and his followers,
the rebellion broke out again in 1895. The United States invaded Cuba
during the ensuing war, worried that the island’s fate would be
decided by armed blacks and men of color. Former abolitionists
agitated for the withdrawal of the US occupying forces and respect for
a Cuban popular assembly.

Slavery in Brazil was eventually suppressed in 1888, and it really
collapsed thanks to an implosion of the monarchy itself, which had
become too implicated on both sides of the question — it was too
close to slavery for the radicals and the republicans, and it was too
close to abolitionism for the slavocrats. The coherence of the slave
regime was destroyed just as the colonial regime in Cuba had been
destroyed.

My latest volume, _The Reckoning_, registers how slave agency emerges
during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The battle between
the North and the South was sufficiently bitter that Lincoln and the
Republicans feared in 1864 that the slaveholders could still win —
even if there was this compromise solution, which would leave
something like slavery.

Half a century ago, slave emancipation was seen to have emerged from
above as a sort of national blessing. Now we are far more aware of the
crucial contribution of the slaves and former slaves. But we are also
more aware of the glaring limits and flaws of the postemancipation
societies, and of the perpetuation of racial oppression in them.

Writing Slavery’s History

OWEN DOWLING

I’d like to ask now about your own scholarly background and
political commitments, and how you got into the study of colonial
slavery. In his conclusion to _Street Fighting Years_
[[link removed]] back
in 1987, Tariq Ali [[link removed]] wrote:
“[Robin] Blackburn is completing his life’s work, a history of
slavery in the New World and the forces that eventually swept it
aside.” The following year, you published your first volume, _The
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery_. Is your trilogy on New World Slavery
— now concluded with _The Reckoning_ — your life’s work? How
did you find your way to it?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

I chose New World Slavery because it struck me as something very
dramatic and different from British politics, which seemed quite
parochial and stale, with never any real change. We developed in
the _New Left Review_ (_NLR_) an analysis
[[link removed]] of
the stupefying consequences of Britain’s peculiar historical
development. I got interested in the Cuban Revolution, initially
through a newspaper description of a general strike there in May 1958.

I joined the London New Left Club
[[link removed]],
which met in the Marquee Club in Oxford Street every Tuesday, and in
which Stuart Hall
[[link removed]],
the first editor of the _NLR_, was involved. I can remember we had a
game of cricket, with very small sides: a dozen or so people
from _Tribune_ on the one hand and from the _New Left Review_ on
the other. I got thirty-five runs, which I was very pleased with.

Somehow or other I’d got involved with the Hands Off Cuba movement,
and I actually went to Cuba in December 1961. I then produced,
together with Perry Anderson
[[link removed]],
a special issue
[[link removed]] of
the student magazine _New University_ that featured Jean-Paul
Sartre
[[link removed]] on
his visit to Cuba and his interview with Fidel Castro. I was to go to
Cuba on another three or four occasions in the ’60s, and it was a
sort of radicalizing experience for me.

It’s not that we didn’t see any problems in the Cuban Revolution:
it was quite clear that there were serious problems, but there were
also fresh perspectives. At any rate, I met Che Guevara on that
occasion; I actually worked for a market research outfit, Cuban
Foreign Trade Enterprises, a branch of the Cuba Foreign Ministry. This
was a time of vigorous debate in Cuba. My minister, Alberto Mora,
articulated a critique of Che’s industrial strategy, but cordial and
comradely relations were maintained. The Winter 2024 issue
[[link removed]] of _New
Politics_ has a special feature on these debates.

I also encountered historians in Cuba, notably Manuel Moreno
Fraginals, and was very struck by a national culture that had powerful
African elements, notably in Cuban music and painting. I met Wifredo
Lam
[[link removed]] and Fernando
Ortiz [[link removed]] — a cultural
anthropologist, but someone who had also studied tobacco and sugar.
That was intellectually quite exciting. I also worked with Fernando
Martínez Heredia, who became editor of a magazine
called _Pensamiento Crítico _(Critical Thought). He was head of the
Department of Philosophy at Havana University, and he was in his
twenties. _NLR_ ran an interview
[[link removed]] with
him after his death in 2017.

C. L. R. James came to Cuba in 1968 for the Congress of the
Intellectuals, and of course he was a hero of mine.

Among the people that I got involved with at this time was C. L. R.
James
[[link removed]],
the brilliant Trinidadian historian and writer. James came to Cuba in
1968 for the Congress of the Intellectuals, and of course he was a
hero of mine. I had first been introduced to him by Orlando Patterson
[[link removed]], my Jamaican
colleague at the London School of Economics, and I was enthralled
by _The Black Jacobins_
[[link removed]].
So there was a sort of intellectual depth to studying Cuban history.

Obviously this was partly a question of looking at the effects of the
history of slavery creating a political culture with a powerful racist
component. The work
[[link removed]] of
W. E. B. Du Bois was obviously of great importance, including
his idea
[[link removed]] of
the “general strike” during the American Civil War. The current of
what you might call “fugitive slave insurrectionism” was a
powerful force that emerged in country after country in the slave
colonies.

OWEN DOWLING

Would you then say that you took a Cuban route into becoming a
historian of New World Slavery?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

I think that’s true, yes. And it’s a bit curious that it’s only
with this last volume, _The Reckoning_, that the material on Cuba
comes out strongly.

OWEN DOWLING

In your conclusion to _The Overthrow_, back in 1988, you wrote that
you had devised plans for a sequel exploring the material that now
appears in your new book, but your next volume in fact proved to
be _The Making_, which went back in history and covered the political
economy of the prior construction of New World Slavery instead of
moving forward chronologically to the Second Slavery. You explain
that _The Making_ and _The Overthrow_ in fact were initially
conceived as one manuscript, and that the late Mike Davis
[[link removed]] had
an important influence upon you in splitting the work into two
separate volumes. What was the importance of the _NLR_ environment
for writing this collection of volumes as you did?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

The _NLR_ certainly supplied a very supportive environment, and
people around it had an involvement. What Mike Davis in particular
opened up for me was the radical history of the Americas, and
especially of the United States. He was very generous in commenting on
work that one had done and making strategic suggestions and giving
advice.

What Mike Davis in particular opened up for me was the radical history
of the Americas, and especially of the United States.

You’re quite correct in saying that he suggested splitting the
manuscript in two. But what was curious is that he also suggested that
the first part chronologically should become the second part, while
the second part should become the first. Specifically with Mike, you
often got a radical twist of the argument of some
sort. _Verso_’s Haymarket Series
[[link removed]],
edited by “the two Mikes” — Davis and Sprinker
[[link removed]] —
has powerfully contributed to reshaping US history.

OWEN DOWLING

With _The Reckoning_’s publication, you have now finished a
complete history, going chronologically from the 1400s up to about
1900, of the rise, challenge to, reinvention of, and final decline of
New World Slavery, from a quite rigorously Marxist historiographical
perspective — which is an enormous achievement. What do you think is
the importance of that tradition of history-writing for our
understanding of this history of New World slavery today?

 

ROBIN BLACKBURN

It’s certainly true that there’s now quite a solid coverage. I
didn’t realize the work necessary on this topic was going to be
quite so extended, although I’ve often been quite pleased at delay,
because you learn more about what might have happened. There’s new
research, and life itself somehow supplies ideas that fit the past.

Most recently, to give an example, take this business of the credit
regime. The economic trouble since the financial crisis of the late
2000s has seen the emergence of derivative products and
financialization, which is quite similar to the credit devices whose
role I examine in _The Reckoning_.

I think there’s something about struggles around slavery that people
find fascinating.

I think there’s something about struggles around slavery that people
find fascinating. Sometimes it may be that it’s a way of
discrediting capitalism to say that part of the pressure of capitalist
expansion will often turn out to involve primitive accumulation
tendencies, whether that entails slavery or other forms of primitive
accumulation — a rich concept developed by Marx.

I suppose there could come a time when these disputes really become
just matters of historical interest. But look, for example, at the
huge global impact 
[[link removed]]of
Black Lives Matter, and how the sight of a policeman kneeling on
someone’s neck can have such a resonance in other societies that had
slave colonies — France
[[link removed]], Spain
[[link removed]], Portugal
[[link removed]], the
Netherlands
[[link removed]].
I think there’s something there from the mechanisms of enslavement,
which hasn’t been totally solved by historians, even though we have
outstanding works by people like James Oakes and Daniel Rood.

OWEN DOWLING

This is a historical character who would have featured more in _The
Making_ than your latest book, but what did you make of the toppling
[[link removed]] into
Bristol Harbor of the statue of Royal African Company slave trader
Edward Colston back in 2020?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

Personally I did quite like to see it. Some of my friends were saying
that it didn’t really change anything very much and was a
distraction. But I thought we need symbols and some sense of scale. We
might now know more about the fate of slavery and the slave owners.
Certainly the toppling of that statue brought to light the size and
scope of Colston’s activities. I have myself been surprised —
although I really should not be — by quite how much British society
was dependent on the slave regime that it had built in the Americas.

OWEN DOWLING

In the conclusion to _The Reckoning_, you discuss the legacies and
inheritances of the Second Slavery for the world that followed its
collapse. You’ve argued that there was a reinvention of racial
slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century to become the
Second Slavery, but you impugn whether there can be said to have been
any “Third Slavery” as such — though you do point to regimes
like forced labor in the colonial Belgian Congo Free State
[[link removed]] as
exemplary of its afterlives. What were the afterlives of the Second
Slavery for the capitalist world in the twentieth century and beyond?

ROBIN BLACKBURN

I think it’s been shown that capitalism, left to its own devices,
will display a hunger for surplus value that will generate new forms
of predatory exploitation of labor and wastage of natural resources,
if it isn’t checked and combatted very skillfully. This is one
reason why the varieties of capitalism need to be thoroughly and
vigilantly investigated and analyzed.

_ROBIN BLACKBURN is the author of The Making of New World
Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, and The Reckoning. He is
emeritus professor at the University of Essex and was a distinguished
visiting professor at the New School in New York._

_OWEN DOWLING is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune._

_If you like this article, please subscribe
[[link removed]] or donate
[[link removed]] to JACOBIN._

* slavery
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* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* class
[[link removed]]
* class struggle
[[link removed]]
* race
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]

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