Think of it as an example of the problems of an exploitative, extractive system of social organization, perhaps as a culmination of that system:
We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible way into the modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to global capitalism. We do not know if Europe and North America could have grown rich without slavery, but we do know that industrial capitalism and the Great Divergence in fact emerged from the violent caldron of slavery, colonialism, and the expropriation of land. In the first 300 years of the expansion of capitalism, particularly the moment after 1780 when it entered into its decisive industrial phase, it was not the small farmers of the rough New England countryside who established the United States’ economic position. It was the backbreaking labor of unremunerated American slaves in places like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama.
When we marshal big arguments about the West’s superior economic performance, and build these arguments upon an account of the West’s allegedly superior institutions like private-property rights, lean government, and the rule of law, we need to remember that the world Westerners forged was equally characterized by exactly the opposite: vast confiscation of land and labor, huge state intervention in the form of colonialism, and the rule of violence and coercion. And we also need to qualify the fairy tale we like to tell about capitalism and free labor. Global capitalism is characterized by a whole variety of labor regimes, one of which, a crucial one, was slavery.[1]
This passage is buried in the middle of a Chronicle Review article by Sven Beckert which traces the relationship between slavery and capitalism. This is about the only place he mentions the expropriation of indigenous lands, but he does mention it and his historical treatment of capitalism’s origins is useful. Read more
- [1]Sven Beckert, “Slavery and Capitalism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/SlaveryCapitalism/150787/↩