Query

A book titled "Debating Slavery" by Mark M. Smith has just been published.
It frames the debate as consisting of Eugene Genovese on one side and
Engerman-Fogel on the other. Genovese's position, simply put, is that the
slavocracy was a kind of paternalistic, precapitalist society. Using
econometrics, Engerman and Fogel argue in "Time on the Cross" that slavery
was actually an efficient and profitable system based on capitalist
property relations. Ironically, both Genovese and Engerman-Fogel end up
promoting the idea that slaves were co-opted by the system. In the former
case, you get a bastardized version of Gramscian "consent"; in the latter
you get a bizarre argument that the profitability of plantations allowed
slaves to enjoy a more prosperous existence than free men in England.

Somehow this debate leaves out not only the point of view of scholars like
Herbert Aptheker, it would also seem to leave out the perspective of Eric
Williams who argued that capitalism and slavery were inter-related but
unlike Entegerman and Fogel saw no particular advantage to that except for
the master. Most of Williams' empirical focus was on the Caribbeans. My
question is whether any world systems theorists have written extensively
about the slave system in the United States and its relationship to the
global capitalist system?


Louis Proyect
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