I’m grateful to John Clegg, Enrico Dal Lago and Nancy Fraser for their stimulating responses to The Reckoning and especially for their probing questions and criticisms, a gift to any scholar, over and above their kind words. From three very different perspectives—political economy, comparative history and social theory—they raise a series of fundamental points about the rise of slave systems and the growth of anti-slavery. These encompass the relation of slavery to capitalism; social reproduction; racialization; the periodization of the Atlantic economy; and the drivers of abolition. In trying to address these, in roughly that order, what I would like to emphasize here are the contradictions of capital—and of politics—that provide the locus for class struggles.

The originating prompt for the expansion of the early Atlantic plantation systems was undoubtedly the growing demand in 17th–18th century Europe for small affordable luxuries—tropical goods like sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco—which in turn was enabled by the spread of money incomes with the rise of pre-industrial capitalism. Metropolitan demand soon outstripped the available labour supply in the Americas. The merchants found the answer in the almost limitless supply of captives who could be purchased on the West African coast and delivered to the New World colonies. Labour conditions were unremittingly harsh. The slave plantation was managed as a single entity with a crew of a few dozen, subject to a whip-wielding overseer or planter. The crew was organized into gangs, or by task. The slave drivers—usually themselves enslaved and comprising something of a slave elite—set an implacable rhythm. The whip and the slave gang established a relentless pace of work, sometimes maintained and moderated by drumming and chanting.

African men had the skill, strength and discipline to make the slave gang a winner in the cane field. Their sisters had great prowess in sowing and picking cotton. It was a considerable bonus for the plantation system that Africans had greater immunity to the tropical-disease environment than young Europeans. They also had more highly developed skills for living off the land; tending a garden patch, keeping chickens, brewing, weaving, netting fish, hunting small game, they could meet most of their needs through subsistence farming—what some have called the slave’s economy. In ecological terms, the slave plantation combined cultivation techniques assembled from the four corners of the Earth. While the plantation cash crops originated from the Middle East or Asia, the subsistence crops had been domesticated by American indigenous peoples. Plantation owners also put the slaves to work growing a basic crop of maize—enough to furnish the crew with a ‘staff of life’ for a year. The commercial logic of plantation slavery stemmed from the fact that maize required only forty to fifty days of cultivation, leaving the crew many months of surplus toil in the fields and workshops, as well as some time for their ‘own’ economy.

The fact that the slaves reproduced themselves in their ‘free time’ would prove an advantageous contradiction. The planters permitted or even encouraged this subsistence activity, so long as it did not detract from planting or harvesting the cash crop, even though some warned that allowing the enslaved any autonomy at all was dangerous; the slave community might start to develop greater confidence and dispute the planters’ control. This is indeed what happened in the 18th-century Caribbean and beyond; the slaves’ subsistence economy became a site of developing class struggle, always vulnerable to a greater show of violence from the colonial forces that backed and controlled the planter’s enterprise but always renewed by the conditions of plantation life. Religion offered powerful arguments in the new struggles over the slaves’ time. The Sabbatarian seven-day week was a widespread notion in early modern Africa, reflecting Islamic, Christian and Judaic beliefs, while making space for the argument that just one day of rest each week did not allow the faithful enough time to offer their prayers, perform their dances and fulfil their spiritual obligations.footnote¹

The class struggles of Africans in the New World began on a different footing to those of European workers there. As Barbara Fields explains, Africans ‘had not taken part in the long history of negotiations and contests in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors’:

To put it another way: when English servants entered the ring in Virginia, they did not enter it alone. Instead, they entered it in company with the generations that had preceded them in the struggle and the outcome of those earlier struggles had established the terms and conditions of the latest one.footnote²

Fields notes that the shaping of the enslaved crew—and of the wider enslaving society—reflected an interwoven layering of domination and exploitation, which enhanced the privileges of some while fastening the chains of others. This identifies a major dimension of the original enslavement of the captives, but successive waves of struggle by the enslaved aimed to set limits to their exploitation, however impermanent any concessions proved to be. The slave community that emerged slowly and uncertainly from the slave crew found important allies among the free descendants of Africans in the Americas. The presence of even a small population of free people of colour could act as a stepping-stone for others. For a later period, Frederick Douglass gave a vivid account of how he had facilitated escape: