With both Slavery and the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830-1848 (1990) and Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and the World Economy (2004), Dale Tomich established the explanatory potential for the Second Slavery. Expanded by Anthony Kaye, Ada Ferrer, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, this sub-field within Slave Studies focuses on links between capitalism and slavery within the Atlantic World. In The Politics of the Second Slavery, disseminated by the Fernand Braudel Center, Tomich offers a collection of essays that further explores Second Slavery through discussions of international proslavery and transnational antislavery. The work engages structural studies of antislavery by Eric Williams and David Brion Davis, and more recent works on the rhetoric of abolitionism by Christopher Brown and Seymour Drescher.
Tomich established the historiographical paradigm of Second Slavery to provide links between the rise of nationalism and the changing institution of slavery during the nineteenth century. After the 1780s, slavery expanded due to the influences of new industrial machinery and the technologies of finance capital. For Tomich, the transnational analysis of capitalism and slavery within the field of Second Slavery upsets previous positivist notions that often asserted a new moral order rose out of the Enlightenment to critique and slowly chip away at the institution of slavery. Instead, slavery expanded in the nineteenth century because a new profit motive emerged whereby slavery and capitalism became economic siblings.
To introduce the edition, Tomich examines British influences upon the political economy of the nineteenth century Atlantic World. English legal mechanisms affected perceptions of the slave trade through a new form of British World-Economic Hegemony, which rose to dominance after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This British hegemonic system developed after the destabilization of mercantilism caused by the American Revolution and the Haitian Rebellion. After Vienna, British forces negotiated the end of slavery within an international order that did not want to close the institution. States that wished to resist British hegemony established various ‘slave zones’ meant to protect slavery from British legal power.
Rafael Marquese and Tâmis Parron continue the analysis of these slave zones through a co-authored essay on the dialogue between Southern proslavery forces in the United States, planters within the Second Spanish Empire in Cuba, and amongst Brazilian saquaremas. However, similarities between these groups changed over time, as international links became untenable due to local inconsistencies, even as Southern annexationism cultivated after the Compromise of 1850. Schmidt-Nowara’s contribution follows with a discussion of Spanish abolitionism during the nineteenth century. He focuses on translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which assisted in expediting the creation of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1865. After Vienna, as slavery grew within the Second Spanish Empire, antislavery voices were suppressed in both Cuba and the metropole. During the 1850s, with Stowe’s work as a shining light, fresh antislavery movements developed in Spain, further burgeoning after the American Civil War when women asserted themselves within international public spheres to question international support for slavery.
José Antonio Piqueras continues the collection through an analysis of agency and structure within historical studies of proslavery and antislavery. His chapter rarely engages with modern scholars, focusing instead on highlighting the historiographical role of Eugene Genovese to define labour negotiation as important for micro-historical studies of slavery. Piqueras argues that structural Marxism should often be paired with social histories of individual phenomena for future slave studies, but offers little reference to recent relevant scholarship on structure and agency, especially neglecting Vincent Brown’s dynamic work on performativity. Chapter 5, by Luís Miguel García Mora, offers a more focused analysis of labour negotiation through a discussion of party development in Cuba during the 1870s and 1880s. In summary, political party development in Cuba broke on questions of emancipation, specifically regarding debates over gradualism, patronage, and immediate abolition.
Ricardo Salles follows with a Gramscian analysis of similarities regarding primitive accumulation in nineteenth-century Brazil and within continental Europe. Akin to the rising middle class in Europe, which fashioned accommodations between Old Regime landowners and the new bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century, planters near the Paraiba River Valley in Brazil became part of a national dominant class through outlining areas for coffee production in accommodation with established sugar planters. However, after 1848, Brazilian politics diverged from similarities within Europe, due to a desire to protect slavery and restrict liberalization.
Leonardo Marques continues the edition with a comparison between Cuban and Brazilian contraband traders to explore state formation, while also implicating traders and shipbuilders from the United States in the broader contraband slave trade. Kaye’s contribution follows, offering a comparative analysis of the Demerara rebellion of 1823 and the Southampton revolt of 1831 led by Nat Turner. His study focuses on spatiality and the staples thesis to probe the successes and failures of each uprising. The analysis explores how the spacing of plantation life in the two regions informed differing outcomes due to inconsistent forms of agriculture, labour negotiation, and religious relationships between masters and slaves.
The concluding chapter, from Enrico Dal Lago, applies an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic to synthesize European liberalization after 1848 with the radical abolitionism of Republicans during the American Civil War. Further fashioning dialogue between structure and agency, the chapter does well to summarize the goals of Tomich’s edition, which link continental European history with the fluctuations in slavery caused by the rise of capitalism throughout the Atlantic World. Due to the efforts of Tomich to provide explanatory power to Second Slavery, there is now a more significant critique of capitalism within Slave Studies. This new radicalism has contributed impetus to recent scholarship on nineteenth-century slavery by Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, and Ed Baptist. The Politics of the Second Slavery furthers those academic goals through discussions of both international antislavery and virulent proslavery opposition.
