Historical Studies of Caribbean Slavery and the History of Capital

Manuel M. Fraginals, in his pivotal work, El ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, argues that, for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cuban sugar production, slavery functions as “brakes to the development of capitalism” and moreover that the slaves themselves are technologically incapable of operating the machinery of capitalist development.Footnote ²¹ For Fraginals, slavery is not only an impediment against the development of capital, but the slaves themselves are also inherently incapable of becoming “workers.” Empirical data proves otherwise.

During the nineteenth century, Cuba doubled its production every ten years between 1816 and 1875 and by 1828 becomes the world’s largest sugar producer. Between 1770 and 1873, there is an estimated importation of 530,000 to 840,000 slaves.Footnote ²² These events also coincide with various technological introductions into the island: the steam engine (1820), the first railroad in Latin America (1837), and the vacuum pan (1841). These events are what partially led to a sixteen-fold increase of sugar production for the island between 1816 and 1875. Fraginals’ own statistics prove how slaves handled and operated the machinery which he so forcefully argues they were unable to manage. If slaves were such “impediments,” how can such statistics be explained along with the fact that this period also marked the zenith of slave trafficking in the Spanish Caribbean? Dale Tomich’s analysis of the development of the Cuban sugar industry during this period and specifically the operation of nuanced technology by slaves in the sugar mills of Cuba further underscore Fraginal’s contradiction.Footnote ²³ In addition, the multiple factors that came to constitute sugar production in its “most advanced level known under slavery” cannot be isolated from the historical specificity of the labor at hand—in this context, that being slave labor.Footnote ²⁴

Each technology called for a larger scale of production on the island. This entailed also shifts in modes of confinement, from smaller scale housing to barracones, specific to such changes in scale of production with further inland expansion for sugar cultivation. More importantly, there needs to be greater scholarly inquiry—historical and theoretical—examining the extent to which such occurrences connect to the continuous resistances of slaves and differing labor forms. For example, the recorded acts of struggles against the nexus of the colonial regime, enslavement, and the specific introduction of technology for increased production not only blanketed the entire first half of nineteenth-century CubaFootnote ²⁵ but also clearly illustrate the ebbs and flows of the development of capitalist accumulation that has yet to be properly historicized. For instance, in 1837, the very same year of the introduction of the railroad into Cuba, the slave Francisco, from the Ingenio Soledad in Cimarrones (modern-day province of Ciego de Ávila), organized a slave uprising against this development.Footnote ²⁶ Six years later, the same type of directed challenge is seen among some of the participants of the Bemba Insurrection in 1843 opposing the building of the railroad from Júcaro to Cárdenas.Footnote ²⁷ In such a regard, the steady accumulation of capital and production of sugar within Cuban society during the first half of the nineteenth century coincided with a simultaneous and asymmetric level of unrest and resistance by slaves.Footnote ²⁸ Befittingly, slave rebellions and conspiracies arose in 1802 (San Antonio Abad), 1806 (Guara), 1812 (The Aponte Rebellion: Puerto Príncipe, Bayamo, Holguin, Havana), 1817 (Camagüey, Guanábana), 1822 (Mariel), 1824 (Mayabeque, Guanímar), 1825 (Guamacaro, San Jose, Sabanilla, Sumidero), 1826 (Puerta Guira), and 1827 (Güines) to name a few.Footnote ²⁹ In April of 1844, akin to both previous instances of opposition to technological innovation and social regulatory methods, slaves Pedro Gangá and Jacobo Gangá from the sugar mill Unión in Guamutas (Matanzas) plotted to bring death to the mayoral of the plantation, challenging the nightly confinement of the barracón.Footnote ³⁰ Two months later, thirty-two slaves from the estate belonging to Conde de la Fernandina in San Diego de los Baños in the Western region of the island, fervently also contested the implementation of such a prison-like structure.Footnote ³¹

Eric Williams’ attempt, in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean: 1492–1969, to unravel the precise history of the Caribbean through an investigation of capitalist development also suggests a distinction between the “slave” and the “technician.” Thus, he argues: “But cane cultivation was one thing, the production of sugar another. The one was a question of agriculture and largely one of labour, the other of industry, capital and technology. The former demanded chiefly the labourer, the latter required the capitalist and the technician.”Footnote ³²

Williams does not simplify the matter in question as vulgarly as Fraginals. While Williams still sees slavery as anti-capitalist, he also differs from Fraginals in a significant way. In his eminent work, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), he sets out to question and contextualize the precise connections between the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the rise of British industrialization and specifically the Industrial Revolution. These much larger connections to capital accumulation on a world scale and its implications for the shifting capitalist world-economy are not found in Fraginals’ work. However, Williams errs when he characterizes such triangular trade in the Americas as a means to create a mature capitalism, which inevitably and paradoxically brings about the decline of the Atlantic slave trade. Williams, as most of his critics do to this day, does not focus on nor incorporates the factor of resistance into his analysis. Williams seems to posit slavery as being antagonistic to capitalism when, in actuality, slavery comes to function within the law of value: necessary labor time and surplus labor under slavery cannot be separated. Hence, within orthodox Marxist theory, all labor—activity—performed by the slave is considered surplus labor as the slave exists as property and therefore does not produce any value for themselves, thus blurring the two concepts. However, the concept of “value,” particularly as it relates to the characterization of slave labor productivity, becomes analytically unstable in such a context. For the purposes of this analysis, “value” must also account for the mental and ontological frameworks maintained and reproduced by the enslaved. These dimensions cannot be adequately captured within the conventional distinction between necessary labor time and surplus value. Furthermore, the acts of insolence against the slave regime itself as well as against accumulation are equally shattered if not destabilized by the way in which the spatial and temporal understanding of the world is turned upside down within the structures of beliefs and ontological retention of traditions wherein the realm of the physical and the metaphysical are equally merged in everyday society. Accordingly, the problem surfaces in that one cannot quantify the relation of the function of slavery to the law of value; i.e., its social effects cannot be calculated.Footnote ³³

Therefore and not surprisingly, Williams’ thesis fails to account for the way in which, at the same time that slave trade is abolished in certain part of the Americas, it also expands and increases in different spaces, particularly in the United States South, which is crucial to his thesis that capitalism “pushes” out slavery, and despite Williams’s own acknowledgment, in Capitalism and Slavery, that such slave expansion does take place after formal abolition by the British empire.Footnote ³⁴ Ironically, with Williams’ arguments we have, on the one hand, a treatment of chattel slavery as an impediment towards capital and, at the same time, as impetus and perhaps catalyst towards the historical development of industrial capital.

Nonetheless, Williams does not stand alone in seeing slavery as pre-capitalist, for the list of authorsFootnote ³⁵ that share this contention runs long and continues to do so today. In The Making of New World Slavery, Robin Blackburn argues that “slave economies” existed in a pre-capitalist era, given his understanding that the productive organization was based on “non- economic coercion; the direct producers were obliged by brute force to produce a surplus and a marketable commodity.”Footnote ³⁶ Apparently, Blackburn demarcates new world slavery as pre-capitalist based on the distinction of economic versus non-economic coercion which Marx makes in the initial chapters of Capital, Volume 1, where he operates at the greatest levels of abstraction in his analysis.Footnote ³⁷ Blackburn further elaborates his contentions arguing that “the imperial power and its colonial entrepreneurs constituted an extensive, non-capitalist apparatus of exploitation but one which, as the price of survival, had to produce an economic surplus.”Footnote ³⁸ Blackburn’s argument demonstrates the way in which slavery is seen as inherently non-capitalist by way of a narrow-economic and local-national-societal perception of productive relations defining capitalism as opposed to perceiving capitalism as a social system.

The result of such conceptualization yields an historical interpretation where the constraints in the historiography of slavery in relation to the development of capitalism also limit the analysis of resistances. In From Rebellion to Revolution, Eugene Genovese argues that while, on the one hand, there have existed differences in terms of the historically wide-ranging forms of slavery, on the other hand, resistances against it all fall into an “archaic and restorationist” past.Footnote ³⁹ Genovese shares the same conceptual and historical limitations of only seeing anti-slavery movements arising with the creation of the political liberal notion of the nation-state proper and corresponding to the liberal concept of freedom that Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Hobsbawm, along with Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, also hold in only seeing challenges against the capitalist world-economy rising in the nineteenth century with the advent of the industrial wage form.Footnote ⁴⁰ Both the historical and subsequently the historiographical consequences of this contention can be seen in the existing and conventional literature on the origin of the working class. It is therefore not surprising that much of this literature locates the emergence of meaningful resistance to capital in the rise of the industrial wage-earning proletariat, treating it as the first historically legitimate challenge to global capitalism.Footnote ⁴¹ Of course, how such challenges are understood is a world-historical process that needs to be framed within the relational nature of how wage-labor was interconstitutive of slave labor at this time and vice versa. In this regard, Marx argues that “in fact the veiled slavery of wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”Footnote ⁴² However, while Marx meaningfully stands correct on such a correlation, his observation fails to consider the ways in which differing labor forms also existed in the nexus/binary which he constructs between wage-laborers in Europe and slaves in the Americas. The refineries of sugar in the Northeast United States (i.e., Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia) along with those in Bristol and Liverpool in Britain must be linked to the actual production of raw sugar in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as well as with the multiple forms of apprenticeship that existed during the nineteenth century that were connected to the linkages of these commodities between the Americas and Europe. In such a regard, linking said commodity chain spectrum will then allow and create the mental framework to envision the corresponding acts of defiance across this continuum by each laboring population in their respective particularity as they asymmetrically set limits to the accumulation of capital at the world scale.

It is therefore not surprising that much of the existing scholarship tends to recognize meaningful challenges to capitalism only in movements rooted in the liberal political traditions of the American and French Revolutions, while other forms of resistance—particularly those emerging from enslaved or coerced labor regimes—are rarely treated as systemic critiques of the capitalist world-economy. Movements, revolts, and rebellions existing before or alternate to this point of departure are not given any validity as challenges to “capitalism” (construed narrowly) or, more broadly, as being anti-systemic or, much less, setting limits to the capitalist world-economy. Consequently, this perception of labor resistance to capitalism seems to reduce “labor” to wage-labor and consequently falls into the trap of only viewing surplus-value produced by the commodity of labor power—a perspective that ironically and contradictorily seems to include even those, like Wallerstein,Footnote ⁴³ who conceive of the “global proletariat” as being composed of multiple forms of labor not just wage labor. Thus, and once again, for the purposes of this analysis, such a preclusion by default also omits acts of defiance sustained and shaped by a wide range of African diasporic worldviews and religious practices.

For example, Genovese argues that slavery as a mode of production is inseparable from capitalist development, but slave revolts are indeed neither part of the structure nor of the development of capital. While for Genovese, slavery “arose in the New World as a response to demands of the world market,” it nevertheless seems to be separated outside of capitalist development.Footnote ⁴⁴ There is a contradiction at hand here. How can slavery arise out of capitalist development and then exist outside of it in function? Standard literature argues that the French and American Revolutions were “the ones to secularize the cause of national-popular liberation and proclaim the Rights of Man.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Revolutions, makes not one mention of the Haytian Revolution within its own merits, as if all slave resistances were and are to be contextualized in the shadows of the French Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁶

So-Called “Primitive Accumulation” and Limits from Below

In these different understandings of “primitive accumulation,” it is quite evident that the term, from Marx’s own writings, seems to contain at least three distinct and somewhat correlated interpretations: 1) as a specific period in the development of capitalist accumulation, i.e., as a particular phase existing before or during capitalist accumulation; 2) as a transition from one mode of production to another; and 3) as a mechanism of social regulation that is globally articulated.Footnote ⁴⁹ He continues to then maintain that the history of such an accumulation: “assumes different aspects in different countries and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Marx also then claims that, “Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry.”Footnote ⁵¹

However, while Marx provides such examples of “moments of primitive accumulation,” he also reduces slavery to a part of antiquity. Even though Marx “found slavery abhorrent,” he “recessed slaves from his discourse on human freedom: ‘The slave only works swayed by fear, and it is not his existence itself, which is at stake, since it is guaranteed to him even if it does not belong to him.’ ”Footnote ⁵² Marx seems to have not fully understood modern chattel slavery and additionally posits contradictory, albeit at times interconnected, examples and characteristics of slavery in relation to the notion of “primitive accumulation” and, more importantly, in relation to the role of modern chattel slavery in the historical development of capital. As such, the ambiguities, and limitations to Marx’s descriptions of the notion of “primitive accumulation” and its connections, or not, to modern chattel slavery may be revealed and problematized by engaging with the epistemologies and resistances within the concrete aspects of labor.

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson directly critiques Marx’s conceptualization and argues that to Marx the “role of slaves in capitalist production was an embarrassing residue of a pre-capitalist ancient mode of production, which disqualified them from historical and political agency in the modern world.”Footnote ⁵³ One of Robinson’s intents is to chart out the historical development of a Black Radical Tradition that indeed has set limits to the establishment of the capitalist world-economy. While, on the one hand, he acknowledges the indispensable contributions of historical materialism, Robinson also argues that we need to understand and give light to the history of those historically subject to a “separate/different reality” and development of capital. Thus, Robinson argues that “to understand the dialectic of African resistance to enslavement and exploitation, we need to look outside the orbit of capitalism.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Such an “orbit” can be partially demonstrated by examining the epistemological structures that serve as the basis for corresponding systems of beliefs.

This leads Robinson to rightfully contend that:

Speaking to this decades earlier, Oliver C. Cox maintained that Marx, “begins his analysis of the nature of capitalism almost where he might have ended it; and as is commonly the case in classical economics, he relegates as subsidiary the very things which should have been the center of his study. His ‘primitive accumulation’ is none other than fundamentally capitalist accumulation.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For this reason and, once again, the particular experiences of slaves and the history of slave resistances against the capitalist world-economy require a much more distinct approach to and framework for explicating such histories than what has so far been the standard. Such an engagement would allow for these experiences to be contextualized in relation to the historical development of capital and thus yield a more accurate account of capitalist accumulation and its structural logic and of the resistances against the most brutal aspects of this structural logic, such as “primitive accumulation.” Toward such an investigation, Terence Hopkins argues that an examination of the history of capitalist accumulation must also question and bring into light factors of epistemology. Thus, he argues, “processes of consciousness and ideology enter as integral to the theory of capitalist-accumulation on a world scale.”Footnote ⁵⁷ And it is precisely within this context in Hopkins’ exposition that he brings up the Black Radical Tradition of scholarship on struggles against slavery, colonialism, and racism as leading examples of sorely-needed critical analysis within a World-Systems perspective.Footnote ⁵⁸

In his seminal work on the Haytian Revolution and its treatment historically, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel R. Trouillot argues that, “The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West, and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Trouillot acknowledges the advances made in alternate historical narratives by F. Braudel, M. Ferro, and I. Wallerstein, but also aptly calls out their shortcomings. Within similar form, Oliver C. Cox, in Foundations of Capitalism, maintains that, “since the age of discoveries, the world view of all other peoples has been progressively subordinated to the dominant, sophisticated view of Europeans. Hence, to know has generally come to mean knowledge from the European point of view.”Footnote ⁶⁰

In engaging the actual context of slave resistances, Robinson offers a critique of Marx, where Robinson further contends that:

In order to fully address the gaps and dismissive approaches of current scholarship, a much different conceptual and methodological architecture is needed to rethink and relocate plantation slavery and slave resistances in the history of European colonialism. Part of the problem with the existing literature is that it engages the study of slavery as internal or external to capitalist development while at the same time tending to reduce such an analysis to the abstract aspects of labor and not sufficiently considering the historically-concrete counterpart. It is precisely within the concrete aspects of labor where we may find the resistance aspects of labor. “Abstract labor” is too often assumed to be interchangeable with historically specific differences and histories of social regulatory and disciplining practices.

This may be illustrated by taking a moment to engage and problematize a specific observation Marx presents, in Volume 1 of Capital, within the context of the rise of machinery and large-scale industry. Marx argues that “the ‘main difficulty’ (in the automated factory) lay. . . above all in training humans to denounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation.”Footnote ⁶² If we take Marx’s observation seriously, a contradiction becomes apparent. The abstract form of labor—wage labor, which is often reduced to a general conceptual category—does not adequately capture the concrete processes of degradation and discipline imposed on workers in order to eliminate such “desultory” practices. That is, the relationship of “wage-labour and capital” as a solution to the circuit of “M” in “C-M-C” only addresses a logical process but is not necessarily a historical explanation. This is precisely why capital as a rational abstraction is historical, abstract theory that excludes concrete realities that must inform a more robust analysis.Footnote ⁶³

If within the structure of capitalist accumulation on a world scale, there are relational ranks amongst differing labor populations, how can the differences in and histories of the despotic practices of social regulation and disciplining, vis-à-vis the resistances to such regulation and disciplining, be both contextualized as well as understood in light of the concrete aspects of each labor form which this disciplining is meant to domesticate, standardize, and transform into abstract labor shift given the concrete differences between specific populations? There are histories of resistance that are recorded neither by conventional nor measurable means, but this does not make them any less effective in setting limits to the establishment and movement of global capital. What is the validity of a theory if it lacks connection to the historical reality or realities of the movement of global capital, including the social forces that set restrictions to capitalist accumulation on a world scale? In this case, what historical specificity does a theory of capital and capitalist development hold if it lacks the explicatory and analytical tools to account for the concrete/totality of the particularities of non-wage labor forms in general and of slave labor in particular?

These are the concerns that lead me to conclude (however preliminary and asymmetrical these conclusions may be) that what is needed is an understanding of the capitalist world-economy through an analysis of the historically concrete aspects of labor. Re-examining so-called primitive accumulation would in this sense help us approximate a better, more in-depth understanding (“pattern of totality”) of the larger-scale, longer-term relationship between capitalist development and slave resistance in its historical sense and structural-logic during the nineteenth century.

Such a conceptual scaffold would consider the components that constitute social inquiry and analysis as put forth by Fernand Braudel. Braudel argues that any kind of social inquiry and analysis must involve three elements; firstly, the definition and identification of forces, trends, and individual moments, in this case, slavery and slave resistances in the mid-to-late eighteenth century to nineteenth century, vis-à-vis other labor forms comprising the “Second Servitudes”; secondly, an abstraction and construction of social reality, i.e., the pattern on their totality, in this instance, rethinking the relationship between global capital and slave labor; and lastly, distinguishing between long term movements and short term spurts and consequently differentiating the different origins and rhythms that both have, in this case examining the movement and shifts of global capital as it establishes the spatio-temporal setting for these new forms of chattel slavery even as the latter undergoes shifts that include social struggles setting limits to the movement of capital at different phases.Footnote ⁶⁴

Cedric Robinson argues that slaves, in their resistance against the slave system and larger capitalist system, made sense of their world external to the capitalist system. Hence, their resistance was a: “preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair.”Footnote ⁶⁵

To understand the challenges set to the capitalist world-economy by the legacy of slave resistances is to understand that the proximity to a larger collective experience of greater exploitation by the capitalist world-economy will produce a history of greater resistance. It is this precise history that Trouillot terms as “evidential” to understanding the experience of slaves and their resistance to the globally linked structures of slavery.Footnote ⁶⁶ Historical materialism has not been able to adequately account for nor provide sufficient explicatory tools to accurately comprehend and contextualize the history of slave resistances. In consequence, this has produced an incomplete historical account of the development of capitalism and the role of slave resistance within such an expansion. Thus, the matter of this deficiency is in part epistemological in nature. Hopkins maintains that “it is about how we think as we proceed.”Footnote ⁶⁷ For Hopkins, to look at the global division of labor, we must turn to the core-periphery relation as this illustrates the uneven and hierarchical relation within the capitalist world-economy. These are processes and systems of relational rank that must be connected to an analytical framework of undertaking analyses and examinations. We cannot understand the resistance of such a “ranking” without understanding the way in which they/we make sense of the relational rank itself. This is precisely why Hopkins critiques World-Systems Analysis and points to Black scholars such as Oliver C. Cox, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Cedric Robinson, and Eric Williams as a “way toward the kind of theory of consciousness that appears to be indispensable to an adequate theoretical account of the process of unequal exchange.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Despite their drawbacks and inaccuracies, the contributions of the Black Radical Tradition along with a critical re-examination of the conventionally omitted histories would perhaps yield a much deeper understanding of the historical and structural logic of capital. However, and as I have already suggested, such a task requires a reassessment of otherwise misunderstood or partially comprehended notions of what constitutes the structural logic of capital and labor resistance—particularly that of slaves.

This type of approximation may be illustrated by way of processes of labor consciousness within capitalist relations but pertaining to a different labor form and another period within the world-economy. For example, in explaining wage labor in the context of the characteristic mode of consumption of Fordism, Michel Aglietta very acutely argues that the “material” has to be re-thought in a very alternate way in order to better define “consumption” itself.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, Aglietta contends that ideological consciousnesses are also “material” and are no less economic than forces or relations of production. The question of the specific structures of knowledge and systems of meaning that have been mutually constituted within, by, and to the capitalist world-economy need to be contextualized when attempting a history and perspective of the world and not a part of it.Footnote ⁷⁰ The act of defining with an inherent act of separation must be executed without precisely omitting the separation itself. Therefore, the parameters for defining the “material” within capital as a social relation must be expanded. Hence, Aglietta’s call for a re-definition and re-assessment of the material proper.Footnote ⁷¹

On Religion, Resistance, and the Capital-Relation

“Over a period of four centuries, Africans had been uprooted by force from their homelands, packed on slave ships, and sold in the Americas to fill a constantly expanding demand for labor.”Footnote ⁷³ However, as Cedric Robinson notes above, with such forced migration came an entire architecture of religions, languages, cultures, customs, and structures of knowledge and warfare. In such a regard, enchained Africans who were able to survive the Middle Passage did not just exist as empty vessels to be filled and fueled by New World mentalities irrespective of the claimed origins of said thoughts. From the moment of capture, a process of deculturation began with the aim of attempting to uproot the culture, politics, economy and society in order to avoid the re-enslavement of those who would become slaves. Despite these attempts, those transported to America were never completely subdued; their philosophy, traditions, history, sensitivity and knowledge were not completely uprooted.Footnote ⁷⁴

Specifically, the religious and spiritual beliefs of the enslaved allowed for a collective creation to give strength and, in a rather dichotomous irony, functioned to support the relationship of domination but also helped to fight against it. Such practices, whether termed spiritual, religious, or ideological, not only defied the colonial regime of slavery but also challenged the accumulation of surplus value on world scale.

More precisely, across the temporal and geographical span of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas, a wide range of African systems of thought and religious practices helped enslaved Africans interpret their lived realities and develop strategies of survival and everyday endurance. These traditions also informed diverse forms of resistance that extended well beyond overt or frontal acts of rebellion. Whether it was Candomblé (Fon and Bantu) in Brazil, Regla de Ocha-Ifá (Yoruba/Lucumí), Regla de Palo (Bakongo), Regla Arará (Ewe and Fon), or practices of the Abakuá or Ñañigos (Efik-Ibibio) in Cuba, amongst others all throughout the Americas like Vodún (Dahomey) in Hayti, these sacred beliefs and systems of beliefs all served as a significant form of resistance for enslaved people, allowing them to maintain a sense of cultural identity and communityFootnote ⁷⁵ while they simultaneously were treated as mere units of production for the world-market. In this respect and as Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux has argued, “religion has been present since the very onset of the system of exploitation (i.e., the colonization of the Americas), and specifically widely used by the dominant powers against the masses of the enslaved in sugar mills and coffee plantations.”Footnote ⁷⁶

In the case of Hayti, Carolyn Fick maintains that “Voodoo. . . was more than merely a ceremonial dance bent on vengeance. It was a religion and, as such, played a vital role in the daily lives and general world view of its adherents. During the ceremonies, slaves often called upon the various gods, or loa, for spiritual comfort, guidance, protection from misfortune, and cures for their sickness, as well as vengeance against their oppressors.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Furthermore, notwithstanding the gamut of colonial attempts to prohibit the full practice of the belief, Vodun, “as a religion and a vital spiritual force, served as [a] source of psychological liberation in that it enabled through their own labor (and of which they were subjectively recognized through the daily realities of coercion and fear).”Footnote ⁷⁸ And yet, while the transported sacred religious practices from Africa provided a psychological rupture from the chains of bondage, the mental archaeology of liberation gained concrete form with the transition from such consciousness to direct rebellion. “For self-hatred turned outward, the drive to affirm one’s own existence and the urge to destroy the oppressor were as fundamental a part of the slaves’ daily existence.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The thought of this yearning crossed paths with the empirical world in colonial Saint Domingue in ways that would not only change the history of the Atlantic world but also the movement of global capital forever.

On the evening of 14 August 1791, a clandestine night gathering of slave representatives from the major plantations in colonial St. Domingue is said to have initiated the first stage of the Haytian Revolution. The meeting at the Lenormand de Mézy plantation in Morne-Rouge formed part of multiple weeks of plotting and conscious preparation by the slaves. The assembly, initially led by Boukman Dutty, Jeamon Bullet, Jean-François, and Georges Biassou, was also tasked to finally identify the day to initiate the uprising after weeks of planning. Upon reaching an agreement on the date, scheduled for a week later on 22 August, the plans for the insurrection were subsequently consecrated in a Voodoo ceremony in the wooded area known as Bwa Kayiman, not too far from the Lenormand plantation.

According to various accounts, the religious ceremony was led by the mambo Cécile Fatiman, a female Voodoo priestess, and by Boukman Dutty, who was not only a commandeur in the insurrectionary army, but who was also a Hougan, a Voodoo priest. Boukman, originally born in Senegambia, was originally enslaved in Jamaica but was later sold to a plantation owner in Saint Domingue due to his involvement in plotting a conspiracy on the island. During the ceremony, accounts indicate “that the high priestess raised her knife to kill a sacrificial black pig, the blood of which was passed round for all to partake.”Footnote ⁸⁰ As Fatiman initiates the calling of the deities, Boukman proceeds to exclaim an

And it is precisely such a call to arms, such a declaration of war against the colonial slave regime in St. Domingue that triumphed into the Haytian Revolution in 1804. Defeating five imperial armies, the secret assembly morphed into a global event that provided reemergence to Hayti while it also fatally altered the trajectory of French imperial presence and hegemonic ambition in the Americas. “It [also] removed the world’s richest colony and largest producer of sugar, coffee, and cotton from international commerce,”Footnote ⁸² as well as aided in the rise of British hegemony for the following 124 years, as well as pre-dawned the rise of the “Odious Commerce”Footnote ⁸³ of the Cuban sugar complex in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it restructured plantation-based commodity production in the United States particularly within the cotton production zones of the Lower South. The Louisiana Purchase not only struck an additional blow to the French empire, but also “brought in new lands west of the Mississippi and extended control of the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, providing a river and ocean transport network and tying together the various zones of the new republic.”Footnote ⁸⁴

The narrative of the Bwa Kayiman gathering demonstrates the centrality of religion to the Haytian Revolution. And yes, while the historicity of this story holds much debate within slave studies, at the very least it still demands rightful research attention to further examine, problematize, and clarify the historical record of the role of system of beliefs into the setting of limits to capitalist accumulation. Hence, Trinidadian scholar, C. L. R. James maintains in The Black Jacobins that, “Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In like fashion, Laurent Dubois argues that, “the story of the Bois-Caïman ceremony symbolizes the place religious practice had in the slave insurrection,” while it also “serves as shorthand for the complex and varied presence of religion in the planning and execution of the insurrection.”Footnote ⁸⁶

In like fashion, religions and systems of beliefs were unequivocally present or served as direct catalysts for slave revolts all throughout the Caribbean and the Americas during the Age of Revolutions. Other historical records spanning the hemisphere are the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot in the United States, the 1832 Demerara-Essequibo Rebellion in present day Guyana, or the well-known 1835 Malê Uprising in Salvador de Bahia which is regarded as the largest and most significant Islamic uprising in the Americas since European colonization.Footnote ⁸⁷ Future research awaits that would unearth even more historical moments wherein such a nexus took place within the regime of slavery but also, in a much broader scope, with other varying labor forms throughout the development of modern capitalism. I also am compelled to indicate that the task awaits to unearth and connect the lesser-known accounts or those that perhaps may only exist in oral memory but are yet to be placed into written record.

Nonetheless, further examples can be seen in the case of Cuba. The impact of the Haytian Revolution on the slave masters and colonial authorities throughout the Americas ran high with fears that similar unrest would be sparked in their respective locales.Footnote ⁸⁸ To such an end, as noted previously, Cuban colonial society was carpeted with slave unrest throughout the majority of the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, the specific character of some of the major conspiracies and rebellions between the 1825 and 1844 period seems to, at the very least, draw serious attention to the question of how and to what extent religion and, specifically varying African systems of beliefs, whether Carabalí, Bantu, Arará, Mina—and especially Lucumí, played a central role in slave agency. “There were at least eighteen documented cases of slave uprising involving groups of Lucumí slaves in the provinces of Havana and Matanzas in the first half of the nineteenth century.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Given the impact of the fall of the Oyo Empire in Africa, large troves of the enslaved after 1820 were destined to both Cuba and Brazil. In such a regard, a mixture of African ethnicities, knowledge structures, religious beliefs, and skills of warfare from the Bight of Benin equally made it across the Atlantic.

In the early Sunday morning of 12 July 1835, a group of over a dozen Lucumí slaves, who reached Cuba a mere two years prior in 1833 from Lagos on the vessel Negrito,Footnote ⁹¹ allegedly initiated an uprising in the community of El Horcón near the Puente de Chávez in the present-day Jesús María section of Havana. The insurrectionists, all members of the local Cabildo Lucumí Elló, were following orders from Hermenegildo Jáuregui, better known as “Tata” or “Taita” Hermenegildo. According to Deschamps Chapeaux, the slaves were dressed in all-white as a homage and request for guidance and protection from the Lucumí orisha, Obatalá, while Tata Hermenegildo, similarly clothed in all white, also carried a garrote and a horsetail, an Irukere, as a means of status.Footnote ⁹² The group, who also included a half dozen of Lucumí ladinos, were charged “with arming themselves and killing white people near the Puente de Chávez. This bridge was the heart of [the] El Manglar” community in the city and also stood a few blocks from the Cabildo Lucumí Elló.Footnote ⁹³ City wide panic soon erupted while the local members of the planter and elite class were receiving Sunday mass. The colonial authorities immediately deployed a cavalry detachment to apprehend the agitators. Thus, they were met across the bridge by Captain Manuel de Moya in an attempt to have the Lucumí practitioners arrested. In the confrontation, twenty-nine of the actors were killed and six were arrested, one of which was Tata Hermenegildo.Footnote ⁹⁴

The six detained were immediately subjected to judicial prosecution under Spanish colonial law. Based on archival documents, “according to criollo, José de los Santos Sotomayor, the Lucumí rebels were shouting, in the Lucumí language, “Havana mine, kill whites, white woman mine.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The Court, led by head prosecutor, Juan Bautista Velázquez, swiftly ruled that the “ ‘true leader’ was the negro Jáuregui, and his co-conspirators were Andrés Campos, Juan de Mata Gonzales, Agustin Lucumí, Clemente Dávila, and Fernando Lucumí.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Subsequently, all of the accused were promptly declared guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad, which was carried out on July 16, just four days after the initial insurrection.Footnote ⁹⁷ Moreover, as was customary order in colonial practices of social regulation in the slave regime, all six were decapitated and their heads displayed around the entire city as a reminder for future potential insurgents.Footnote ⁹⁸

Eight days later on 24 July 1835, the Capitan General of Cuba, Miguel Tacón y Rosique, officially informed the Spanish Crown that the Havana unrest “was caused by people who were all from the Lucumí nation.”Footnote ⁹⁹ As such, this particular event involving enslaved Africans and free people of color [mostly] all of Lucumí ethnic composition still holds much historical debate and interpretation within Cuban slave studies. The dominant academic interpretation has been that the actions did not contain an insurrectional character.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Even more so, the case study also raises to the forefront the matter of the tension of the historicization within existing scholarship between the ethnolinguistic origins of slaves, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the corresponding religious frameworks of each African ethnicity as described. Because of this, part of the task, in this context, is to historically anchor and clarify the connections between the various African ethnic practices—within all of their juxtapositions, complexities, and processes of transculturation—and the respective religion(s) in order to better identify the specific roles they each played within the actions of practitioners as they sought to challenge the slave regime in nineteenth century Cuba.

In such a way, perhaps a different historical understanding of the development of capitalism during this time period may be reached by specifically repositioning the analytical point of departure in a way that “we. . . put the enslaved human herself at the center of our analysis of the commodity form,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ however problematic and unaligned this may be. For this reason, let me be clear, a possible approximation or ability to further anchor our historical understanding of the development of capitalism, as a social relation, in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century, from the context of the slave regime as well as other forms of coerced labor, is through historically theorizing the resistance aspects of individuals through examining the respective epistemological frameworks and sacred thought systems with which people resisted their oppression. Such an episteme is what allowed laboring populations to make sense of their material and lived experience over time and space as well as through the intricacies, asymmetries, and non-fixed characteristics of bondage in all of its manifestations. Such lines of analysis will also unveil the complexities of the ways in which coloniality, writ large, has defined/confined our modes of thinking of religion, in particular, and hierarchized/infantilized/excluded acts of defiance from a historically informed theory of capitalist development. In regard to a better historical understanding of the power and influence that systems of belief and religious practices, in all of their “trans-acculturated”Footnote ¹⁰² forms, had on the resistance actions of enslaved Africans in Hayti, Cuba, Brazil, and other societies in the Americas then and now—much is yet to be done. Even more as to the question of the exact role of female religious leaders, like Cécile Fatiman at the start of the Haytian Revolution in 1791 or Carlota and Ferminia in the Triunvirato uprising in 1844 in Matanzas, Cuba as well as others who await archival discovery, there is still a missing chapter in the history of religion within slave resistances in the Americas.Footnote ¹⁰³

Invisible Structures: The Challenge of Slave Epistemologies to the Historiography of Slavery and the Temporality of Capital

Slavery, along with the varying forms of non-wage labor, as an integral part of the development of the colonial-capitalist world-economy needs to be re-contextualized in the studies of the development of capitalism. The debate on whether the slave labor form was non-capitalist or anti-capitalist shifts the attention away from engaging and further specifying the historicity of slave resistances in the colonial-capitalist world-economy. What is needed for a future research agenda in this regard is to better explicate the exact role that slave labor and resistances have played in the development of global capital while neither reducing such labor and resistance to academic categories of “culture” nor having either of them constructed as external to the realm of the economic.

The approach proposed in this brief analysis argues for identifying the limits of a theory of capital that, in general, does not consider the ethno-racial colonialized reality of the global accumulation of capital, and in particular, does not account for histories of capital and slavery: such inquiry needs to be anchored within a re-articulated and historically re-contextualized theory of capital. In this manner, the existing disjuncture between the histories and theories of capital and the histories and theories of slavery may be bridged. Addressing this void would allow and challenge us to re-historicize otherwise conventionally understood separate concepts of religion, frameworks of belief, politics, race, and class within the context of the historical specificities of slavery during the “Second Servitudes” in relation to the current operation of comparable coerced labor forms today. Opening up such a discussion will also allow us to better understand the material and “structures of everyday life” in ways that will allow us to re-assess current realities vis-à-vis capital and coerced labor in any form. That is to say, as Braudel describes in Structures of Everyday Life, “people will continue to grow corn and wheat” as history both moves along and is mutually constituted by the limits to the possible, both from below and above, but the “ways people eat, dress, or lodge, are never a matter of indifference.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

What is this history, and what of it has not been told? Moreover, if the movement of global capital contains cyclical rhythms and patterns, then what and how can we assess the movement of specific labor forms, slave labor in particular and highly coerced labor forms in general, within the movement of capital, structurally, then and now? What was it exactly in the nineteenth century that came to transform the stage and development of the capitalist world-economy and what are, using Kösick’s (1976) analysis, the constitutive parts/whole of such a structural shift?Footnote ¹⁰⁵ And of course, given the youth of this analytical path, it is very appropriate to keep in mind that “because we are here venturing, let me repeat into unexplored territory. . . the sources have to be individually discovered, and checked one by one.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Braudel also challenges us and suggests that this then means that we have to be open to the fact that “material life presents itself to us in anecdotal form of thousands and thousands of assorted facts.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As such, laborers—as labor—have cultures and these cultures create humanity. This humanity has a past, and such humanity has a consciousness that is neither evolutionary nor hierarchical yet warrants proper historical anchoring and theoretical place. For Braudel, such ideology and consciousness is a structure that operates in the historical “short-term” and whose patterns in the “long-term” have to be identified.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus, similar to Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Braudel maintains that there are long-term scale structures that create and embody social life and if capital is to be perceived as a social relation itself, then an understanding of such ideology and consciousness is indispensable to an understanding of a world-historical perspective of capital.

Opening a space for such an investigation will place into question and investigate the omitted histories, challenges, as well as contributions that varying labor forms, aside from the wage and slave form, have made to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world history. Ultimately, what is required are explorations of the varying accounts of the ways in which the resistances of ethno-racially subordinate labor and their corresponding systems of belief, in general, and of plantation slaves, in particular, have set limits to the modern colonial-capitalist world-economy. For this, the traditional identifiers of resistance need to be both expanded as well as historically grounded in specificity. Braudel, in Structures of Everyday Life argues that indeed the structures of how individuals made sense of their world (their “mental equipment”) are not easily measured, but this does not make these cosmologies and epistemologies any less structural.

In “Marx After Marxism,” Dipesh Chakrabarty contends that, insofar as the concrete aspects of labor embody alternate forms of envisioning the world and historical temporalities, the existing gap between the abstract and concrete aspects of labor is closed by capital through the use of coercive force.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus, coercion is used to reduce the differences between the concrete real and the abstract given that concrete labor represents in part a reluctant component of the temporality of capital. At the same time, concrete-labor “conforms to the temporal code within which ‘capital’ comes into being,Footnote ¹¹¹ but also violates it.”Footnote ¹¹² “The resistance (violation) it speaks of is something that can happen only within the time-horizon of capital while disrupting the unity of that time.”Footnote ¹¹³ As such, it is a dimension of labor that embodies other temporalities and suggests “other forms of worlding.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ And it is important to note that such forms of “worlding” include religious practices, as ritual is a way to engage, resist, and transform the world for specific purposes. For this reason, the contextualization of the systems of belief is a critical and indispensable component to better understanding the material lives of those subjected to varying labor processes throughout the development of capitalism in a way that would help better historicize the histories of capital and labor, i.e., the concrete aspects of labor.

It is this transcendent and non-existent-empirical-temporal reality that made resistant slave epistemologies metaphysical. Understanding this relationship between the metaphysical and the empirical-real is key to further historically acknowledging identifiers of resistance. The actual negation of rejection and opposition to the empirical reality of slavery is the metaphysical vision of another world, which is counter to and stands beyond this empirical reality. Robinson terms it the “negation of the negation in the world-system.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

In closing, carrying out the type of inquiry and re-assessment proposed above has certain implications to both academic analysis but also to the larger world at hand for the politics inherent to this analytic is keenly important. The conceptual and methodological implications for social analysis, as suggested here, open up and expand the conventional understanding of how to conduct and carry out world-historical sociological analysis. Combining the arguments of Karel KösikFootnote ¹¹⁶ and TrouillotFootnote ¹¹⁷ allows us to better historicize these multiple challenges. In addition, such a calling would otherwise contain certain political implications for how to make sense of the history of slave resistance against capital, as well for today’s political terrain regarding comparable forms of present-day labor unrest. For that reason, how and in what ways can this highly contested ongoing process of “primitive accumulation” be understood in terms of how it operates and how it is connected to the juridical and political structures of social regulation and labor formation on a world scale today, especially its growing, highly-coercive manifestations? We must be able to fully comprehend or more thoroughly understand these histories of resistance in order to better construct intellectual-academic and socio-political strategies against unequal exchange on a global level.

For far too long, the history of slave resistances and of other non-wage labor forms and their corresponding epistemological structures—as a structure—has been omitted from the discussion and theorization of world-changing labor challenges to the capitalist world-economy. As long as this continues, the valuable insights from significant parts of the world’s laboring populations remain on the sidelines in discussions and research on how to find ways to change the current and historical movement of global capital even less develop a belief, like enslaved Africans held during the Bwa Kayiman in Hayti, that it is possible.