Robin Blackburn on the History of Slavery and Capitalism in the Americas

How was slavery defeated in the Americas? In this interview Robin Blackburn discusses the key ideas and arguments in his new work, The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888. He is interviewed by Kevin Ochieng Okoth—a writer and researcher based in London, part of the Salvage Editorial Collective, and author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics.

The Reckoning traces the “Second Slavery” that surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil after the Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean. By 1860, more than 6 million captives of African descent toiled to produce the cotton, sugar and coffee craved by global consumers.Robin Blackburn highlights the role of abolitionism in driving Confederate slaveholders into the apparent escape-hatch of secession, and how racial oppression was later reconfigured by “Black Codes” and Jim Crow.

Robin Blackburn is the author of many works of history on slavery, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery and The American Crucible. You can find all his work here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/authors/blackburn-robin?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_video&utm_content=robin_blackburn

The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888 is out now: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3115-the-reckoning?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_video&utm_content=robin_blackburn
 
See also—Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics by Kevin Ochieng Okoth: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2896-red-africa?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_video&utm_content=robin_blackburn

00:00 Intro
00:45 The genesis of the ‘Slavery in the Americas’ project
06:27 Capitalism and slavery
10:21 Slavery and indebtedness
14:35 The American Civil War and abolition
17:36 Abolition of the slave trade didn’t abolish slavery
18:24 The Second Slavery: US, Cuba and Brazil
20:50 Credit in slavery
26:10 The Fugitive Slave and antislavery movements
30:30 The Civil War’s impact on Cuba and Brazil
35:11 Brazil, racialisation and fascism
37:04 Racial capitalism as a term
42:18 Specialisation of production

Welcome to the Verso YouTube I’m joined today by Robin Blackburn to discuss his new book The Reckoning um the Reckoning is the final volume the five-part history of slavery in the Americas uh including other titles the making of New World slavery the overthrow of colonial slavery of course the Reckoning the American

Crucible Marx and Lincoln is also part of that Series right these volumes together kind of give us a really good picture of the central role that slavery played in the making of the modern world it’s an immense work of historical scholarship um that took a lot of I’m

Sure time dedication and really really hard work so I was wondering kind of what what brought you to this project initially and did it have anything to do with your political convictions at the time very much so uh I should make clear though that um I didn’t realize it was

Going to be five volumes when I started the project um of course I did have in mind that it should cover the whole of the Americas not just just to focus on Britain or Europe or or North America but uh look at Cuba and Brazil and Spanish America and Dutch America um

So that was part of the project to begin with I suppose it came to me the need for new approaches here to British Colonial hisory hist um came well I sort of studied history at Oxford and the lsse MH and um I was able to pick up some critical points from LSC from

Historians that had been at work there but really I was inspired really by the work of um CLR James the Trinidadian historian and political activist and his tremendous book The Black Jacobins showed me that there was a whole other history there which had been neglected uh when I started

Off James’s book was not actually in print and oh really so it was quite an effort to get hold of copies at that time but what one saw with black jacket cin is uh an an awareness that uh of the peculiar forms of class struggle generated by a capitalist version of

Slavery or a a version of slavery that was in transition to capitalism not fully capitalist yet but with many of the essential ingredients of a capitalist system um the the first book The that I actually published was the overthrow of colonial slavery and then I wrote subsequently the um the making of New

World slavery so it’s a bit odd to have it around that way but um that’s because I it made sense to me to look at resistance and Revolution and the limits and the Coalition of class forces and social forces which put in question the very existence of of slavery

Um I I was very aware that um the slave owners were amongst the wealthiest people on the globe in the 18th and 19th century they were having a huge impact on Europe and above all British path to industrialization as Eric Williams argued in his book capitalism and slavery which

Was very novel in its research and which was also very well written and um and conceptualized so um that was and I was trying to Grapple with the nature of the colonial slave regime on the one hand and its contradictions and on the other hand the um internal Dynamic of of capitalism

Itself uh I suppose I was aware from the beginning that um capitalism had allowed the development and in eventually encourag the development of a horrendous system of slave exploitation and um eventually formal chattle slavery was to be abolished but capitalism didn’t lose that capacity to generate large-scale

Exp exploitative system and to give it a a racial connotation and um intensification which has left a poisonous Legacy to the societies where slav slavery especially the slavery of the Americas is concerned so today in Black lives matter in North America in the United States but also it was interesting that that great

Protest it did sparof support and resonated in other countries countries especially Britain France Spain Belgium partly too Bel Belgium a lot uh although the Belgian regime was in Congo in Africa yeah exactly that Legacy which is there today in the politics of the United States and

Brazil as well as Britain and um and as you say Belgium I said at the outset that but um there was a capitalist powerful capitalist element in the spread of slavery in the 17th 18th centuries I said I didn’t think it was fully capitalist exactly yeah for a

Number of reasons but an important one would be that a lot of the economic activity of the slaves was not concentrated solely in under the direction of the Planters but was um under the slaves own I that they they produce most of the food that they at and that sustained them and it’s

True that there was some dried fish and dried meat would supplement these Russians but the basic corn maze cu SAA cereal crops of one sort or another were produced by the slaves in their own garden plots and there was a sort of unfortunate I mean what the Planters were really doing is

Starving the workers in the field but then giving them quite making sure they didn’t I mean they actually the intake of galleries was quite considerable in the slave diet but with a lot of it being provided by their own hunting and trapping for example and all in their

Own time of course in their own time and and developing elements of a culture the stories they would be telling and music um very powerful cultures of resistance which became important later on because really the the assassination of Lincoln was something pretty dramatic and created a very dangerous

Situation with uh Ultra reactionary new president in the shape of Johnson and um and the growth of white supremacist gangs like the KKK infusing an element in the culture of the United States which um I mean you had Jim Crow and and the lynching but also you did get some resistance to

That um coming out of and the so the picture is really very complex and um because what was happening in Louisiana was not at all the same as what was happening in Massachusetts or what was happening uh in Georgia I go into this more in Abraham and Lincoln and Carl marks that

Little a booklet really but I’d also try to put in some of the documentation that one would need with the second slavery with the ability of the Planters to realize larger loans I mean really what was happening is that dimension of the slave regime was non-c capitalist where it said in a

Bankrupt case you you you have to protect the Planters MH regime his estate the move from that to allowing loans to be based on on I mean that nearly doubling of the loan capacity of the planter was a huge boost yeah of course um a huge perhaps almost uncontrollable boost sometimes it took

Them further than was really good for them those Planters I see that as being a an important move to Greater capitalist content um and greater capitalist Dynamic um and exposure to things like recession and tied into the the trade cycle and the economic cycle of boom and bust mhm uh um so

I I think that’s an important theme uniting the two halves of the book because the first half is really about the capitalist character and the colonialist character of the second slavery of the neoc colonialist category I I just was wondering in terms of the concept of capitalism MH

Whether it’s actually quite close to that of indebtedness it doesn’t have all the same dimensions but it has a lot of them I talk about slaveholders which applies to the early part of the earlier parts of the book and then slave owners for the second more destructive phase because I think they’re more

Exposed to commodification and more exposed to predatory lending but I think I think in capitalism as such debt is pretty important I I would like to clarify something about um the term I use use the second slavery this is a concept which has been used by historians of slavery above all those

Working not principally on North America but also on Spanish America and Portuguese America Cuba and Brazil being cases in point and really from the beginning I was approaching the study of slavery from other perspectives not the great narrative tradition of British abolitionism but one that was good see that the challenge

Came from sandang from Haiti and that the timing of abolition of the Atlantic slave trade was very much L to the progress of the Asian revolution in the early 19th century I think it’s interesting the way you said that you kind of started out the project with uh

The study of uh basically the end of the or the overthrow of colonial slavery and kind of the narrative around um abolition in Britain has often you know for a long time that was U partly Eric Williams’s project is kind of pointing out that it wasn’t just a parliamentary

Kind of debates about abolitionism or abolitionist movements in Britain but rather that there were these uh Myriad kind of social forces that did lead to abolition in the end um and I mean I mean we’ll start maybe with the first of these events but yeah you’ve already spoken about the Haitian revolution

Being kind of a key event in the in the process of abolition Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833 the slave trade still or slavery still flourished in the territories you mention here in the US Cuba and Brazil I kind of wondered if you could talk a

Little bit about about the uh US Civil War as kind of almost a defining event in ending that kind of second wave of slavery that um persisted even though um it had orig officially been abolished yeah I think the a key element here is to look at what happened to

Slave property uh the conception of in slaving human beings created alarm amongst English workers a point that CLR James explores in Black Jacobins and um a coalition developed which included some quite conservative forces but it did eventually Focus what what was going to make a difference was not moral suasion

Or but attacks on slavery as property and if you didn’t tackle that you weren’t going to be able to do much about the slave system and in a way the English abolitionism tried to abolish the slave trade imagining that that would lead to the end of the slave system which proved to

Be a big mistake um Wilbur Force in 1811 was attacking the idea that there should be any attempt to abolish slavery he said what we’ve got to do is abolish the slave trade and if we do that it will by gradual and inexorable logic lead to the suppression

Of slavery now that turned out to be completely wrong I think this comes out very very clearly in in in the Reckoning it’s um what kind of were the differences I guess for example in the US which I found really interesting kind of that you had um that the abolition of

The slave trade itself didn’t lead to the abolition of slavery there are various factors that played into this but one of those was um kind of the US uh South’s ability to have a self-reproducing population of enslaved uh enslaved people people for example while in Cuba and Brazil I think you

Mentioned that um they were more reliant on kind of actual captives from the West African Coast being shipped into um being shipped into work because the conditions were so bad also that um the enslaved people couldn’t the enslaved Works couldn’t reproduce um themselves so that that definitely did that have

Anything to do with that yes the three main territories where the second slavery flourished mhm the US South Cuba and Brazil the they were survivors from the age of Revolution the age of Revolution roughly 17 1783 to maybe 1848 destroyed the first slavery which is the slavery of the European Colonial powers

With the Haitian revolution playing a key role in Thea in the case of the um United States Cuba and Brazil they’d survived abolitionism they managed to develop a less vulnerable type of slave regime in which slaves were not the actual majority of the population or of the workforce even of the workforce they

Were in a very important component of of it but not a majority and the the difficulty in s deang and in Jamaica had been that SL the the free population the free white population was only a tenth of the total population slaves are about 80% and free people of color uh the the

Rest they also managed to harness technology more dynamically M and so that element in the formula of the second slavery was important Recent research has emphasized the how the productivity of Labor greatly expanded and especially as the Planters acquired more financial means of borrowing money and applying new technologies which they did

New technologies of a financial description and new technologies of production just following up on that could you speak a little bit more about the role of kind of credit in this late flourishing of slavery and the US Cuba and Brazil because as I read it that’s a

Central kind of claim of the Reckoning kind of the the role that credit played in the ability of these kind of Planters in these three territories to um or how it encourage capitalist accumulation in these three territories yeah that’s a very good question um and um basically what had held back

The slave plantations of the Americas is the Roman law which really Latin law or the Latin model which stemmed from the epoch of the late Roman Empire were uh to protect the estate owners the slave owners of the ancient world the principle had been established that the slave crew could never be

Offered as collateral Al as Security in alone so that um what this measure was designed to remove the Menace of greedy creditors destroying the estate without the patience to wait what was needed was what they sometimes call Patient capital and um this regime was changed first by the English Colonial Colonial officials of

The 18th century in 17 32 there was a a colonial debts act which said slaves can be offered as collateral and this of course in turned out to double the amount of loans that they could contract it led to a long boom in it led to a fe fearsome

Intensification of slavery of gang labor on the in the in the fields the second slavery managed to harness a form of capital which was secured against the slave crew this led to a quite feverish growth of Plantation slavery and speculative frenzies in both in London and in New

York this provided the context for addressing one of the questions that we have which is why une Earth did the slave owners of the United States who’ carved out for themselves a very strong position in US Society uh with slaveholders dominating US foreign policy and dominating internal domestic policy that

Created the sorts of conditions and divisions the growth of an anti-slavery sentiment and which was created leading to um the decision to secede from the union by by the US Planters or the majority of the Southern Planters you mentioned it’s the kind of the emergence of a credit fueled boom in these Plantation

Economies of the US South Cuba and Brazil did that eventually have anything to do with kind of the decline of the second slavery or the fall of the second slavery I think it its decisive impact was on the American Civ a war the secession by the southern slave owners which

Alone created the conditions where they could be challenged M otherwise it was going to be I mean if there were wait for peaceful means to abolish slavery that would have been very unlikely to succeed the slave owners were never willing to really give up in the United States the British Planters had received

Compensation the French Revolution had abolished slavery because it was willing to see the end of slave property so and The crucial point in the American the unfolding of struggles around slavery in the United States is that it created conditions where Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could make sense so you

Allocated a Central role to the to anti-slavery movement um and the kind of coalitions that it Formed to resist the slave or slavery um in in the US particularly um could you talk a little bit about were there kind of particular forms of resistance that enslaved people

Engaged in in coll in kind of conjunction with the kind of birth of the political anti-slavery movement um and how did those two forms of resistance or relate to each other yes I think a key element that his historians are now bringing to the four to explain

The overcoming of slavery and the growth of anti-slavery sentiment uh among the white population as well as as well as the enslaved population and the people of color the theme which has acquired greater prominence is that of the Fugitive Slave the Fugitive Slave of course is the slave who runs away

Uh hides out in the mountains and the swamps and provides a pole of reference to all all enslaved including communication between those who are in the mountains and swamps and those who are agitating in the towns and the Metropolis um so the instances of this would be well

First the slave narratives which were very important for creating a political movement Frederick Douglas is a key person in this field and um I devote quite a lot of space to develop showing the impact he had um and of course the slave narratives I mean Frederick Douglas wrote three versions of his

Autobiography which were used in campaigns and he’d go around tirelessly lecturing yeah I think you mentioned some of the the number of kind of tour dates he was doing in a particular year and it’s I mean it’s a grueling kind of tour schedule for to to advocate for

Abolition yeah and all of this is creating great alarm in the South just having someone openly going around denouncing the slave system and and the fact that it was coming from someone who well actually formerly remained a slave until 1846 or thereabouts rley explaining this willingness to

Seced a lot of it had it fear of the Fugitive Slave was a very powerful element in that and even in uh as moderate a work as Uncle Tom’s Cabin the author is looking at this the Fugitive Slave and measuring the vulnerability of the regime slave regime to that

Um and the theme comes up again in Cuba and in Brazil the testimony and witness of slave fugitives was very important in depriving the slave owning Elite of legitimacy and it destroyed any idea that the slaves were happy under slavery that would just be manifestly ludicrous and so it produces this sharper

Polarization and it provides a theme where the slave and the black activists can reach out and construct a new coalition so um kind of from this pivotal event the American Civil War um could you take us through uh how that kind of affected um the situation in uh Cuba and Brazil

And how that kind of affected the situation of the Planters in in those uh in those two countries and also kind of the Elites in those countries and what kind of about the American Civil War made it untenable for um Brazilian and Cuban Planters to continue engaging in in slavery

Yeah the the American Civil War if it had just remained a civil war between two sections with Southern nationalism southern white nationalism versus unionism slavery might never have been destroyed uh James Oaks has recently argued that and I’ve cited that in the book um and I think even Lincoln himself was aware

That short of freeing the slaves there was no other way of winning the war at least that’s what he said sometimes I think it’s interesting that the first International the working men’s International Association which marks was a member of uh they it would be recollected wrote a letter

To Lincoln congratulating him on the Emancipation Proclamation and actually used that as a solidarity movements with the freeing of the SL lives in North America as a element for building um a socially radical political force in the United States as well as in Europe and in Britain there were about

150 branches of the international in North America so it’s rather extraordinary that the United States which has been so resistant to socialist or Marxist ideas actually and at this period there was even a man like Charles sta one of the editors of the um Herald Tribune who signed up marks to

Write in the end over 400 articles for Herald Tri Herald Tribune which at that point was a new type of Journalism reaching a a very broad public maybe as many as a million people Dana also later became the assistant secretary for war responsible for promoting radical abolitionists to important commands in the Union

Army and of course it was elements like that that also panicked the southern Gentry they thought these subversives were running a mock and that um their Union if if they remained in the union there they were going to be destroyed I should say however that at conferences on the second

Slavery one in particular in Brazil of a few years back about five years I think I did ask the assembled historians including several dozen Cubans and and Brazilians whether they thought slavery could have been destroyed in their countries if the Civil War War had gone the other way mhm

And none of them thought that it could have been they they felt an integral connection which reached out Beyond borders would you like to maybe talk a little bit about um the kind of different conceptions of race that emerged on the different uh kind of in the different Plantation economies so

Kind of uh the difference between I guess the racial dynamics that emerged in the US South with a very binary white black kind of racial classification versus kind of Brazil and Cuba where there were many more different forms um of uh ethnicity and linguistic differences that were arranged in

Different hierarchies all that you say is true but it is rather terrifying how this component in Brazil Andrew singer in his articles in you left review about bolsonaro I mean it’s astonishing that but even today there’s a plantation group in Brazilian politics getting about 10% of the vote which are quite

Fascist and bolsonaro has been getting much more than just 10% he been getting nearly a half does Brazilian capitalism need fascism I don’t think it does actually I think that’ be a very wrong-headed conclusion mhm and the Workers Party and Lula I mean the they’re inadequate in a number of

Ways that singer goes into but it is true that um it creates the basis for cross racial alliances I mean we’d be delighted as something like PT and belula existed in United States and the final part of your book you talk a little bit about how um after

Kind of the end of slave of New World slavery there’s the you know kind of the uh Berlin Conference 8485 marks the shift where the colonial Powers then all the former Colonial powers in some cases in Latin America turn their gaze towards uh the African continent as a new kind

Of site of lab exploitation where they can kind of colonial regime exactly so a new type of colonial regime based on Force labor in right or returning to what I was me trying mentioning earlier that’s kind of when the Congo or the Belgian role in the in what is now the

Democratic repu Republic of Congo becomes becomes very Central um do you think the kind of concept which I think you use in the book some sometimes the concept of like a racial capitalism is useful for kind of analyzing that kind of long-term the long-term effects I guess of

Um of Plantation slavery in the Americas and kind of how we can then connect it to that later Colonial project and how perhaps we can connect it to um some of the forms of exploitation and racialized exploitation that are going on today I think that’s interesting to

Point out that element in the conclusion would be good and I would um I’ve noticed I’ve used the concept G racial capitalism a few times myself MH but I haven’t given it devoted attention that I think it perhaps merits I’ve read Katherine Hall’s very interesting contribution in history

Workshop journal on the concept but I’m not sure whether it’s doing the work of explanation that we need do do you use that concept I mean I think you wrot a piece in the lrb didn’t you yes exactly um kind of about Cedric Robinson’s uh Cedric

Robinson’s work on I mean I’ve got his book up there and I was reading it going right back 20 years but I’m not sure whether it persuaded me of yeah of the usefulness of that of that Concept in this particular or to analyze this particular I mean I think what’s

Important there is his defense of his explanation of black Marxism and I think that um you know he does there’s arguments there whether in the end one talks about racial capitalism I I still think I’ve got work to do so although I’ve written five volumes there might be a six there

There it may turn out not to be anything more than a an article mhm but I do think there quite some loose ense there that I’ll need to attend to certainly if you look globally does global capitalism require NEOS slaveries I think late capitalism will give rise to those

Ideologies and is quite alarming the extent to which they’ve developed in the wake of you know the authoritarian populism but I I don’t think these in capitalisms require that they they have to go back to Prior forms like chattle slavery I don’t think they do and I think the history of

Abolition shows that there are some currents there and there’s something new about that has to be addressed I mean if you just start off with 1884 like you said I think it’s very true that what was happening there is a mutation of the form of racial domination and instead of slavery just being

Shattered it re formed in vicious shape and racialism was a common theme in colonialism and today there’s been a globalization around themes of immigration which has had an extraordinary impact in Western Europe in Eastern Europe in Latin America MH in India not so much in China but who

Knows the Chinese regime is quite tight if ever it develops there forms of Chinese nationalism which have been quite reactionary another interesting factor I thought that came up in the book was um specialization so competitive Advantage um would you like to talk a little bit about that or that is another

Capitalistic feature I mean the context in which I think Spa the specialization of production uh Brazil with coffee the US South with cotton and Cuba with sugar really the evolution of these different Commodities uh and their prominence in in different parts of the new world especially in Brazil all suggests that there

Is something like capitalist comp competition going on between in the Rivalry between these zones I mean sometimes the word capitalism is tossed around in a rather rhetorical way but I think it can mean quite specific mechanisms and like the mechanism of foreclosure and so forth um I I should say I’ve been quite

Influenced in my thinking about that by John CLE who has an article um in Social Science History which looks at this question of credit and posits incre its increasing importance and he’s done a very thorough study of foreclosures in South Carolina in a 20-year period and finding literally thousands of these contracts

It’s Eide that in the in the book right I’m glad you’ve noticed that CU I feel it’s almost got lost but if you write a 500 page book then it’s difficult not to lose something you know yeah of course it’s it’s part of just to put it slightly in the wrong

Place your questions enable me to bring out some overarching issues yeah and the way they connection and to produce a narrative of How It’s survivors of the um a Evolution and then there’s the moral autonomous and more technologically advanced development and organization of slavery and then there are themes like

The Fugitive Slave and the importance of um of a new Financial regime with with the use of the slave crew as an element of security I mean I think that’s quite fundamental really if the slaves the slaves are becoming part of the capitalism I mean it’s Lancy Fraser is

Recently written a book cannibalistic capitalism and um I think she’s probing at some of the same issues there’s a woman who’s just written a book on British colonialism which I refer to there which I I feel when book comes along like that and it deals oh is it the Caroline

Caroline Elkins one yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean I mean a fantastic book and it’s yeah that’s tremendous and so I feel like I don’t have to regurgitate all that I can just refer to her book you know yeah yeah I think I was just

Mentioning it cuz it was in the in the afterward it is in the afterward yeah the afterward is about how difficult it is to write up and I’ll give it