Sell Zach - Trouble of the World

T his book returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States (183365) to address a long-standing trouble in the field of empire studies: the relationship between slavery and empire within capitalism. During this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. Britain waxed fat from this outflow and helped finance U.S. slavery while looking toward its empire to meet the bar U.S. slavery set. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. U.S. slavery provided the raw material for metropolitan Britains explosive manufacturing growth and inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root from the Atlantic world to Asia and the Pacific.

Passed in 1833 by Britains parliament, the Act for the Abolition of Slavery ended the enslavement of 800,000 people across the British Empire from the Caribbean to Canada to Mauritius while exempting India, Sri Lanka, and Saint Helena from its provisions. By 1865, enslaved people in the United States brought down slavery in the midst of the American Civil War, resulting in the immediate end of slavery for 4 million people. Because slavery regimes were being toppled and because colonial subjects and enslaved people from India to Jamaica to the United States revolted against colonial occupation and exploitation, this epoch was also defined by racist and imperialist reaction. Slaveholders, colonial bureaucrats, factory owners, rural settlers, politicians, and wage workers seeking protection in whiteness all struggled to extend capitalisms lease on lives.

There was a terrible convergence between U.S. slavery and British imperial expansion, providing a new proving ground for the elaboration of projects toward dispossession within the changing realities of global capitalism. U.S. slavery plantations provided raw materials that drove British manufacturing forward, with slaveholders responding to demands created by slaverys location in the world market. Liverpool shipping, Manchester manufacturing, and London finance all together sustained the demand for U.S. slaveryproduced commodities. Across the British Empire, politicians, colonial officials, and settlers sought to reshape imperial rule and occupation to allow commodities to pour out of colonies to match or surpass the economic dynamism of U.S. slavery. Technological modifications in factories and on plantations responded to meet the demands of the world market. U.S. slaveholders and Britains manufacturers relentlessly sought ways to maximize their profits globally. This terrible convergence was part of the increasingly integrated, coordinated world of global capitalism.

Three interrelated tendencies within capitalisms production of, and operation through, racial domination and colonial occupation came to define this era. The first tendency entailed projects to perpetuate plantation society through the elaboration of new forms of coercion. The third tendency was defined by projects to racially arrange, dispossess, and dominate work through the capitalist marketplace. This last tendency operated through the making of a false choice, drawn starkly in colonial and post-slavery contexts, between the compulsion to work for wages or produce commodities to sell on the marketplace or otherwise suffer from destitution. Together, these three tendencies were essential to mid-nineteenth-century capitalism and remain accumulated within the structures of everyday life.

Such tendencies within capitalism spilled over national boundaries and flowed across empires, converging in the contradictory spaces of colonial projects. U.S. slavery itself was essential to the expansion of the United Sates as an empire-state. These state-backed settler projects enabled slaveholders to gain further political power through U.S. settler slavery, a racial, colonial, and class-based relationship of dominance.

At the same time, Victorian Britain asserted global economic dominance through the expansion of manufacturing and finance along with the growth of overseas trade. British manufacturers, politicians, and colonial officials were just some of those who drew lessons from U.S. slavery to understand how to try to make the empire work for them.

U.S. slavery expansion was supported by Britains dominant position within global capitalism and by demand for slavery-produced commodities. By 1860, U.S. slavery accounted for nearly 75 percent of U.S. domestic exports, with much of these exports destined for Britain.

U.S. slaverys booming but combustible growth and Britains continued profits inspired new British imperial imaginations of what forms of colonial conquest were possible. British metropolitan society fashioned new obligations onto India, the British Caribbean, and Australia where colonial projects unfolded with aims to match or surpass the economic dynamism of U.S. slavery without replicating settler slavery itself. Colonial India was meant to be remade into both Britains cotton field and rice swamp. Workers who could not find jobs in Britains shuttered factories were expected to become settlers in Britains colonies where they were to grow cotton, buy textiles, and remain forever. Yet, British colonial projects and fantasies of unbridled success encountered limits set by U.S. slaverys structural advantages within nineteenth-century capitalism. These limits frustrated Britains capitalists, settlers, and merchants, who all saw their profits set back by U.S. slaverys dominance. The limits to empire further disappointed Atlantic abolitionists who promoted the possibility of emancipation through capitalism based upon increased colonial commodity production to outstrip U.S. slavery. U.S. slaveholders feared diminished significance should a part of the British Empire surpass their cotton or rice plantations as occurred with the shift in indigo cultivation from South Carolina to eastern India.