Aaron Berman: You open the book with a set of studies of planter intellectuals. You present Richard Ligon as a precursor to classical political economy; by calculating the pressures of competition and accumulation as they affected planters, he offered strategies oriented towards improvement, a category whose centrality to both indigenous dispossession and capitalist slavery in the New World you demonstrate. Your second chapter presents George Washington as a planter theorist of time and value who brought the practically realized abstractions governing the plantation to consciousness for his class. Finally, you turn to E. G. Wakefield, whom Marx had parodically shown to be the bourgeoisie’s own discoverer of the unnatural and coercive character of capitalist accumulation. How did you arrive at this particular trio of figures and concepts (improvement, abstraction, coercion) that subvert the dominant narrative of the history of political economy?
David McNally: Triangulating these three figures allows us to see the modern constellation of colonialism, enslaved labor, commodity production, and the integrated plantation at the heart of Atlantic capitalism. First, Richard Ligon, who was both a plantation manager and a writer, takes us to the birth of the modern commodity-producing plantation complex in Barbados. George Washington, a major slaveholding planter in his own right, then brings us to the interface of war, Indigenous dispossession, capitalism, and slaveholding in the US South. Finally, E. G. Wakefield, a celebrated author and colonial official, expresses these relations via a liberal political economy of British colonialism and bonded labor. In the triangulation of these figures, we discern a project of building “improved” agrarian capitalism with bonded labor in the New World.
Taken together, these three figures offer a rich, empirically grounded overview of the “factories in the field” that fueled the plantation system. Furthermore, in reading their texts—memoirs, letters, account books, land surveys, published works—we detect the technologies of power and coercion that subtended plantation capitalism: whips, bells, clocks, account books, maps, improved seed strains, and new machinery. These, of course, are all technologies of abstraction. Clocks were devices for imposing the rule of abstract time upon labor processes, just as account books treated every hour of labor in the fields, mills, and boiling and curing houses as quantitatively identical. With all this in view, it is impossible to consider classical political economy to be a doctrine of human freedom.
Wakefield, who deployed the principles of liberal economics to defend colonial slavery, was widely embraced by classical political economists of his day. Yet what Wakefield showed is that there are two means by which a liberal market economy can be made to work: by dispossessing the majority of land so that they are economically coerced into working for capitalist employers; or, where land is abundant and accessible, by dragooning them into such labor by means of bondage. At a higher level of theoretical explication than either Ligon or Washington, but entirely consistent with their commitments, Wakefield demonstrates the inherent violence and coercion of the capitalist mode of production.