McNally’s
first major contribution is his definition of slave labour on sugar and cotton
plantations in the Americas as commodity producing labour. Unlike Spanish and
Portuguese colonialism, which extended feudal social relations in its focus on
gold and silver mines, Britain focused on production processes and extended its
agricultural capitalism to the ‘new world’. ‘What emerged in Barbados between
1640 and 1680 was qualitatively distinct: agro-industrial production of
commodified sugar by enslaved gangs of African descent, working on giant
estates under military-type discipline’ (PP.21-2). Slave labour was, thus, an
integrated part of the emerging capitalist mode of production. ‘The classic
methods of large-scale commodity production by slaves … were created on the
estates of English colonies – first in Barbados, then Jamaica’ (P.40). Instead
of understanding slave plantations as backward based on outdated production
methods, McNally regards them as part of capitalist modernity. ‘In their
embrace of liberal property rights, scientific agriculture, and an
Enlightenment commitment to natural science, planters were in and of capitalist
modernity’ (P.62).
Second,
and as a logical consequence of treating slaves as commodity producing labour,
slaves are regarded similarly to wage-labour as variable capital by McNally,
producing surplus value through their surplus labour, i.e. the time they work
for free beyond the ‘wages’ they receive. McNally dedicates a full chapter to
the ‘wages’ of slavery. He makes clear that the food and shelter slaves
received can be understood as wages, with slaves at times also bargaining over
larger allocations (P.138). And as he demonstrates in a host of empirical
examples, even the payment of ‘wages’ was not uncommon. ‘None of this is meant
to suggest that bondpeople were primarily wage earners. But it is to insist –
in opposition to doctrinaire identifications of wage labor with freedom – that
work for wages was part of the experience of at least hundreds of thousands of
people [who] were chattel property’ (P.122).
Third,
McNally reaffirms that the emergence and further development of capitalism
depended on the slave plantations in the Americas, while the slave plantations
themselves were firmly located within the structural pressures of the global
political economy. The ‘pressure on planters to meet the competitive demands
transmitted by the world market ratcheted up: to expand the scale of
production, intensify work processes, and boost the productivity of labor’
(P.166). The general law of value, the compulsion of the world market drove the
development towards industrial slavery in the late 18th, early 19th
century. ‘Railways, steamboats and steamships, canals, and the telegraph
conquered space, linked markets, and sped up the circulation of goods and
laborers. In so doing, they also integrated commodity and capital markets as
never before, making possible a truly global price system’ (P.225). This, in
turn, facilitated a credit market discipline, to which slaveowners too were
submitted, compelled to innovate constantly their commodity production (P.228).
Fourth, McNally importantly asserts that even slaves have agency resisting exploitation in their everyday lives as well as through broader uprisings. People are never only victims. ‘Every hour of every workday plantation managers struggled with bonded workers over absenteeism, the pace of work, labor discipline, breaks, food provision, and more’ (P.140). At times, slaves fought over improved living conditions, better clothes. At other times, resistance resulted in full scale insurrection. ‘Nothing compared to the scale of arson that accompanied the revolution in Haiti (1792 – 1804), when hundreds of plantations and buildings burned to the ground’ (P.165). Of course, unlike wage labourers, who can go on strike, slaves had to escape to withdraw their labour. However, resisted they did!
Finally, McNally
highlights the continuing implications of slavery for racial capitalism today.
‘Drenched in the afterlife of genocide and slavery, our trembling present
demands an accounting with the “insane will to mass murder” that continues to
haunt humanity in the epoch of racial capitalism’ (P.247). It is especially the
genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people, which makes
these words ring true.
I do
have one point of criticism, though. Does McNally perhaps exaggerate the role
of these slave plantations and thus the role of slave labour in global
capitalism? Is he perhaps in danger of making the periphery of capitalism into
the core? The following lengthy quote helps me to demonstrate my argument:
‘In Jamaica, the
average sugar estate had 99 bonded workers by the early 1740s. By 1834, more
than 60 percent of Jamaican sugar estates contained bonded workforces of more
than 200. The same was true of the British colony of Demerara, where in 1813 40
percent of all estates contained more than 200 enslaved workers; a good number
had 400 or more. Yet in England, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,
workplaces of this size would have been exceptional. As late as 1830,
considerably more English workers toiled in homes, small workshops, and on
farms than in factories or mills. Even in Britain’s cotton mills at the time,
the average workforce was about 175 people, fewer than the typical Caribbean
sugar plantation sixty years earlier’ (P.100).
I
live in Nottingham in the UK, close to the Derwent Valley, which is one of the
birthplaces of the industrial revolution. It is in Cromford that Richard
Arkwright built the world’s first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill
in 1771. Arkwright’s first mill initially employed about 200 workers. ‘By the
time his second Cromford mill was operational in 1777, the workforce had risen
to 800’ (Stanford
2000/2022: 43).
Further
down the river from Cromford were the cotton mills of Belper by the Strutt
family. ‘By 1833, the Belper mills alone employed some 2000 workers’ (You and Tertzakian
2025: 170)
making them the largest industrial complex in the world (Visit Peak
District & Derbyshire).
Why
is this important? It is not necessarily the difference in quantity of people
employed, which is crucial. It is the quality of the way production is
organised around wage labour and the private ownership or control of the means
of production, which is decisive. It is due to this way of how production is
organised that a number of key structuring conditions of the capitalist social
relations of production are generated. First, the capitalist mode of production
is enormously dynamic. Because capitalists must constantly compete with each
other for market share, there is a general drive to technological innovation.
Nevertheless, producing constantly more with fewer workers employed regularly
results in a crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation. Capitalists
desperately struggle to find profitable investment opportunities for their
super profits, while more and more workers are unable to find employment.
These
crises do not automatically result in the collapse of capitalism. The key,
structural dynamic is capitalism’s constant search for new markets and cheaper
labour elsewhere in order to regain competitiveness. It is this structuring
conditions which underpins capitalism’s relentless drive towards outward
expansion. Without acknowledging the centrality of wage labour, we cannot
understand why capitalism expanded across the world. I agree with McNally,
slave labour was commodity producing, but arguably it was only slave labour
because ‘free’ wage labourers were not available. Hence the need to draw on
black slaves from Africa instead. In other words, slave labour is commodity,
surplus value creating labour, but it is a subordinate form within capitalism
in a geographical location, where no wage workers were available.
In
sum, McNally makes an excellent case about the importance of surplus value
producing slave labour as part of the emerging capitalist global political
economy. In a fascinating, wide-ranging collection of empirical examples, he
demonstrates the agency of slaves. He portrays an important part of the global
capitalist political economy including the legacies of slavery for today’s
racial capitalism. However, we must remember that his analysis is of
developments in the periphery of global capitalism. Important for sure, but the
dominant structuring conditions were generated by the pulsing heart of
industrial capitalism in the British core.
This
said, McNally’s impressive book is a must-read for everyone interested
in the impact of slave labour on global capitalism past and present.
Andreas Bieler
15 October 2026
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