253
THE SO-CALLED WORLD SYSTEM: LOCAL INITIATIVE AND LOCAL RESPONSE
Sidney W. Mintz
Certain obvious matters having to do with
The Modern World-System* need not detain us
[ 1 ]. By now, the bare outlines of Wallerstein's
argument have become familiar to a large and
articulate population which has apparently
not had time to read the book - an unfortunate
but rather common problem in contemporary
scholarship. Many reviewers suggest that the
substantive criticisms of Wallerstein's thesis
will come from regional specialists, and
specialists in particular historical periods, who
will be able to use their detailed knowledge to
test and improve - or disprove - the sweeping
and lucid conceptual devices the author is
developing [2]. His now familiar argument is
as follows: "In the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth century, there came into existence
what we may call a European world-economy"
(p. 15). That emergence rested on three prin-
cipal developments: European political,
military and economic expansion; the differ-
entiation of forms of labor for different seg-
ments of the whole; and the growth of strong
national states in the European heartland.
This single worldwide economic system did not
rest on one form of labor use or exaction, but
precisely on a combination of different forms.
Wallerstein posits three forms of labor, each
appropriate to one such segment. The core is
based on free labor, and is western European;
the semiperiphery is based on tenantry and
share-farming, and is south European; the
periphery is based on forced labor, and is both
eastern European and American in locus. These
three forms of labor exaction are not contra-
*Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World.System: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World.Economy
in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, Inc.,
1974).
dictory so much as intimately interdependent;
each "zone" is typified by different political
structures, different economic functions and
different systems of stratification, as well as
by its different ways of relating labor to the
other factors of production.
The world-system, as it developed, never
confined capitalism to the political limitations
of single states. Its postulation, if accepted,
implies that an analysis of capitalism not
limited to the study of single states will be
more complete and, in certain ways, less static.
Moreover, it calls into question attempts to
analyze local economic subsystems in terms
of their component modes of production, to
the extent that such analyses ignore or circum-
vent the significance of the overarching world
system within which such subsystems must
function. By implication, then - and to some
extent quite explicitly - Wallerstein's inter-
pretation challenges certain global and me-
chanical Marxist treatments of the nature and
rise of capitalism, and of the relationships
among developed centers of capitalism and
tlieir satellites, colonies, tributary areas and
frontiers. Thus, for instance, he writes:
The point is that the 'relations of production' that
define a system are the 'relations of production' of the
whole system, and the system at this point in time [the
sixteenth century] is the European world-economy. Free
labor is indeed a defining feature of capitalism, but not
free labor throughout the productive enterprBes. Free
labor is the form of labor control used for skilled work
m core countries whereas coerced labor is used for less
skilled work in peripheral areas. The combination thereof
is the essence of capitalism (p. 27, italics added).
It is tempting at this point to move toward
one of two different but related ways of dis-
254
cussing Wallerstein's ideas. One way would be
to review the arguments as to whether capital-
ism is best understood by reference to class
relations of production, or to market and ex-
change relations - a dichotomy that a few
scholars are beginning to consider somewhat
obscurantist. Such a route would require in
turn a review of a literature now grown rather
prolix. A different way would be to recapitulate
the arguments as to the differences between
"capitalism" and the "capitalist mode of
production," for which the relevant literature
is now alarmingly profuse as well. I will try
neither such approach here, choosing yet
another, even though I cannot entirely avoid
the intellectual penalty for backing into major
issues, without dealing with them fully.
By using materials treating one of the key
areas in the growth of world capitalism, the
Caribbean region, and by trying to examine
the question of labor exaction there, I hope
to be able to substantiate the theoretical
significance of Wallerstein's work, while
suggesting some of its persisting (but, I suspect,
by no means wholly inescapable) limitations.
Hence I intend to try what many reviewers
have predicted specialist readers of Waller-.
stein's first volume would, indeed, undertake.
This choice on my part will probably persuade
some critics that historical particularism is
still alive, if not entirely well; while convincing
others that the reviewer, like WaUerstein, still
does not understand the difference between
"capitalistic" and "capitalism."
Wallerstein's formulation requires him to
aggregate the diversity typical of the forms of
labor-exaction within each of his "sectors" or
"zones." He is aware of the difficulties entailed
by this procedure, but cannot elude them
entirely in this volume. Thus he assimilates to
the "periphery" at least three different major
regions: eastern Europe, the continental high-
lands of South and Middle America, and the
Caribbean and circum-Caribbean lowlands. He
recognizes (e.g., pp. 86-95) that these sub-
areas fitted very differently into his conception
of a world-system, and that the specific forms
of labor associated with each region (all with-
in his "periphery") differed substantially not
only from each other, but also involved in each
case a range of variation.
Even omitting from consideration eastern
Europe, one can immediately note important
differences between the Andean and Middle
American highlands on the one hand, and the
Caribbean and circum-Caribbean lowlands on
the other. The first difference turns out to be
temporal; forced integration with the European
core came later, and more slowly, on the main-
land. Secondly, the mainland labor supply
(except for Brazil, the Guianas and parts of
Mesoamerica such as Morelos and Vera Cruz)
was from the first and thereafter mostly
autochthonous; in the Caribbean and circum-
Caribbean, it was very soon entirely imported.
Thirdly, the mainland (again, excepting Brazil
and the Guianas region) was colonized and
"developed" by Spain, while "development"
in the Caribbean islands was principally non-
Hispanic, after about 1620. In other words,
the mainland did not become integrated into
European intent at the same time, at the same
rates, in the same ways, or with the same results
as the Caribbean islands and their nearest
mainland surroundings. As part of all this,
component regions (that is, continental high-
lands versus insular and littoral lowlands)
differed, in terms of the extent to which they
were implicated in direct commodity produc-
tion for Europe itself. Finally, it must be
stressed that the integration of varied forms of
labor-exaction within any component region
addresses the way that region, as a totality,
fits within the so-called world-system. There
was give-and-take between the demands and
initiatives originating with the metropolitan
centers of the world-system, and the ensemble
of labor forms typical of the local zones with
which they were enmeshed. One hopes that
Wallerstein will try to deal with these local
ensembles in later work; otherwise, the nature
of key economic regions within the periphery,

the ways in which such regions shifted from
one part of the periphery to another, and why
such shifts occurred, cannot be made clear [3 ].
The postulation of a world-system forces us
frequently to lift our eyes from the particulars
of local history, which I would consider
salutary. But equally salutary is the constant
revisiting of events "on the ground," so that
the architecture of the world-system can be
laid bare. Accordingly the balance of this
critique is devoted to observations about the
Caribbean sector of the periphery, and to the
problems entailed in treating it in undiffer-
entiated fashion.
The Caribbean region became part of
Europe's world, beginning with Columbus'
first voyage. Contrary to Wallerstein's passing
claim (p. 333, fn. 156), sugar (meaning the
sugar-cane) was not introduced first "into
Brazil, and later the Caribbean," but indepen-
dently in each case, and first in the Caribbean.
Not only sugar-cane, but also a large-estate
form of production utilizing enslaved Africans
as the principal labor base; and, as a result, the
first commercial New World sugar was pro-
duced for export. Developments in Santo
Domingo, and later in the other three Greater
Antilles, followed with some fidelity patterns
laid down even before the "Discovery" in
Madeira, the Canary Islands, Sicily and, as
concisely described by the Polish economic
historian Marian Malowist, on Portuguese She
Tom~, in the Gulf of Guinea, off the West
African coast. In She Tom~, Malowist writes,
though
... the mode of production was rather primitive on the
island.., the sugar plantation system there was intimately
linked to large-scale international trade, in which the big
merchants of Antwerp and then Amsterdam participated
equally. In these great centers of economic life were
created numerous sugar refineries, operating in the sixteenth
century thanks to the growing deliveries of the molasses
[mdlasse] ofS~o Tom~ [4].
In its pattern of enterprise, royal support and
taxation, large-scale organization of production,
slave-labor basis, tight linkage to European
255
capital sources, technology, markets and
refining centers, the S~o Tom6 "model" pre-
figured New World developments on the Carib-
bean islands, in the circum-Caribbean region,
and in Brazil.
Sugar-cane was brought to Santo Domingo
in 1493, and was being grown there in 1494;
a grinding mill was built no later than 1503
[ 5 ] ; and the first sugar we know to have been
produced there is documented for no later
than 1505-1506. The rising price of sugar
in Europe after 1510 was a stimulus to
Spanish colonists in the Greater Antilles,
especially as it became clear that the gold
resources of the islands were scanty. Moreno
Fraginals (personal correspondence) rejects
Ortiz' assertion that sugar was shipped to
Spain from Cuba in 1517 [6], but it appears
more certain that sugar of a commercial
quality was produced in Santo Domingo in
the same year [7]. Plantation production of
sugar was carried from Santo Domingo to
Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, all under
Spanish tutelage, with European capital and
control above, and African slaves and enslaved
aborigines as the labor force. This first phase
of Caribbean plantation production continued,
though very unevenly and, at times, with limited
success, during the sixteenth century and
thereafter; it was the Spaniards, not the
Portuguese, who introduced the sugar-cane,
the first grinding mills, plantation production,
and African slave labor to the New World.
"Slavery followed sugar," Wallerstein asserts.
As it moved, the ethnic composition of the slave class was
transformed. But why Africans as the new slaves? Because
of exhaustion of the supply of laborers indigenous to the
region of the plantations, because Europe needed a source
of labor from a reasonably well-populated region that
was accessible and relatively near the region of usage.
But it had to be from a region that was outside the world.
economy [nora bene; italics added] so that Europe
could feel unconcerned about the economic consequences
for the breeding region of wide-scale removal of manpower
as slaves. Western Africa t'flied the bill best (pp. 8 8 - 8 9 ) .
That different instances of capitalist develop-
256
ment, unfolding in different regions using dif-
ferent technologies, and with differing goals,
should also differ in the extent to which the
costs of reproduction of the labor force
would be borne by local societies and enter-
prises, should surprise no one. Today's inter-
national labor market - Turks in Germany,
Algerians in Paris, Pakistanis in London, and
Puerto Ricans in New York - represents a
comparable and more unified phenomenon.
But Wallerstein has in mind forces and
events now 400 years old. Even if Africa was
right for Europe's purposes, lying as it did out-
side Wallerstein's "periphery," slavery and the
use of enslaved Africans remains less than self-
explanatory. Economic historians have been
puzzling for a long time over the "causes" of
slavery - or rather, over why slavery, rather
than some different means for relating labor
to the other factors of production, should
emerge and become institutionalized in
some regions and not in others. But the con-
cern here is not why slavery was ever employed,
or why it is, in one or another case, absent.
The concern is, rather, why slavery was intro-
duced into the Caribbean region in the first
place; why it flourished, spread and became
heavily institutionalized there; and how it
was related to other forms of land-labor linkage
and use in the same area.
The rapid destruction of the aboriginal
populations of the Antilles and the surrounding
mainland littoral deprived those who killed
them off of their labor. That land was abun-
dant and became more so, relative to popula-
tion, was hence conjoint with human action.
Land is, of course, under specific social condi-
tions, a force 9f production, and not in itself
a relation of production. How land is used is
always mediated by cultural values and, in a
class-divided society, by conflicting cultural
values, which pattern social interaction and
express social relationships among groups. The
question as to "why slavery?" thus becomes
assimilated to the particular social conditions
under which a specific form of labor-exaction
is in accord with the nature of entrepreneur-
ship, and with other factors of production
besides labor power. As Tomich puts it
(personal communication), "How the land is
used will be determined by the relationship
between social classes and how they do or do
not fit into... [the] system of international
trade and production. Then one might ask:
given the appearance of a class that wants to
profit by producing for this trade, what
mechanisms are available to expand the sur-
plus at its disposal?"
In the Caribbean region, conquest, settle-
ment and control proceeded gradually; effec-
tive control of territory resulted in staggering
losses of population, thereby making the
problem of "development" a different one. But
the abundant land resulting from population
decline was also land that could not be ade-
quately policed. Put differently, the Antilles
constituted, and in large part remained, a
frontier for several centuries:
The plantation organization of agricultural industry is
largely concentrated in the tropical zone, not because of
climate, but because tropical regions constitute the most
important and the most accessible frontier of the world
community. They constitute a frontier where there are
exploitable resources, mostly agricultural, that are nearer
to consuming centers in terms of cost than are the vast
areas of sparsely peopled lands capable of producing
various kinds of agriculture in the temperate zones. The
reason the plantation dominates where it does is the
necessity in those regions of securing a disciplined and
dependable labor force. Where the native peoples are not
sufficient in numbers or cannot be induced or coerced
to supply the necessary labor, laborers are imported as
indentured servants, as contract laborers, or as slaves. It is
this rather than climate that gives its character to the
plantation [8].
Thompson, one of the foremost and earliest
serious students of the plantation institution,
argues that the plantation form could (and
did) exist in non-tropical areas; Malowist [9]
indicates how the forcing-up of agricultural
productivity on large estates in eastern Europe
and the Baltic region played a part in the
development of the more advanced lands of
western Europe. One can thus contend that

the plantation is an economic and political
device of the frontier, and not climatically
predetermined [ 10].
But in the Caribbean region, plantation
development was always linked to subtropical
commodities (particularly sugar), into the
production of which climate and topography
entered importantly [ 11 ].
In discussing the agricultural entrepreneur's
need for "a disciplined and dependable labor
force," Thompson turns to a central question:
how is such labor to be secured; This question
plagued others besides agricultural entre-
preneurs, however; economists and economic
historians continue to struggle with it.
Thompson bases his argument heavily on the
work of H.J. Nieboer [ 12], whose compara-
tive study of slavery led him to conclude that
it appears as an institution in situations where
the individual can produce substantially more
than the costs of his own subsistence, and
where land is a free or nearly free good.
Engerman [13] and Domar [14], among
others, have imposed qualifications on Nieboer's
formulation [ 15 ]. In Engerman's terms,
"... free land is not a sufficient condition for
the existence of slavery" [ 16]. But this is a
reservation one can easily live with; in the
Caribbean case, the ~combination of abundant
land, scarce labor, and less than totally effec-
tive occupance of conquered territory made
slavery a "solution" attuned to the times. It
was, at least to some extent, familiar from the
fifteenth-century experiences of Spain and
Portugal in the Mediterranean and nearby.
In the case of the Antilles, pioneer settle-
ment occurred under conditions of either
sparse aboriginal population, or the rapid
destruction of such populations. Production
by slaves was not an inevitable consequence
of the low land-labor ratio, but of that ratio
in situations where:
(1) an effective closure of the frontier areas
to pioneer settlement by free persons was
difficult to attain;
(2) police power adequate to the legal-
257
military containment of a free population
was unavailable; and
(3) "surplus" population for enslaved labor
power was obtainable at an acceptable market
price, and on institutionally agreeable (legal
and cultural) terms elsewhere.
Under different conditions, the European
entrepreneur has been able to employ free
but needful and landless workers as wage
earners, in order to garner a profit; or profit-
ably to purchase and resell commodities
produced by peasant cultivators, by turning
the terms of trade against the peasantry; or
to rent or to lend at interest scarce resources
(land, capital, tools, etc.) to independent
producers, both agricultural and non-agricul-
tural. But these entrepreneurial alternatives
ultimately appear to depend upon either an
effective artificial scarcity of needed resources,
such as land; the real scarcity of such resources,
due to a prior primary accumulation of capital
in the region itself; and/or the presence of a
large, landless and free population competing
in the sale of its labor. It is in the presence of
the conditions enumerated in the preceding
paragraph, and in the absence of the conditions
just mentioned that slavery may become a
"natural" or "expectable" solution for the
capitalistic investor. Yet these conditions do
not forecast that slavery will inevitably be the
"solution," any more than they preclude its
.emergence as a logical possibility, since the
conditions are not of themselves sufficient
[ 17 ]. Slavery is not a single, indivisible
phenomenon. Its historical occurrence is in
fact highly variable. The extent to which it
comes to typify a particular historically- and
geographically-bounded social formation
varies with the case; when it may be defensibly
regarded as "dominant" is still at issue [ 18].
In a thoughtful recent paper, Robert Padgug
has formulated a general definition of slavery,
in an attempt to test it against different, specif-
ic occurrences. "To what degree," he asks,
"can we even speak o f 'slavery" (italics added)
as a single institution with its own specific
258

features when its appearance in history is
associated with the most varied social and
economic systems?" [ 19]. He distinguishes
first between what he calls (a) household
slavery - "which makes its earliest appearance
and finds its greatest significance in pre-class
societies"; and (b) commodity slavery (for
which somewhat misleading label he apologizes) -
which "appears only in societies of a class na-
ture where the means of production are com-
paratively well-developed.., produces a surplus
product, appropriated by a distinct ruling class.., the same time:
and this product is large enough to be at least
partially available for redistribution and ex-
change" [20]. In discussing type (b), Padgug
deals with Greece and Rome, on the one hand,
and with the colonial Americas from the 17th
to the 19th centuries, on the other. He writes:
the significant element in the formation, with circulation
and exchange playing a secondary, although significant,
role. If we look, however, at the entire capitalist socio-
economic formation and not merely at its individual
sectors [modes? S.W.M.], we find that its central feature
is the accumulation of capital based upon the exploitation
of wage-labor, and it is the requirements and needs of the
central sphere which create and utilize the subordinate
sectors, with the circulation process merely providing the
means for maintaining and reproducing the system [23].
Padgug concludes that in Greece and Rome
slavery was "both decisive and dominant." At
Only in classical antiquity was there in general no separa-
tion between slavery and other sectors of the formation,
which could then be dominated by slavery. The particular
relation of dominance or subordination, again a product
of the nature of the entire formation, thus determined the
levels of the formation at which slavery was to be found
[24].

It would, however, be fundamentally wrong to place

the classical world and the societies of the colonial
Americas in the same category ... those which arose as a
result of the expansion of Europe are not independent
units of analysis. They belong to the wider world of
capitalist development and it is only in the context of
their relationship to that world that they can be under-
stood. By this I do not mean merely that the American
slave systems produced for an external market (unlike
most earlier slave systems) and that they were as a conse-
quence more intimately tied to another socio-economic
formation. The point is that they were very literally a part
of that soeio-economic formation; in other words, they
formed sectors of a world-wide capitalist socio-economic
formation [21 ].
As Padgug himself recognizes, this view
"appears to rest on a kind of Marxist heresy:
that what makes the American slave systems
sectors of a wider system lies not in the sphere
of production, but in that of the circulation
of commodities, which is what in fact ties the
sectors together" [22]. But he offers a solu-
tion similar to Wallerstein's, one this reviewer
finds convincing:
If this ["circulationist" thesis l were correct, the entire
view would have to he discarded, for while Paul Sweezy,
among others, has justifiably argued that a socioeconomic
formation cannot be reduced simply to its dominant
relations of production, nonetheless those relations are
In the world of classical antiquity,
... while slavery did form the basis of a relatively advanced
commodity system, that system could never completely
predominate in the economy as a whole; rather, its fullest
development was restricted to the larger urban agglomera-
tions. The majority of population in classical antiquity
- slaves, small peasants, and others - remaine I enmeshed
in an economy producing for direct use [251.
Without the wage-labor system typical of
capitalism, then, slavery does not form the
basis of a commodity and exchange sector;
when it emerges within capitalism, it
appears as a "backward sector, completely
dominated by wage-labor" [26].
I emphasize Padgug's article especially
because it seems to me to represent a telling
application of a general thesis which Waller-
stein has advanced, building upon the work
of important predecessors, including especial-
ly A.G. Frank [27]. If it is true that we can-
not fully understand New World slavery, post-
1492, without investigating its particular and
specific linkages to prior developments in the
European heartland, then some additional
illumination can be shed upon analyses which

have bounded New World slavery as if geogra-
phy were the same as political economy. To
examine the capitalist system globally when
looking at any one of its sectors means taking
into account the accumulation of capital
through wage-labor at the core, while seeing
other sectors as satisfying the systemic re-
quirements of that core. Such an assertion
neither contradicts nor purports to refute
Marx's assertion that the secret of primitive
accumulation consisted of "... nothing else
than the historical process of divorcing the
producer from the means of production" [28].
But "commodity slavery," to use Padgug's
terminology, occurs during the era of primitive
accumulation and mercantile capitalism, and
persists vigorously, well into the era of indus-
trial capitalism.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and
looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, sig-
nalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of
primitive accumulation ....
The different momenta of primitive accumulation
distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological
order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France
and England. In England at the end of the 17th century,
they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the
colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation,
and the protectionist system. These methods depend in
part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But they all
employ the power of the State, the concentrated and
organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion,
the process of transformation of the feudal mode of
production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the
transition. Force is the midwife of every society pregnant
with a new one. It is itself an economic power ....
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in
England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the
transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal
slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact,
the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed,
for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world
[291.
That famous passage from Volume I of
Capital calls to mind an earlier declaration by
Marx:
259
Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism... We
are not dealing with the indirect slavery, the slavery of the
proletariat, but with direct slavery, the slavery of the black
races in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North
America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our
industrialism today as machinery, credit, etc. Without
slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern mdustry.
Slavery has given their value to the colonies; the colonies
have created world trade; world trade is the necessary
condition of large-scale machine industry. Before the
traffic in Negroes began, the colonies only supplied the
Old World with very few products and made no visible
change in the face of the earth. Thus slavery is an econom-
ic category of the highest importance [ 30].
"Indirect" slavery is contraposed to "direct"
slavery, "veiled" slavery to "slavery pure and
simple"; though using the word "slavery" on
both sides of his equations, it is not as if Marx
were attempting to blur the line between these
critically different forms of labor-exaction.
Indeed, the contrast between them is spelled
out in a hundred ways, even though both in-
volved "the historical process of divorcing the
producer from the means of production."
Marx clearly recognized that, while it was
analytically necessary to contrapose slavery
and free labor in order to understand (and to
dramatize) the emergence and consolidation
of European capitalism, their "antagonism"
did not mean they do not co-occur, or that
there are no forms of labor-exaction which lie
between them. Always the historical particu-
larist (italics added), he warns his most fervent
admirers against "using as one's masterkey a
general historico-philosophical theory, the
supreme virtue of which consists in being
super-historical" [31 ].
One senses, all the same, that the presence
of "slavery pure and simple" within capitalism
- indeed, within a leading industrial state of
the nineteenth century - disturbed and
distracted Marx. "The fact," he writes, "that
we now not only call the plantation owners in
America capitalists, but that they are capitalists,
is based on their existence as anomalies within
a world market based on free labour" [32].
Anomalies? Padgug, seeking to reconcile
Genovese's view of American master-slave
260
relationships as "seigneurial" with Waller-
stein's view of the capitalist dominated world-
economy (and, implicitly, with Marx's curious
"anomalies"), writes as follows:
In the slavesectorsof the capitalistformationa
complex patterndeveloped.Both slavesand mastershad
dual relationships,one with respect to each other, and
one with respect to the widerformation.The plantation
ownerswere from this pointof viewcapitalistsand acted
as suchexternallywith respect to the widereconomy,
but as Marxputs it, they were suchonlyformally,since
they producedwith slavelabor.Becauseof their use of
slavesthey had a tendencyinternally to developwhat
Genovesehas termed'seigncurial'patterns,but this,like
the externalaspect,was alsoincompletelydeveloped.
The slavestoo had similarambivalentrelationships.
On the one hand,they were directlysubordinatedto a
slave-holdingclassat home.whileon the otherhand their
productiverelationswerein the last analysisdetermined
by the dominantwage-laborsystemof Europeand the
Americannorth [33].
This seems to me a supple and intelligent
attempt to deal with the problem; but I am
afraid that it may not be entirely satisfactory.
To begin with, the emphasis in Marx's analysis,
as in those by Padgug and Genovese, is upon
the United States South, rather than upon the
Caribbean region, and I think the differences
are substantial. Genovese has shown his aware-
ness of these differences, particularly in The
World the Slaveholders Made; but I cannot
attempt to review the argument here. Within
the Caribbean region, not only may differ-
ences from one colony to another be specified,
but also differences in te,,ns of the maturation,
apogee and decline of particular, specific sys-
tems. These local systems varied in the degree
to which they were integrated into the world-
economy, and each historical instance requires
careful and serious study. Slave labor was
important, in general, almost from the "Dis-
covery" until nearly the end of the nineteenth
century (abolition did not come until 1873 in
Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba). But slavery was
not always the dominant form of labor-exac-
tion in many Caribbean societies, nor (if one
accepts the Wallerstein and Padgug theses) was
it ever the decisive form, vis-h-vis the metro-
poles.
In fact, it is possible to schematize Carib-
bean plantation and labor history usefully,
even if we do not yet have more than a
minimum of the information needed to make
such schemata satisfactory. I would suggest
that, excluding the United States South and
treating the "West Indies" as meaning the
Caribbean islands and certain parts of the im-
mediate mainland (such as the Guianas), it is
possible to project at least five such periods,
or "phases":
(a) slave-based sugar-cane plantations in the
Hispanic Greater Antilles, 1500-1580;
(b) plantations based on slave and indentured
labor in the French and British Lesser Antilles,
1640-1670;
(c) plantations based exclusively on slave
labor, at their apogee in English Jamaica (post-
1655) and French St. Domingue (post-1697);
(d) plantations based on enslaved, semicoerced
and "contract" labor in Spanish Cuba (post-
1762) and Puerto Rico (post- 1815);
(e) plantations based on emancipated and
"contract" labor, throughout the sugar
colonies (post-1838, British; post-1848,
French; post-1886, Cuba; etc.).
Subsequent periods or "phases," (as I will
try to make clear in a later publication) involve
the firm emergence of a rural proletariat and,
finally, the virtual elimination of manual labor
from the sugar-cane fields in the "most ad-
vanced" colonial Caribbean societies.
I have omitted here any attempt to cor-
relate the "phases" with stages in the history
of capitalism (mercantile vs. industrial), or to
specify a particular "mode of production"
for each "phase." Though I believe such spec-
ification will eventually be possible, it is too
early to attempt it now. For the moment, my
major point is that, only for certain periods
and in certain colonies, were the principal
export commodities produced exclusively
by enslaved labor. Equally important, where

such labor was not exclusively slave-based,
the complementary forms usually involved
some degree of coercion [34]. What is more,
thoughtful study of slave-based production in
the Caribbean colonies repeatedly turns up
evidence that the slaves commonly produced
part of their own subsistence, sold part of
their product, and were able to accumulate
some liquid capital [35]. Accordingly, I would
argue that the gap between slave and free labor
was by no means always so clear as might be
supposed; that intermediate forms and degrees
of coercion were common; and that the slaves'
entire product - at least, in specific Antillean
cases, which are richly documented - was not
forcibly appropriated by their masters, any
more than was their entire labor-power [36].
I would also accept Wallerstein's contention
that the variant forms of labor-use and labor-
exaction to be found in the Antilles between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries - that I
is, during the entire history of post-Columbian
slavery - coexisted within a single world-
economy, the dominant mode of production
of which was based on free labor.
That one cannot have capitalism or the
capitalist mode of production without "free"
labor (which has sometimes been called "wage
slavery") seems to be self-evident. If free labor
is not by itself a sufficient defining feature of
anything, at least there is unanimity on its
being a necessary defining feature of the
capitalist mode of production. Trouble arises
only when different forms of labor exaction
coexist. Which among such forms may be con-
sidered to stand for, or to define, a social
formation? Are coexistent forms of labor
exaction to be understood as inherently
incompatible, giving rise by some evolutionary
process to an inexorable movement toward a
single form?
Padgug, citing "Marx's observation that
slavery as a system normally breaks down the
modes of production in which it arises and
turns them into forms of itself," feels the
need to concede that this is correct, but "only
261
a general tendency, with actual developments
depending upon the specific historical cir-
cumstances" [37]. This strikes me as over-
generous, even so. While it would appear to
have held in certain Caribbean instances
during the ascent of the slave-based plantation
economies, their descent was regularly marked
by the use of other (non-slave) forms of co-
ercion, and eventuating in free labor. These
cases, I believe, can be most profitably studied
as occurring within the world-economy, and
responsive to it. Otherwise, one is compelled
to attempt to analyze them as detached from
that economy, generating their own internal
dynamic without respect to their position in
wider fields of forces. An illustration may help.
In a careful and interesting article entitled
"Background to the emergence of imperialist
capitalism in Puerto Rico" [38], the Puerto
Rican historian A.G. Quintero Rivera argues
that the economic changes of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in that society
constituted a transition "from a subsistence
agriculture of family production to what I have
called a seignorial hacienda economy; both pre-
capitalist regimes" [39]. Quintero's argument
rests on what he regards as two important
fallacies: the identification of capitalism with
commerce; and the tendency to ignore the
relative unimportance of wage labor in the
Puerto Rican economy during those centuries.
Quintero points out that, toward the
end of the eighteenth century... Spain began to take
concern in turning Puerto Rico into a productive colony
rather than a dependent one. This concern became a vital
necessity when the Empire began to vanish at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
A large number of Spanish families from the
emancipated colonies and also French families from
Louisiana and Haiti, began to arrive on the island. Many
of them brought their slaves, working tools, or some
agicultural machinery with them. The Spanish govern-
ment gave them land and facilities to start cultivation.
It did away with a whole set of impediments to trade
which had been imposed on the island... Agricultural
production for exportation began to increase rapidly.
This is the situation mentioned earlier which the inter-
preters of economic history of Puerto Rico, have erro-
neously seen as the origins of development of capitalism.
Why, then, did no working class appear? [40]
262
But working classes never simply "appear."
They are particularly unlikely to "appear" in
situations where land is available for squatter
cultivation, police power to shut such cultiva-
tion off is lacking, and population density is
low. The emigr6 planter families who arrived
with their slaves and machinery in the early
nineteenth century were well advised to come
thus equipped. As Quintero himself points out,
they and their fellow-planters soon received
help in "producing" a working class: the
forced labor laws, "promulgated by the Crown
and which constituted what was known as the
r~gimen de la libreta (work-book regime), or
white slavery" [41 ]. Of course, that working
class was not free:
These lawsforcedpersonswithout a trade, occupation,or
any state-recognizedpropertyto workfor a proprietor.
This included, of course, peasants, working the landby
traditionbut without propertytitles. [Quinteroneglects
to mention, moreover, that freehold in land had been
instituted by the Crownin 1778.] Anyone without trade
or property had to carrya work-booksignedby the
proprietorfor whom he was working, and non-possession
of such constituteda punishableoffense.In order to move
to someother part of the island, or even to move from
one farm to another in the same region, the work-book
carrierneeded the approvalof the proprietorfor whom
he was working. It is impossible to conceive the develop-
ment of a labor market under these conditions [42].
I would put the matter slightly differently.
It was because a labor market could not develop
that these conditions were necessary. But
these conditions were not an internal conse-
quence; the granting of freehold, the admission
of foreign planters with their slaves and
machinery, and the anti-vagrancy legislation
were the consequence of external forces,
responding to external needs and opportuni-
ties. The heightened importation of slaves
- indeed, at the very moment that slavery
was declining in much of the Caribbean - was
also the result of external forces. The produc-
tion undertaken on the new and expanding
agricultural enterprises of the time was
destined for foreign markets, and was under-
written in many cases by foreign capital. The
basis of labor-exaction, under these specific
conditions, was slavery and coercion. In this
connection, Quintero cites an early paper of
mine on the role of forced labor in nineteenth-
century Puerto Rico, indicating that I treat
the anti-vagrancy "regulations as a road to
capitalism in terms of the labour force that
they created from previously independent
producers. [Mintz] overlooks," he says, "the
stage of serfdom that these regulations
generated" [43]. I do not feel I overlooked
"the stage of serfdom," because I do not feel
"serfdom" defines at all the mode of produc-
tion characteristic o f Puerto Rice's nineteenth-
century slave-and-agregado plantations. Rather,
I believe that forced labor was employed on
capitalistic enterprises within the international
division of labor, since Puerto Rico at the time
formed part o f the periphery of the capitalist
world-economy. That the mode of production
required coerced labor does not, in my view -
and, I daresay, in Wallerstein's - mean that
nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was feudal,
no matter how one stretches definitions. Nor,
it seems to me, does the fact that the Puerto
Rican economy expanded on a forced-labor
basis, so as to export market commodities to
European centers, signify that its economy
was "noncapitalistic."
I suspect that there is a genuine difficulty
implicit in the view that enables one to con-
ceptualize coerced-labor systems within the
Antillean region as self-contained forms of
land-labor relationship, defining the social
formations o f which they are parts as lying
outside capitalism (or, alternatively, as un-
affected by the capitalist mode of production).
The Cuban case, though different from that
of Puerto Rico, provides another example.
There, Moreno Fraginals has documented
how the plantation system and slavery
began to expand, particularly from the sixth
decade of the eighteenth century onward [44].
The slave system received no official challenge
until well into the nineteenth century, and
slavery did not end there until more than

t w e n t y years a f t e r t h e War B e t w e e n t h e States.
During t h a t c e n t u r y or so o f i n t e n s i f i e d slavery,
it seems n o w generally agreed t h a t m a n y o f t h e
paternalistic p r o t e c t i o n s typical o f C u b a n
slavery b e f o r e t h e 1 7 6 0 ' s were r e d u c e d in
n u m b e r a n d in effect. W h a t is m o r e , t h e
i n t r o d u c t i o n o f m o r e t h a n 1 2 5 , 0 0 0 Chinese
" c o n t r a c t l a b o r e r s , " d u r i n g a m e r e 22 years
( 1 8 5 3 - 7 4 ) , s t r o n g l y suggests t h a t t h e n e e d
for l a b o r r e m a i n e d high t h r o u g h o u t . T h e
i n t e r e s t i n g t h i n g a b o u t all o f this is t h a t the
more intensified, the more impersonal, the
less "seigneurial, '" the harsher Cuban slavery
became, the closer the system got to the
point where emancipation would be an inev-
itable step. W h a t is it, t h e n , a b o u t t h e s e "slave
societies" [45 ] a n d " p l a n t a t i o n e c o n o m i e s "
[461 a n d " p a t e r n a l i s t s y s t e m s " [47] t h a t
m a k e s t h e i r i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n t h e last step b e f o r e
"real c a p i t a l i s m " ? Would n o t o n e e x p e c t t h e
o p p o s i t e ? T h e answer, o f course, is t h a t n e i t h e r
before nor after emancipation can any of
t h e s e " s y s t e m s " be satisfactorily a n a l y z e d
in vacuo. Slaves, c o n t r a c t laborers, a n d in-
d e n t u r e d servants were n o t free wage-earners;
b u t it was t h e e x i s t e n c e o f capitalism w i t h its
E u r o p e a n free wage-earner s e c t o r t h a t b r o u g h t
t h e m i n t o being. It is n o t t h a t t h e y were
" a r c h a i c " or " a n o m a l o u s " , because t h e i r l a b o r
force was unfree. R a t h e r , t h e c o n d i t i o n s t h a t
facilitated t h e pristine e m e r g e n c e o f E u r o p e a n
capitalism in t h e first i n s t a n c e were n o t p r e s e n t
in t h e i r societies. Indeed, h a d t h o s e c o n d i t i o n s
b e e n present, t h e l a b o r force would have b e e n
free. A n d t h e difficulty w i t h this assertion is,
palpably, h a d c o n d i t i o n s m a d e possible a free
wage-earning l a b o r force, t h o s e selfsame areas
c o u l d n o t have played t h e part t h e y did in t h e
f u r t h e r g r o w t h o f w o r l d capitalism.
T h e r e m a y a p p e a r t o b e s o m e sort o f
e n i g m a here. Marx decides t h a t t h e p l a n t a t i o n
o w n e r s o f t h e U n i t e d States S o u t h are capitalists
a n d e x p e c t s t h e m t o act accordingly:
Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the
American Union preserved something of a patriarchal
263
character, so long as production was chiefly directed
toward immediate local consumption. But in proportion,
as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these
states, the over-workingof the negro and sometimes the
using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in
a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a
question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of use-
ful products. It was now a question of the production of
surplus labor itself [48 ].
E u g e n e Genovese, w i t h o u t d o u b t Marx's m o s t
e l o q u e n t a n d persuasive critic o n this t h e m e ,
writes:
If for a moment we accept the designation of the planters
as capitalists and the slave system as a form of capitalism
[a position that Marx himself may have had some trouble
with, but never abandoned], we are then confronted by
a capitalist society that impeded the development of
every normal feature of capitalism [49].
Several p r o b l e m s , I t h i n k , are raised b y this
c o u n t e r p o s i t i o n , t h a t have to do w i t h t h e
Wallerstein thesis. First, t h e r e is the p r o b l e m
o f where o n e draws the lines t o b o u n d t h e u n i t
o f analysis, a n d w h a t this p r o c e d u r e has to d o
with the concept of mode of production.
Second, t h e r e is t h e p r o b l e m o f capitalism's
" n o r m a l " features. I will refer to these p r o b -
lems in t u r n , a n d briefly.
In his review o f G e n o v e s e ' s i m p o r t a n t Roll,
Jordan, Roll, Wallerstein writes:
... for Genovese, the analysis revolvespresumably around
- a mode of production. Yet he never quite uses the term.
Why not? Why does he speak of slavesociety, paternalist
society, slavery as a system?In the end these are all
euphemisms for 'state' or the quasi-state which was the
Old South - as though states have modes of production.
A state no more has a mode of production than does a
firm. The concept 'mode of production' describes an
economy, the boundaries of which are precisely a prelim-
inary empirical question of the utmost relevanceto an
understanding of 'class rule.' The South, certainly in the
years 1 8 3 1 - 6 1 . . . was part and parcel of a world-economy
whose mode of production was capitalist,and within
which owners of large-scalecash-cropplantations utilized,
to the extent they could, such state structures as they
could control (or largely control) to make it possible for
them to extract the largest share of the surplus value being
produced by productive workers.
Slavery was thus very useful to them, particularly the
variety of it ('paternalism') which evolved... [50].
264
I think that this is a useful criticism, and
that it might be extended, even more force-
fully, to analyses of Antillean societies, such
as that undertaken by Quintero in the case of
Puerto Rico. Only by defining Puerto Rico
(or some other Caribbean plantation society)
without direct reference to its fit within wider
economic and political systems is it possible
to view the coercion of labor as contradictory
to the capitalist mode of production - since
I would assert that it was capitalism, and the
capitalist mode of production, which brought
the coerced-labor forms of the Caribbean plan-
tations into being. Such an assertion, needless
to add, requires its own defense, which I can-
not undertake here. Suffice it for the moment
to say, perhaps, that I do not mean by this
that the combination of local productive
forces was ever irrelevant to the forms such
development took. Rather, such forces, and
the relations of production built upon them,
were repeatedly geared into wider social,
economic and political fields of force whose
vital centers lay elsewhere.
As to the "normal" characteristics of
capitalism, the argument devolves to some
extent into a debate between abstract char-
acterizations of "types" on the one hand, and
historical particulars on the other. It may be of
help to pursue the issue in one regard, at least.
To study the history of labor, the plantation
economy, and the slave mode of production in
the Caribbean region, a few dates must be
brought to mind. The slave trade ended at dif-
ferent points for different metropolitan powers:
Denmark, 1802; England, 1808; Sweden, 1813;
Holland and France, 1814; Spain, 1820. (As is
well known, the trade continued in defiance
of such legislation, and enslaved Africans were
arriving in Cuban and Puerto Rican ports, well
into the second half of the nineteenth century.)
Emancipation came later: in the British colo-
nies in 1838 (actually, in 1834, followed by
four years of "apprenticeship"); in the French
colonies in 1848; in the Dutch colonies in
1863; in Puerto Rico in 1873 (followed by
three years of "apprenticeship"); and in Cuba
in 1886.
The movement of emancipation was, in
each of these instances and in each colony, of
immense importance. In many cases, however,
it was followed (and in some cases, preceded)
by large importations of "contract" laborers,
as has already been noted; indeed, even in the
twentieth century, the massive intra-Caribbean
movement of plantation workers (e.g., from
Haiti and Jamaica to Cuba) kept pace wit h the
continued importations of "free" laborers
(including Chinese to Cuba, Javanese to
Surinam, Africans to the British West Indies,
etc.). These various "units" of human labor
were not slaves; they were, by the conventional
criteria of the time, free. But what did they
have to do with the transformation of slave-
based and "seigneurial" economies into "truly"
capitalistic economies, based on the capitalist
mode of production? Are we now to be told
that, in the moment of emancipation, a
paternalist, seigneurial, non-wage, precapitalist
economy miraculously becomes an impersonal,
wage-based, capitalist economy? Our question
thus eventuates in whether these "slave soci-
eties" and "plantation economies" could be
transformed, on the day their slaves were freed,
into societies typified by capitalism and the
capitalist mode of production when, the day
before freedom, they were supposedly neither.
This argument, whatever its limitations [ 51 ],
may make a little clearer the advantage of
Wallerstein's world-system approach. It may
also throw some light on the difficulties of
talking about "normal" capitalism if one wishes
to take into account what capitalists were
doing outside the European heartland. The
history of Cuban slavery after 1762 indicates
a fairly steady progression toward the degrada-
tion of the black population, both free and
enslaved, an elimination of traditional guaran-
tees of various kinds for the slaves, an inten-
sification of labor use and its maltreatment,
and an assimilation to slavery of the "contract"
labor practices used with Chinese migrants.

The closer freedom comes, the less "seigneurial"
slavery turns out to be. Of course the end of
slavery, and eventually, of contract labor, sig-
nificantly changed the statuses and bargaining
positions of the workers. It is of interest, then,
that improvements such as emancipation were
so often accompanied by massive additional
importations of labor; the differences between
"slavery pure and simple" and "veiled slavery"
were being finessed. In parts of the Caribbean,
les droits des seigneurs apparently included
the right to degrade the bargaining position of
the newly-freed by trying to alter the land-
labor ratio overnight. What Wakefield had
suggested as colonial policy, and Marx had
attacked so vigorously, had indeed become
policy, in some instances. It seems to me that
these particular historical processes, occurring
under specific circumstances, and representing
concords achieved in the metropolitan centers
of power by competing capitalist groups with
interests in the colonies, attest powerfully to
the reality of the world-system, and of its use-
fulness in understanding how that system
expanded and consolidated itself.
This is not an argument about inevitability,
but about the international division of labor
that typified capitalism's spread as a world-
system. In WaUerstein's view, free labor in
Europe itself underwrote and forecast the
developments outside the core. I find this a
convincing perspective in one way, at least,
that Wallerstein does not deal with specifically.
There has now been some debate concerning
the contribution of New World enterprise,
and particularly slave-based production and
the slave trade, to the growth of capitalism in
the core [52]. Marx himself was very clear as
to why the slaves were differentially integrated
into the world system, because their labor
supposedly was - except for their initial cost
and maintenance - entirely surplus. The
mystification that typifies the transformation
of part of wage labor into surplus value
presumably does not occur in the case of the
slaves or, at any rate, does not occur in the
265
same form. What is more, slaves cannot be
consumers in the way that free wage-earners
are consumers; and although this assertion
leaves much to be desired [53], it will do for
present pruposes.
But the relationship between free wage-
earners in Europe and coerced labor in the
New World is not exhausted or analyzed by
mention of this distinction. Indeed, the
distinction serves in at least one important
way to conceal their relationship. European
wage-earners produced commodities that
slaves consumed; more significantly, slaves in
the Caribbean produced commodities that
European wage-earners consumed. How these
parallel productions'and consumptions operated
in the total absence of any direct exchange be-
tween the free and the enslaved remains one of
the most important chapters in the history of
world capitalism; indeed, it is in some ways so
obvious that it appears to have been largely
overlooked. I do not intend to deal with this
matter here. Suffice it to say that, when the
whole story of the production of low-cost,
high-energy food substitutes (such as sugar,
rum, tea, coffee, chocolate, and even tobacco)
for the European working classes has been told,
it may turn out that the indirect savings to
European capitalism were very substantial.
Here, then, would be a way in which core
and periphery, "veiled" slavery and "slavery
pure and simple," capitalist and "precapitalist"
modes of production were tied together, that
has still received too little attention [54].
The relationship between different modes of
labor-exaction (different modes of production,
in part) in different parts of the world-economy,
and within different single segments of that
economy (as in the case of a Caribbean society,
where enslaved labor, "contract" labor, and
"free" labor may be found in conjunction and
interdependent) deserves another word. Padgug
has argued convincingly against the view that
different forms of labor are freely interchange-
able in specific historical settings. He writes:
266
There can be no doubt that to a certain degree this
view is correct. The post-emancipation American systems,
for example, were indeed able to convert to other systems
of labor without losing their position in world markets.
But that they were able to do this was not in fact a function
of the absolute mterchangeability of labor systems, but
rather of the dominance of capitalism in the world, a
dominance which created and kept in operation a major
system of commodity production and exchange....
The apparent interchangeability of labor systems at
particular historical moments paradoxically exists, there-
fore, only because of the peculiar nature of the dominant
labor form, a form which in terms of dominance is not at
all interchangeable with other forms. That this should be
so ought not to be surprising. For slavery, like other
modes of production, has particular characteristics and
particular effects which differentiate it from all other
modes. And at points where it is precisely those character-
istics and effects which dominate the entire socio-economic
formation or which are decisive for its functioning (as, for
example, in the period when slavery in the Americas proved
to be the only system capable of providing labor in suffi-
cient quantities to enable the colonies to be tied into the
world system), it is not at all interchangeable with other
modes. It is true that Marx tends to lump slavery and
serfdom together on occasion as if they were interchange-
able, but this is only vis-a-vis wage-labor, and is only
meant to demonstrate the vast differences which exist
between all precapitalist labor relationships and the
capitalist one [55].
Once again, the explanation is made to
hinge upon the integration of local segments
of the periphery with the world-economy and,
on the local level itself, of one subsegment
with another.
Some injustice may be done Wallerstein's
view by the tack this reviewer has taken,
particularly in avoiding the issues of mercantile
vs. industrial (commercial vs. productive)
capitalism, and of the concept of mode of
production. I tried to indicate at the outset
that a serious pursuit of either of these
arguments would diffuse the focus of this
inquiry. As to the concept of mode of produc-
tion itself, I believe that the merits of ongoing
debates are partly sapped by matters of style
and of vogue. It may be some time before the
concept can be examined coolly, and with
sufficient perspective, to fulfill its analytic
promise. In recent years we have been treated
to a village mode of production, a domestic
mode of production, an African mode of
production, and many discussions of the
Asiatic mode of production. No doubt some-
one will eventually put this all together effec-
tively; I suspect that something of the same
might be said in regard to the debate over
mercantile and industrial capitalisms. At any
rate, I have chosen to avoid engaging these
issues head-on; perhaps Wallerstein's projected
further studies will do precisely that.
NOTES
Fernand Braudel, Eric R. Wolf and A.G. Frank have
praised The Modern World-System so warmly that they
have been cited on its dust jacket. It is the first of four
volumes promised, the second of which may have appeared
by the time this essay is published. The book has been
reviewed, mostly favorably, by at least a score of thought-
ful scholars in the United States and the United Kingdom.
No one whose comments I have read so far takes this
volume or its author's purposes lightly, whatever his/her
criticisms. The book is very heavily footnoted, which is
a source of both distraction and illumination (as well as
of intimidation); and the style has proved disappointing
to some reviewers. This first volume has pleased, among
others, Samir Amin, Andrew Appleby, Rod Aya, Lewis
Coser, Michael Hechter and John Waiter, it has failed to
convince, among others, Rondo Cameron, Eugene Genovese,
Frederic C. Lane, Richard Rapp, and Keith Thomas. In
her review in the New York Times, Gertrud Lenzer called
the publication of The Modern World-System "one of the
extraordinary publishing non-events of the season"; its
appearance had not been remarked by Publishers' Weekly,
even though it surely would prove to be "one of the
important books of the year [ 1974] 2' Lewis Coser
(Political Science Quarterly for September, 1975) calls it
"the first major American work in a nee-Marxist vein since
the publication of Barrington Moore's seminal Social
Origins o/Dictatorship and Democracy eight years ago."
Indeed, few recent books in history and the social sciences
seem to have stirred their readers so profoundly. Peasant
Studies VI (January, 1977) has published a five-part review
symposium, and The American Journal of Sociology 82
(March, 1977) a three-part review of TheModern World.
System; while the Department of Sociology of American
University has seen fit to sponsor a two-day conference
on the political economy of the world system, with nine
prepared papers (March 31-April 1, 1977).
My originai title "Macro-Batics," had been inspired by
Anthony Hopkins's stimulating "Clio-Antics: A Horoscope
for African Economic History," in Christopher Fyfe (ed.),
African Studies Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1976),
pp. 31-48. Among those to whom an earlier draft of this

essay was sent for comments, I owe warm thanks to
Eduardo Arehetti, Fredrik Barth, Ciro Cardoso, Eugene
Genovese, Scott Guggenheim, Harry Hoetink, Anthony
Hopkins, Dominique Legros, Manuel Moreno Fraginals,
Robert Padgug, William Sturtevant, Dale Tomich and
Eric Wolf, all of whom responded promptly and cogently.
I have not been able adequately to deal with many of the
telling criticisms these (and other) friends offered, for a
wide variety of reasons, disagreements in some cases
included; but I have cited them freely in text and in foot-
notes. I remain deeply in their debt, and take full respon-
sibility for the final result. Special thanks to Ms, Lauri
Sehell, who provided valuable assistance.
Contrast in this connection, for example, the following
citations: "The slave economy developed within, and was
in a sense exploited by the capitalistic world market; con-
sequenfly, slavery developed many ostensibly capitalistic
features, such as banking, commerce and credit. These
played a fundamentally different role in the South than
in the North. Capitalism has absorbed and even encouraged
many kinds of precapitalist social systems: serfdom, slavery,
oriental state enterprises, and others. It has introduced
credit, finance, and banking, and similar institutions
where they did not previously exist. It is pointless to
suggest that therefore nineteenth century India and
twentieth century Sandi-Arabia should be classified as
capitalist countries" (Eugene Genovese, The Political
Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon, 1967, p. 19).
No matter whether commodities are the output of
production based on slavery, of peasants.... of
communes..., of state enterprise.... or half-savage
hunting tribes, etc. - as commodities and money they
come face to face with the money and commodities in
which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as
much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value
borne in the commodity capital, provided the surplus-
value is spent as revenue; hence they enter into both
branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The
character of the process of production from which
they originate is immaterial. They function as com-
modities in the market, and as commodities they
enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as
into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated
in it. It is therefore the universal character of the
origin of commodities, the existence of the market
as a worldmarket, which distinguishes the process of
circulation of industrial capital" (Karl Marx, Capital,
VoL II [Moscow, (1885) 1956], p. 113).
I am indebted to Dale Tomich's "Some further reflections
on class and class-conflict in the World Economy"
(Working Papers, Seminar I: Group formation and group
conflict in the historical development of the modern
World-System, Fernand Braudel Center, SUNY-Binghamton,
December, 1976), where these citations are similarly
employed.
Marian Malowist, "Les d~buts du syst~me des plantations
dans la p6riode des' grandes d~couvertes," Africana
267
Bulletin 10 (1969), p. 29 (My translation, S.W.M.).
Mervyn Rateldn, "The early sugar industry in Espafiola,"
Hispanic American Historical Review 34 (1954), p. 4.
Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint (New York: Knopf,
1947), pp. 282-283.
Ratekin, op. tit., p. 7.
Edgar T. Thompson, "The plantation" (A part of a Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Chicago) (Chicago: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Libraries, 1932), pp. 13-14.
Marian Malowist, "The problem of the inequality of
economic development in Europe in the latter Middle
Ages," EcOnomic History Review 19 (April, 1966), pp.
15-28.
10 Eric R. Wolf and Sidney W. Mintz, "Hacienda and
plantations in Middle America and the Antilles," Social
andEeonomic Studies 6 (September, 1957), pp. 380-412.
11 In an illuminating comment on this point, Moreno
Fraginals (personal correspondence) writes as follows:
To your question as to why slavery was introduced
into the Caribbean region in the first place, and the
citation from Thompson, one must add: climate is
one factor determining the establishment of planta-
tions, but not the only one ....
The plantation, like any other institution or organiza-
tion created by human beings, is a living organism. For
its existence it is necessary that a series of variables
co-occur: but these variables do not combine them-
selves in a rigid [invariant] fashion through time and
space. On the contrary, a large number of combinations
is possible.... [T]here is no doubt that the sugar
plantation is the plantation model or prototype, from
the seventeenth century to the beginnings of the nine-
teenth. If we take sugar as our example, we see that
climate was one of the fundamental components
taken into account in the establishment of a planta-
tion, since sugar-cane requires climatic conditions
suitable to its cultivation, and the profitability of
the sugar enterprise is contingent upon these condi-
tions. Climate alone, of course, is not decisive. For
example, sugar manufacture from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries required a fuel which, in
the initial stage of development, could only be ob-
tained in the form of firewood (lef~a). Moreover, it
required motive power which, until well into the nine-
teenth century, cattle (principally oxen) could provide.
If we add the basic required factors we get: suitable
climate + forest or firewood + sufficient cattle +
abundant land.
But not merely land; it must be land of certain sorts,
for example flatland, since sugar fabrication is not
feasible in mountainous locales. Nor is that all. The
sugar of those centuries was a soft, heavy product,
which had to be packaged in large barrels, difficult to
transport, and with a high ratio of bulk to product. In
other words, the cask, in the optimum size for moving
and transport, amounted to 30% of the total weight of
the exported merchandise. The only way to ship these
barrels (before the birth of the sugar railway) was in
268
carts which went to embarkation ports.., on tropical
roadways passable only in the dry season. The precipita-
tion required for the best cane yield was so high that
the roads were inundated in the rainy season.
Once analyzed, these factors reveal that the sugar
plantation required suitable climate + firest or )ire.
wood § sufficient cattle + abundant flat and cheap
land § nearness to a port o f embarkation. Finally, the
major social-economic problem: labor power. As this
did not exist in the optimal zone, it had to be
imported; so the optimal zone had to be located,
beyond these other factors, in a geographical setting
providing easy access to the receiving market and to
the supply market for labor power. When one analyzes
thus the phenomenon of the sugar plantation, with the
perspective of an entrepreneur intending to establish
an enterprise in the best possible place, one understands
that plantations and slavery [together] are a very
Antillean phenomenon, although both earlier and later
they are found in other zones...
To sum up: sugar production with slaves on plantations
was a consequence of the 'low land-labor ratio,' in
situations where the factors you enumerate, those I
have added, and yet others coincide. (My translation,
S.W.M.).
12 H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1900).
13 Stanley Engerman, "Some considerations relating to
property rights in man," Journal o f Economic History 33
(March, 1973), pp. 43-65.
14 Evsey Domar, "The causes of slavery or serfdom: a
hypothesis,".. Journal o f Economic History 30 (1970),
pp. 18-32.
15 This is not the place to trace the antecedents of the
land-labor ratio controversy. Domar (op. cit.) believed
he had rediscovered Nieboer in 1970. Among those who
had managed to keep Nieboer in mind during the interim,
however, one may mention Thompson, op. cit. (1932);
J.J. Fahrenfort, "Over vrije an onvrije arbeid," Mensch en
Maatschappij 1943), pp. 29-51; S. Mintz, "Cafiamelar:
The contemporary culture of a rural Puerto Rican
proletariat" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, New
York, 1951), and review of S. Elkins, Slavery, American
Anthropologist 63 (1961), pp. 579-587; and H. Hoetink,
The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967). Nieboer, however, is only
one in a long and complex lineage of serious students of
the problem. Marx, of course, dealt with the issue in
discussing the so-calied primitive accumulation of capital
in Capital, Vol. 1 (New York, International Publishers
[1887] 1939). Herman Merivale, in his Lectures on
Colonisation and Colonies (London: Longman, Orme,
Brown, Green and Longmans, 1841-1842), and Edward
Gibbon Wakefield, in his A View o f the Art o f Colonisa-
tion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1849), also contributed to the
argument (Both of them, hut particularly Wakefield, are
brilliantly criticized by Marx.) Yet another line of devel-
opment is represented by Frederick Jackson Turner,
whose famous "frontier hypothesis," it would appear, is
derived from to put it most charitably - the work of
-
Achille Loria. Where Turner must have got most of his
ideas is suggested by Lee Benson, in "Achilie Loria's
influence on American economic thought," Agricultural
History 24 (1950), pp. 182-199. Loria, in turn, is
roundly buffeted by Engels in his preface and supplement
to VoL Ill of Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, [1894] 1959). Turner's descendants,
especially William Christie Macleod and Walter Prescott
Webb, were also preoccupied with the possible wider sig-
nificance of the ratio between land and labor. Today,
more and more students seem to he turning back to
political factors in attempting to explain why abundant
land plus scarce labor do not automatically result in
slavery, but nonetheless often appear to "generate" 'it.
The ironic element, perhaps, is that the importance of
political power in making slavery possible and in en-
forcing its operation was clear - though not always to
the same degree - t o such early students of colonialism
(by no means an ideologically homogeneous group!) as
Roscher, Leroy-Beaulieu, and even Albert Galloway
Keller. Thompson (op. cit., p. 23) notes that Oppen-
heimer, that eariy student of the state (Franz Oppen-
heimer, The State New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922) saw
this clearly as well: "The state originaliy begins its career
as a large estate, and Oppenheimer believes, the large
estate may prove the last stronghold of the principle
of exploitation which the state embodies."
16 Engerman, op. cit., p. 59.
17 Though some students are less uncertain. Cf. Barry Hindess
and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes o[ Production
(London: Routledga and Kegan Paul, 1975).
18 I have already conceded my unwillingness here to engage
the issue of dominance within a mode of production, in
dealing with Wallerstein's approach. Legros has touched
on this matter usefully, in his "Chance, necessity, and
mode of production," American Anthropologist 79
(1977), pp. 26-41,
19 Robert A. Padgug, "Problems in the theory of slavery
and slave society," Science and Society (1976), pp. 3-27.
20 Ibid., p. 6.
21 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
22 Ibid., p. 17.
23 Op. cir., loc. cit.
24 Ibid., p. 22.
25 Ibid., pp. 20-21.
26 t Op. cit., loc. cit.
27 Andr~ Gunder Frank, ''The development of underdevelop-
meet," Monthly Review (September, 1966).
28 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York: International
Publishers, [1887] 1939), p. 738.
29 Ibid., pp. 775-776,785.
30 Karl Marx, letter to P.V. Annenkov, Dec. 28, 1846 in
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels: Selected Works (New
York: International Publishers, 1968).
31 KarlMarx, lettertotheeditorsofOtechestvenniye
Zapiskie, in Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism
and Modernisation (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 470.
32 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Pelican, transl. Martin

Nicolaus, 1973), p. 523. This is, however, what some
exegetes would call a cheap shot. The passage, as trans-
lated by .lack Cohen (Karl Marx, Ire.Capitalist Economic
Formations [Formen die der Kapitalistischen Iroduktion
vorhergehen], New York, International Publishers, 1965
[1858 ], p. 112, reads differently: "If we now talk of
plantation-owners in America as capitalists, if they are
capitalists, this is due to the fact that they exist as
anomalies within a world market based upon free labour."
The German original, in Padgug's view, is ambiguous:
"Dasz wit jetzt die Plantagenbesltzer in Amerika nicht
n w Kapitalisten nennen sondern dasz sic es sind, beruht
darauf, dasz sle als Anomalien innerhalb eines auf der
freien Arbeit beruhenden Weltmarkts existieten" (Karl
Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie:
Das Kapitel vom Kapital-Epochen 6konomischen Gesell-
schafts.formation, Heft V, Frankfort, Europiiische Verlags-
anstalt, Wien, Europa Veriag, 1967 [1858 ]), p. 412.
Cardoso (personal correspondence) believes I am inferring
(and imputing) a doubt Marx himself never had. I think
that Cohen's translation is inaccurate, that Nicolaus's is
correct, and that the original is not really ambiguous.
And I think Marx was puzzled by slavery within
capitalism without being led to conclude, therefore, that
what he was looking at was not capitalistic.
33 Padgug, op. cit., p. 18.
34 I cannot dwell on this point. It is supported, to some
extent, by Marx's thesis on the wider effects of the slave
mode of production (cf. Padgug, op. cir.), though not
entirely. Cf., for instance, S. Mintz, "Groups, group
boundaries and the perception of 'race,'" Comparative
Studies in Society and History 13 (October, 1971), pp.
437-450; Stuart B. Schwartz, "The manumission of
slaves in colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684-1745," Hispanic
American Historical Review 54 (November, 1974), pp.
603-635, and Stuart B. Schwartz, "Perspectives of
Brazilian Peasantry," Peasant Studies Newsletter 5
(October, 1976), pp. 1-19.
35 This raises additional serious questions concerning how
best to characterize "the slave mode of production," so-
called. Cf., for instance, S. Mintz, Caribbean Transforma.
tions (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), pp. 131-213.
36 Cite Cardoso (personal correspondence) writes:
According to Marxist theory of modes of production
and socioeconomic formations, as I understand it, the
fact that a 'peasant breach' [that is, slave production
for independent use and sale] may coexist with slavery
is not at all an impediment to the existence of a slave
mode of production.... In every socioeconomic forma-
tion, the dominant mode of production coexists with
others, and nothing prevents members of a social class
from being immersed in more than one type of produc-
tive rehtions (as with the peasants of western Europe
who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during
winters, could also be textile workers in the domestic
system of production.) (My translation. S.W.M.).
37 Padgug, op. cit., p. 22.
38 A.G. Quintero Rivera, "Background to the emergence of
imperialist capitalism in Puerto Rico," Caribbean Studies
269
12 (October, 1973), pp. 31-63.
39 Ibid.,p. 40.
40 Ibid.,pp. 39-40.
41 Ibid.,p. 42.
42 Ibid.,p. 43.
43 Ibid.,p. 43, footnote 43.
44 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El lngenio (La Habana:
UNESCO, 1964).
45 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (London:
MacGibbon and Kee, 1967).
46 Jay Mandle, "The plantation economy: an essay in
definition," Science and Society 36 (Spring 1972), pp.
49-62.
47 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York:
Pantheon, i974).
48 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York: International
Publishers [1887] 1939), p. 219.
49 Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery
(New York: Pantheon, 1965), p. 23.
50 Immanuel Wallerstein, "American slavery and the capitalist
world-economy," American Journal of Sociology 81
(March, 1976), p. 1212.
51 Cite Cardoso (personal correspondence) findsmy
argument weak. "On the one hand," he writes, "it does
not seem to me that these new 'indentured servants' from
China, India or Java could be thought of as free by any-
one making a considered judgment. On the other, aboli-
tion did not mean to anyone the passage to a typical
capitalist system in regard to productive relations, since
slavery was replaced by sharecropping and similar arrange-
ments, which represented a high level of personal depen-
dence, including extra-economic coercion. I believe this
is one of the clearest cases of the formal subjection of
noncapitalist forms of labor to a clearly capitalist process,
thereby preventing internal opportunities for preexisting
structures - productive forces, forms and levels of
accumulation, and a whole historical context - from
responding differently to new influences of the world
market... For me... this reveals the necessity of analyzing,
in transitions of this sort, the contradictions [arising
from] the confluence of external and internal forces."
(My tranSlation. S.W.M.). See Cardoso, "Latinoam6rica y
el Caribe (siglo XIX): la problem~itica de la transici6n al
capitahsmo dependiente." Paris, Congreso de Americanistas,
septiembre de 1976, mimeograph (revised version, March,
1977).
52 A useful review of some of this literature appears in
William A. Green, "Caribbean historiography," Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 7 (Winter 1977), pp. 509-530.
53 I have found particularly enlightening Dale Tomich's
Prelude to Emancipation: Sugar and Slavery in Martinique
1830-1848 (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History,
University of Wisconsin, 1976).
54 Once again, with regard to Marx, it seems to matter whether
one prefers the letter or the spirit, as Wallerstein puts it.
The contrast between proletarian and slave illuminates our
understanding of capitalist Europe, while it may some-
times obscure out understanding of the capitalist periphery.
In the case of Caribbean slaves, many of them were, for
270
much of the time, producers and consumers of surplus
value-surplus product, separable from their slave labor-
power. On this point see, for instance, Mintz, op. cit.,
1974, Ciro Cardoso, "La brecha campesina en el sistema
esclavista," ms. 1977. As I have indicated earlier, Cardo~o
does not see this qualification as any restriction upon the
slave mode of production as dominant under particular
conditions.
On a slightly different note, more apposite to the
direction in which the reviewer is going, Albert Hirschman
writes:
There is, then, nothing intrinsically inconceivable in
one particular commodity acting as a multidimensional
conspiracy in favor of or against development within
a certain historical and sociopolitical setting. But how
likely is it that such conspiracies have really existed?
For an answer to this question, a brief excursion into
a different historical period and event, the emergence
Dialectical Anthropology 2 (1977) 253-270
9 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands
of massive slavery in the New World, is revealing. It
seems evident that a number of characteristics of
sugarcane cultivation - the heavy, largely unskilled
work in tropical climates, the availability of free land
close to the plantations, the need to keep the labor
force together during the slack season, and the possibil-
ity of using that force, including women and children,
in minor tasks - conspired with the "sugar hunger"
in post-Renaissance Europe to create a special affinity
between sugarcane and slavery. Obviously it was not
sugarcane that created slavery, but it is fairly safe to
suggest that slavery would not have become as extended
as it did after the sixteenth century without that
particular staple and its peculiar bundle of character-
istics ("A generalized finkage approach to development,
with special reference to staples," Economic Develop-
ment and Cultural Change, Vol. 25, Supplement 1977,
p. 96).
55 Padgug, op. cit., pp. 24-25.