By David Pretel
This article discusses the main contributions of the New History of Capitalism written over the past fifteen years by paying particular attention to how this scholarship has reconsidered the old question of the relationship between capitalism and slavery. It questions the relatively peripheral place of Latin America and the Caribbean in this revisionist historiography and argues in favour of expanding the debate to include resource extraction and capital formation during the «second slavery» in Brazil and Cuba. New research avenues, such as studies on the technological, business, and environmental dimensions of slave production in the Americas and the Atlantic world, are explored throughout the article.
Keywords: capitalism, slavery, commodities, Cuba, Brazil, United States, nineteenth century.
Published:
2022