In the last decade, scholars have produced instigative histories of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. A renewed interest in capitalism and its seemingly inescapable power led historians to emphasize the cruel rationality of plantation slavery and its products. Studies on antislavery addressed topics such as human rights discourses and mass social movements. Yet these works often pushed aside questions raised decades ago by the first generations of scholars to write about slavery and emancipation. In telling “history as it really happened,” contemporary historians tend to dismiss the concepts and theories of an older school. And yet, the large body of work devoted to examining the deep contradictions that slavery and emancipation presented to the modern world ought not to be ignored. These were histories that sought to explain how things changed and spilled much ink trying to capture how people–the enslaved, capitalists, planters, the poor, and others–made sense of and shaped the forces shifting in front of them. Our proposed series of three roundtables feature historians who revisit the works of thinkers such as Robert Brenner, Robert Browne, David Brion Davis, W.E.B. DuBois, Eugene Genovese, Elsa Goveia, Oscar Handlin, C.L.R. James, Sidney Mintz, Manuel and Delia Zapata Olivella, Walter Rodney, Margaret Spufford, Eric Williams, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Harold Woodman. These scholars–each in their own way–adapted classical political economy and cultural studies to understand slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. With limited access to primary sources–as compared to what is available today–they produced powerful narratives, rich explanatory models, and explicit theoretical frameworks. They discussed how a central institution to the making of capitalism came to be seen and made by pro- and antislavery forces as essentially different from it. Furthermore, they cast the end of slavery in light of imperial and capitalist expansion, explaining how alternative impulses for democracy and equality were crushed. What can historians today learn from these foundational texts? And how does placing them in conversation with one another open up new possibilities for future scholarship?
Running with E.P. Thompson’s provocation that “Historical consciousness ought to assist one to understand the possibilities of transformation and the possibilities within people,” our conversations will inquire into how scholars can reappropriate and perhaps update classic concepts such as class struggle, patriarchy, the domestic sphere, primitive accumulation, merchant capitalism, the market revolution, underdevelopment, dependency, reconstituted peasantries, proletarianization, and class consciousness. This intellectual pursuit cannot be separated from the task of locating concepts in people, in institutions, and in the social stuff of life, not in abstract forces of destiny. In so doing, we hope to illuminate the complex reality of a system of labor that at once sustained and contradicted modern capitalism. Our hope is that these roundtables will raise provocative challenges to the now dominant approach to the history of slavery and emancipation in pushing forward older models.