Antebellum plantations functioned as internal colonies integrated into the global capital market

Evidence

As Beechey puts it, with great clarity: “Slaveholders were both merchants, dealing with the purchase and sale of commodities on the world market, and slaveholders exploiting their slaves within the plantation system, which emerged as a specialized agricultural region, a kind of internal colony within the expanded world market” (Beechey 1978). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 608

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the plantation as an ‘internal colony’ — a spatial-form concept linking slavery to world-system analysis.
• XREF: connects to: Closed plantation units were paradoxically dependent on external markets — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 387