Closed plantation units were paradoxically dependent on external markets

Evidence

A second contradiction contrasts the Plantation’s will to autarky with its dependence, in reality, in relation to the external world. The transactions it fûstered with this world took place in the elementary form of the exchange of goods, usually at a loss. Payrnent was in kind, or as an equivalent exchange value, which led to accumulation neither of experience nor of capital. Nowhere did the Planters rnanage to set up organisrns that were sufficiently solid and autonomous to allow them to have access to the control of a market, means of international transportation, an independent system of money, or an efficient and specific representation in foreign markets. The Plantations, entities turned in upon themselves, paradoxically, have aIl the syrnptoms of extroversion. They are dependent, by nature, on someplace elsewhere. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 387

Categorization

• XREF: Plantation’s ‘self-enclosed but extroverted’ structure parallels the paradox in the reader’s project: a closed identity that is constitutively dependent on the other it excludes. — connects to: Antebellum plantations functioned as internal colonies integrated into the global capital market — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 608; Monopolized credit forced growers into dependence that competition later dissolved; Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance

Broader Connections

• Antebellum plantations functioned as internal colonies integrated into the global capital market #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 608
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance #expands (0.80)
• Monopolized credit forced growers into dependence that competition later dissolved #qualifies (0.75)