Plantation slavery was formally not capitalist yet functioned within global merchant capital circuits.

Evidence

However, whereas under capitalism the worker owns his own labor-power which he sells as a commodity to the capitalist, slaveholders owned both the labor-power and the slave. “The slaveholder considers a Negro, whom he has purchased, as his property, not because the institution of slavery as such entitles him to that Negro, but because he has acquired him like any other commodity through sale and purchase” (Marx 1974: 776). However, both the slave trade itself, and the extraction of the commodities so produced, were funded by mercantile capital and circulated within the global circuits of capital. 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

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Echoes the earlier chapters’ discussion of slavery in the Americas and connects to Genovese/Williams debates.
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: how this formal-vs-functional distinction maps onto debates about racial capitalism.

Related

• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.87)
• Marx held plantation slavery only formally capitalist because it lacked free wage labor (similarity 0.84)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.82)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.82)
• Antebellum plantations functioned as internal colonies integrated into the global capital market (similarity 0.82)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.81)
• Whether plantation slavery was capitalist remains an unresolved scholarly debate (similarity 0.80)
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor (similarity 0.80)
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case (similarity 0.79)
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist and formally pre-capitalist modes combine in structured dominance. (similarity 0.79)
• Africa supplied slave labor because its region lay outside Europe’s world-economy (similarity 0.79)
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage #corroborates (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 118
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition #corroborates (0.70)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally #expands (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 553
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor #expands (0.35)