The super-exploitation of African labor was the key to colonial elites’ liberation

Evidence

As the capitalist strata of western Europe achieved political, social, and ideological maturity, their jockeying for hegemony over the world system reduced African labor in its homelands and in the New World peripheries to pawns of power. State banditry, as E. P. Thompson named it, became the modus operandi that weeded out the landed nobilities and integrated their survivors with the rising bourgeoisies. Intensive exploitation of labor became the basis for purchasing new sortings of intra-European domination. In the overseas territories, in the slave societies of Cuba, Brazil, North America, Jamaica, and Haiti, restive colonial elites amassed wealth but envisioned how much greater and diverse that wealth could become without the parasitism and restraints of state and trade imposed by the dominant orders in the mother countries. For these “ruling” elites, too, enslaved African labor, that is its super-exploitation, became the key to their liberation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 703

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior chapter work on how capitalist accumulation and the slave economy interlock with West African political economy; also to E. P. Thompson’s ‘state banditry’ as a historical concept. — connects to: Colonized elites also helped exploit their own people under colonial protection. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 259