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The "new historians of capitalism" are Sven Beckert ("Empire of Cotton"), Edward Baptist ("The Half that has Never Been Told"), and Walter Johnson ("River of Dark Dreams").
These "new historians" label antebellum U.S. slavery capitalist, but are reticent to define "capitalism". Clegg argues that without a clear definition of capitalism, it is difficult to provide a coherent historical explanation of its characteristics.
Clegg also labels antebellum U.S. slavery capitalist, but finds the new historians concept of capitalism lacking. For Clegg, slavery was capitalist because slaveholding planters experienced "generalized market dependence". This concept of market dependence is central to Robert Brenner's reading of Marx.
Clegg and the new historians agree that antebellum slavery exhibited the following features:
Due to Clegg's divergent concept of capitalism, he takes issue with the new historians' endorsement the Williams Thesis (page 295):
A distinguishing feature of these works [by the new historians] is their acceptance of a revised version of the Williams thesis. Eric Williams had argued that profits from the slave trade and sugar plantations were a major source of investment funds for Britain's nascent industries. Subsequent scholarship has tended to dispute this view. However, Joseph Inikori and Kenneth Pomeranz have recently proposed a revised Williams thesis, arguing that the necessary contribution of colonial slavery to British growth came not through reinvestment of profits, but through an elastic supply of raw materials and an elastic demand for British exports.
Eric Williams - Capitalism and Slavery
The principal critics of the thesis in Anglophone academia were the Genoveses, who advanced a Weberian view of capitalism, and dwelled on slaveholders putative "paternalism" and lack of a "bourgeois mentality" (the former theme was also a favorite of the "racist" U.B. Phillips). They identified themselves as "Marxists" for a time, but later voiced "conservative" views. The "new historians" represent a break with the Genovese/Phillips position, which long held sway, the U.S. slavery was pre- or non-capitalist. Clegg welcomes this.
Page 285:
At first sight it might seem that slave owners have direct nonmarket access to at least one means of production: the labor of their slaves. They thus seem to have something in common with the characteristically noncapitalist productive unit in Brenner’s schema: the peasant household. Precapitalist peasants often take advantage of the opportunity to sell their output, but are under no compulsion to do so, for their access to the principle means of production and subsistence (land) is guaranteed by customary rights. As a result, peasants rarely specialize for the market and are not compelled to produce at a competitive cost. Indeed, peasants tend to diversify output and resist the imposition of market-determined rents in order to avoid becoming dependent for their subsistence on volatile market prices.
However, a glance at the historical record is enough to show that there is in fact no analogy between precapitalist peasant households and antebellum slave plantations in terms of their relation to the market. Slave owners in the United States could not fall back on subsistence agriculture, living off the labor their slaves, even if they had wanted to. For they had to purchase land and slaves on markets, typically on credit, and they faced fixed monetary costs in interest, taxes, and the wages of overseers. Therefore, antebellum slave plantations specialized for the market much more than small yeoman farmers. Their dependence on competitive markets for both inputs and outputs meant that slave owners were compelled to minimize costs by adopting the most productive techniques. As a result, both the productivity and price of slaves rose over time.
In light of the market dependence of slave holders, a few points can be made.
Regarding the "profit motive": the profit motive is not a "simple psychological proclivity" or exogenous cultural factor (e.g. "protestant ethic") (page 286).
Existing slave owners, in order to remain slave owners, were com- pelled not only to make profits but to maximize them (by minimizing costs relative to sale prices). To meet fixed money payments, including interest on purchases of land and slaves, they were forced to adapt and transform the slave labor process in response to price movements.
Regarding productivity growth:
Profit seeking is as old as trade itself, but continuous and generalized productivity growth is unique to capitalist societies. The latter requires not only that those who control production seek to make a profit but that they also have the capacity to transform the production process and the opportunity to sell the increased output. Moreover, new techniques will be cer- tain to generalize only if those who refuse to adapt are penalized, for example, by losing access to the means of production.
Regarding commodification and collateralization (page 286):
Finally, if product and slave markets presented planters with incentives, finance presented them with a constraint. Slave owners were typically indebted, and their debts imposed on them a legal obligation to raise cash to repay creditors. As Claire Priest has shown, British colonial law was unique in facilitating the transfer of land and slaves from insolvent debtors to creditors via foreclosure auctions, a measure instituted in the Debt Recovery Act of 1732.
Widespread foreclosure acted as a selection mechanism, ensuring that planters who were not willing to maximize profits lost their land and slaves to those who were. In this light, the analogy that Baptist and Johnson make with the housing bubble of the 2000s seems misdrawn. For rather than a sign of irrational exuberance, it can be shown that rising slave prices accurately capitalized the price of cotton and the productivity of slave labor. Easy credit may have had short run effects, but the secular increase in slave prices is more plausibly attributed to the threat or reality of foreclosure leading to increased competition and rising productivity.
Page 300:
In a new economics textbook, Samuel Bowles and his coauthors emphasize this constraint [faced by market dependent capitalists]: "A feudal lord who managed his estate poorly was just a shabby lord. But the owner of a firm that could not produce goods that people would buy, at prices that more than covered the cost, was bankrupt—and a bankrupt owner is an ex-owner." However, Bowles et al. are mistaken to further claim that, like the lord, "the owner of a slave plantation who was not very good at growing cotton retained his status. He was a less-than-averagely-wealthy slave owner; but still an undisputed member of the elite." In fact a slave owner in the United States who failed to produce cotton in a cost-efficient manner became an ex-slave owner: his slaves were literally taken away from him. I estimate that, in South Carolina in the 1840s, more than half of all slaves sold in upland cotton counties were sold by the courts on behalf of creditors.
Yet Bowles et al.’s description may well have applied to Latin American colonies, many of which protected slave property from foreclosure.
Per Clegg (contra Beckert), it is doubtful that industrial capitalism in England or the Northern U.S. states was ever dependent on slave grown cotton. To argue that it was is to argue "that without slavery industrialization would have been averted, diminished, or delayed" (p296).
However, Beckert himself shows that Britain’s cotton industry was capable of doing without slave-grown cotton during and after the American Civil War. He might object that Egypt and India couldn’t have stepped into the breach earlier, but when Britain was briefly cut off from American cotton imports by the war of 1812, the price of cotton rose less than it did in the 1860s, suggesting less dependence in this earlier period.
It is also questionable whether the Northern US economy was ever “dependent” on slave-produced cotton, either as an input to manufacturing or as a revenue-generating export. Ironically this argument was first made by slave owners themselves, and it became a fateful mistake in the hands of the secessionists, who assumed that the Northern economy could not survive without Southern cotton.
Clegg adduces this striking fact, which is hard to square with Beckert's narrative.
...while cotton represented a large share of US exports, exports were a small share of the antebellum US economy, averaging 6 percent of GDP from 1800–1860.
Clegg argues that because raw cotton inputs comprised so small share of production costs for cotton textiles, and cotton textile production saw such enormous productivity and output growth, it is hard to see why industrialization would not have occured in a counter-factual situation in which there had been no U.S. cotton plantation slavery. Page 297:
As for the textile industry, the real question is not whether Lowell or Manchester could have done without slave-produced cotton, but what they would have had to pay for it. A higher price may have put pressure on less efficient mills, but raw cotton was a small component of the final textile price, and demand was not particularly elastic. Thus it is hard to believe that a modest increase in the price of raw cotton would have held back an industry that was experiencing compounded revolutions in productivity. Moreover, while we can’t know for sure how much it would have cost the British economy to do without slave-produced cotton, we do know it was possible, for French mills relied on cotton from the Eastern Mediterranean well into the early nineteenth century.
The chronology of industrialization also presents difficulties for Beckert's narrative:
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that industrialization depended on cotton. Since the Atlantic sugar trade preceded British industrialization, Williams could at least plausibly attribute a causal primacy to the former. Yet cotton was a comparative latecomer to the Atlantic economy. By the mid 1700s, before it began to import slave-grown cotton on a major scale, Britain had already pulled away from the rest of Europe in terms of population growth and urbanization.
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