The Work of Empire: Current Directions in Transnational Labour History

Historical studies on the nexus between slavery and capitalism have proliferated over the past few years, to a point that it is now considered a core issue in the emerging field of the so-called "new history of capitalism."¹ Following, though not always acknowledging, the well-trodden footsteps of pioneering scholars of African descent, this growing body of scholarship has considerably unsettled the stagist narrative of the origin of capitalism by illuminating at ground level the complicated and situational meaning of market freedom for workers, free and unfree.² Moreover, the transnational framework of analysis within which this corpus is operating has revealed – or aimed to reveal – a geography of the rise of capitalism more broad than the largely Eurocentric, if not Anglocentric, debates within the Marxian canon since the 1950s.³

Despite their differences, the three books surveyed here continue this tradition of scholarship, but move it forward by bringing the historical study of the interplay between unfree labour and capitalism to bear on the history of colonial empires. The three studies are joined by the ambition of the authors to untie the study of empires from diplomatic affairs and interstate politics and re-explore it instead through the lens of labour history. In Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire, Abigail Swingen examines how transatlantic ideological debates on population and labour management among different sections of the ruling class in England and her Caribbean colonies during the second half of the 17th century contributed to generate competing, yet overlapping, visions of an empire foundationally based on the mobilization and exploitation of unfree labour. In Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500–1914, editors John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings make a strong case that state mobilization and employment of unfree labour for imperial work from the 16th century onward proved integral to the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. Lastly, in Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, editors Daniel Bender and Jana Lipman reframe US labour history as an imperial story to illuminate how the American capitalist economy, from Reconstruction onward, has developed via the integrating of a wide spectrum of free and unfree labour regimes, both domestically and abroad. Contrasting these three books substantiates the value of the imperial analytic for labour history and adds new insights to the current transnational and even global turn in the field.⁴

The study of the rise of the English Atlantic empire and the study of the rise of African slavery in England's Caribbean colonies have generally been told as two separate stories. In the former, the prevailing mercantilist interpretation has led historians, such as David Armitage and Jack P. Greene, among many others, to emphasize the commercial, religious, and military underpinnings of England's first imperial expansion in the 17th-century Atlantic world, hence leaving the labour question out of the narrative.⁵ In the latter, historians, such as Hilary Beckles, David Brion Davis, and Theodore Allen, have respectively focused on the economic, cultural, and political factors that led to the rise of African slavery in the Caribbean colonies, hence leaving the imperial question out of the narrative.⁶ Swingen's Competing Visions of Empire seeks to bridge this gap by integrating English imperial history with the history of African slavery to illuminate how unfree labour in general, and Black racial slavery in particular, was from the outset central to England's imperial expansion in the Atlantic world. In doing so, she reframes the rise of African slavery and the transatlantic slave...