Onward To Liberation!—Samir Amin and the Study of World Historical Capitalism

This article presents theoretical and methodological insights of world-systems analysis via the works of Samir Amin and his major interlocuteurs. It is argued that Samir Amin was central to sparking the study of world historical analysis, and offered unique contributions to the discussions that emerged. It is demonstrated that this is due to Samir Amin’s ability to balance structure, specificity, and historical contingency, as well as his enduring commitment to human liberation.

Capitalism

As a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of complex historical phenomena, “capitalism” has been a powerful tool for historians of the Atlantic World. Capitalism, used as a concept in the sense derived from the work of Karl Marx, generates analyses that integrate the processes of production, consumption, and exchange with the historical development of consciousness and social systems. It is a critique, rather than simply an alternative form, of political economy. How exactly to conduct such critical analysis has been a matter of prolific and sophisticated argument for over a century, and specific definitions of capitalism as an object of historical study vary as functions of that debate. Indeed, debates about the precise formulation and usefulness of capitalism as a concept, and about its geographical and temporal scope as a historical object, have run on similar though by no means parallel lines to debates over the “Atlantic World.” These discourses intersect most vibrantly in the study of Atlantic slavery. From the 19th to the 21st centuries, the relationship of slavery to capitalism has remained a site of intense conceptual struggle. All serious contributions to such debates, and to the study of historical capitalism generally, have relied to some extent on the evidence and analysis of scholars who were not themselves engaged in that study. This bibliography, however, will deal for the most part only with work that deploys the term “capitalism,” signifying a more or less conscious engagement with the tradition and debates that derive from Marx’s work.

Mining and historical capitalism

Books reviewed: Horacio Machado Aráoz, Mineração, genealogia do desastre. São Paulo: Editora Elefante, 2020; Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020

The European Union building from Public Choice to Ordo, Röpke’s and Einaudi’s ideas of Europe

The first part the article deals with the Public Choice approach to the European Union as a club of sovereign states that decide to share, without losing sovereignty, some segment of their public goods and related power under the subsidiarity principle. It also deals with Ordo, Röpke’s and Einaudi’s liberal third way between historical capitalism and a competitive market economy, with – at its centre – the people and the civitas humana. The second part presents the dualistic performances of the main countries of the euro area, building on the analysis of eight parameters for the period 2013–18, and discusses the incompleteness of the institutional construct of the European Union. The third part discusses potential solutions to these problems in the light of Ordo, Einaudi’s and Röpke’s ideas of Europe.

New World Slavery in the Capitalist World Economy

This chapter explores, first, how New World slavery and other forms of coerced labour appear in the volume organized by Larry Neal, The Cambridge History of Capitalism, published in 2014. The second half of the chapter offers a brief alternative interpretation of the history of slavery in the Americas as a constitutive part of historical capitalism. In this way, it tackles a central problem in The Cambridge History of Capitalism: its static representation of slavery, which, abstracted from the broader world structures of which it was part, appears as a single immutable institution throughout the modern era. The main goal of the article is to emphasize, first, how slavery changed over time and, second, how it was part of the total ensemble of global relations that formed the capitalist world economy between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is a history of slavery in capitalism.

Introduction

This introduction emphasizes the importance of global conjunctures and non-European resources, labour power, goods, ideas, institutions, techno-scientific developments, consumer demands, and socio-economic dynamics in the genesis of historical capitalism(s). The contributions to the volume are summarized, highlighting both the internal socio-economic dynamics of a number of regions (that is, parts of Latin America, Eurasia, and Africa), as well as the global interconnections, entangled histories, and intertwined processes that went into the making and co-production of historical capitalism(s).