Slavery and Capitalism, Redux

Abstract

Roberto Saba ’ s American Mirror is an insightful examination of how abolition in both Brazil and the United States resulted not in more equitable societies, but, rather, in the expansion of capitalism under regimes of wage labor that intensified vast inequalities. Saba argues that cosmopolitan antislavery reformers promoted emancipation “ to boost capitalist development in both countries ” (2). These “ bourgeois modernizers ” saw slavery as “ the main impediment ” to modernity and capitalist development (3). Abolishing slavery would attract immigrant laborers, encourage innovation, and free up capital and labor in more rational ways. According to these reformers, slaveowners did not make good use of technology, did not innovate, wasted labor power, and maintained a colonial relationship with Great Britain. Saba contends that antislavery was not just about rights and freedom, but also about the making of capitalism: while rights would remain “ distant aspirations, ” “ antislavery reformers succeeded in expanding capitalist production and trade ” (7). Saba is not comparing and contrasting the United States and Brazil, but, instead, studying the shared process of capitalist development on a global scale (one of the book ’ s great strengths). Saba ’ s provocative thesis builds on as well as upends the new historiography detailing slavery ’ s centrality to capitalism ’ s expansion, arguing that even more important was how the abolition of slavery, and the new labor and property regimes that emancipation engendered, created an even more powerful industrial and agro-industrial capitalist system. Saba argues that the clear economic superiority of the U.S. North in comparison with the U.S. South proved to nineteenth-century observers that slavery was an economic anchor. Furthermore, slavery ’ s abolition in both countries didn ’ t result in economic disruption (which