The Global Plantation Complex
The Engine of Capitalism
In this essay, I seek to expand upon and problematize the foundational definition of the plantation, working toward a more holistic, dynamic definition of the global plantation complex. To understand the historical processes of capital accumulation, underdevelopment, and the internal contradictions of contemporary capitalism, it is essential to understand the plantation: the engine of imperialism. I begin by analyzing the standard definition of the plantation system, then engage with the plantation economy model and its various reimaginations, followed by the plantation within racial capitalism model, and finally, I conclude by humbly presenting my definition of the global plantation complex.
The scholarship of Edgar T. Thompson and Charles Wagley on what we today recognize as the global plantation complex has proven to be foundational as it laid much of the necessary methodological groundwork. By placing the work of each researcher in conversation, I survey a basic definition of the global plantation complex, which is necessary to establish before entering in the various polemics and epistemological questions in the contemporary literature. Edgar T. Thompson was the first scholar to conduct a survey of what we today understand as the global plantation complex, laying much of the necessary methodological foundation. Thompson outlines the concept of the plantation system as a social system, emphasizing the epistemological root of the term “system,” which is “a set of relations forming a whole, that is forming an aggregate about which something is thought to be true which is not true of the member parts or objects. It seems that consciousness of the existence of a unity or whole does not automatically carry with it consciousness of the constituent relations and parts of a whole” (41). In other words, one must understand each of the constituent parts of a system and the way they compose the system as a whole; a system is more than the sum of its parts. Thompson highlights the importance of understanding the plantation as what he calls a “settlement institution.” Underscoring the historical evolution of land and property relations, he writes, “As a settlement institution the plantation belongs in a class with the farm, the ranch, the manor and other social forms that institutionalize the relations between human groups and the land” (44). In conversation with Thompson, Charles Wagley enumerates several of the basic commonalities, such as “monocrop cultivation under the plantation system, rigid class lines, multi-racial societies, weak community cohesion, small peasant proprietors involved in subsistence and cash-crop production, and a matrifocal type family form” (9). For the purposes of this brief critical essay, I will define the basic understanding of the plantation system through a synthesis of Thompson and Wagley: the plantation system is a colonial settlement institution organized around the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the owner through export-oriented monocrop production; its political economy is driven by the authority of the planter, which is enforced through racialized hierarchy and despotic order, often at the level of the state.
George Beckford’s plantation economy model synthesizes Thompson’s plantation system as settlement institution model and Wagley’s plantation society model into a more holistic framework, particularly depending on the former’s analysis of the structure of the plantation and the identification of a rigid class divide and racialized hierarchy. In terms of political economy, the plantation economy model analyzes how the social organization of the plantation, centered around and subject to the authority of the planter, mirrors that of a state. For Beckford, the plantation is a total institution[1] organized around the economic goal of profit through the exportation of a single cash crop subjected to the complete authority and control of the planter. He outlines the internal and external dimensions of the plantation system: the internal dimension constitutes the plantation as a social system locally while the external dimension encompasses the plantation as an economic system both within its locale and within the global economy more broadly (Beckford 10). The internal and external aspects of the plantation system interface dialectically, creating what Beckford defines as the plantation economy, “the term we apply to those countries of the world where the internal and external dimensions of the plantation system dominate the country’s economic, social, and political structure and its relations with the rest of the world” (12). As we can see, Beckford presents a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the plantation system, advancing our efforts to establish a definition of the global plantation complex.
Though Thompson, Wagley, and Beckford each discuss enslaved labor and the Atlantic slave trade in their scholarship, the institution of slavery as integral to the plantation system is notably absent from their definitions. This has resulted in much fruitful debate in the field. Scholars such as Alex Dupuy “argue that the original causes of underdevelopment are to be sought in the effects of the slave relations of production, that is, the relationship between social classes, and not in the structures of the plantation which are epiphenomena of the slave social relations” (237). To understand the dynamics of the plantation system, it is necessary to study the social organization of labor. As Walter Rodney outlines,
“Indeed, I would argue that capital is of less importance than having a labor supply of a particular type…The labor must be cheap and plentiful, and, even more important, the labor must be easily controlled. Unless labor can be provided under conditions that maximize the industrial control, you cannot have a functioning plantation system” (646).
The centrality of control as a defining aspect of the social organization of labor; if the planter does not have absolute authority over the plantation, and specifically, over the productive labor on the plantation, the system cannot function. Rodney and other scholars tend toward a more ambivalent view on the importance of slavery, particularly underlining the fact that the abolition of the slave trade counterintuitively fed the expansion of the global plantation complex (47). By analyzing the plantation system in Guyana from a broad perspective with a theoretical methodology, Rodney renders Dupuy’s framing static and narrow, presenting an alternative, more dynamic framework through which it is made clear that slavery itself is not the primary cause of underdevelopment. It is not an ahistorical aberration that exists in a vacuum. Rather, the institution of slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade, must be understood as having developed simultaneously as an engine and consequence of capitalism. To understand the global plantation complex, it is important to understand slavery as dialectically related to the historical development of capitalism and the rise of imperialism through centuries of systematic underdevelopment of the Global South and accumulation of wealth in the Global North.
Dale Tomich grapples with the question of underdevelopment, outlining two major theoretical tendencies prevalent throughout the 1970s, dependency theory, which emphasizes the role of trade—e.g. unequal exchange—in sculpting the relationship between the imperial core and periphery, and mode of production theory, which highlights the social relations of production as deterministic of imperial core-periphery interchange (Tomich 16). His intervention characterizes each approach as reductionist; each investigates merely a single aspect of the complex, dynamic global process at the expense of the rest of the analysis—for him, dependency theory is structural determinism while mode of production theory is class reductionism. In rethinking the plantation model, Tomich takes “the capitalist world-economy as the unit of analysis and treat[s] specific plantation regimes as units of observation within this more comprehensive analytic and interpretive framework.” By situating his analysis of the plantation system within the broader historical process of capitalist development, he recognizes how “it extends and deepens the world-economic division of labor by geographically integrating new regions, producing new (staple) commodities, and mobilizing labor on an expanding scale” (32). Through this broader, more nuanced methodology, he establishes the commodity frontier model, which thinks of the plantation “as creating a series of moving transnational frontier zones producing distinct products in different locations at different times” (35). In other words, the plantation system is a vehicle of wealth creation through commodity production driven by the historical forces of capitalist development and imperialist expansion. Within the commodity frontier model, the social organization of labor is dialectically related to global dynamics of domination and underdevelopment: the extractive violence inflicted upon plantation laborers is the local manifestation of the global violence exacted upon the periphery by the core through the historical process of capital accumulation.
Moving beyond the commodity frontier model, Kris Manjapra presents a more thorough, nuanced definition of the global plantation complex:
“The plantation complex, an early form of prison factory, was perfected as a social and economic institution in the Caribbean. It entailed a racial system of land appropriation from indigenous peoples, and savage techniques of labor control of kidnapped and shackled labor migrants. It was based on the enclosure of lands for the intense cultivation of single crops (monocropping) that were sent into the international market. The plantation complex involved the outlay of huge amounts of credit, which served as a lever for vast infrastructure projects of agro-ecological transformation, including land enclosures, irrigation works, railways, and the dredging of ports. In short, the plantation complex was honed and streamlined in the Caribbean from the 1500s to the 1700s. It mixed together ecological extraction, racism, colonialism, financial and mercantile capitalism, militarism, and agricultural science into a destructive, cellular form that metastasized from the Caribbean across the Global South after abolition” (363).
In what is perhaps the first direct association of the global plantation complex with the prison industrial complex, Majapra underscores how the plantation is inextricably linked to the emergence and continuation of racial capitalism. Working from the position that all capitalism is racial capitalism, which he defines as “a racialized system of dispossession and exploitation, dehumanizing some groups for the material benefits of others” (365), he illustrates how the social organization of labor through racial hierarchies and the export-oriented monocropping production model persisted after the abolition of slavery and lives on presently in the form of the prison industrial complex. Following Beckford’s plantation economy framework to its logical conclusion, one would come up with an analysis resembling Manjapra’s work on plantation dispossession within agricultural racial capitalism.
I conclude by briefly retracing the theoretical development of the plantation system. Beginning with Thompson and Wagley, the plantation emerges as a social institution, particularly defined by its vertical integration and authoritarian organization of labor under the total control of the planter. Beckford synthesizes these aspects and expands them to apply to the political economy of entire societies, taking care to underscore the dialectical relationship between the plantation economy and the development of capitalism. Thompson, Wagley, and Beckford each acknowledge the importance of slavery for the development of the plantation system, but none include it as a defining factor, as problematized by Dupuy. Rodney, however, through his case study of Guyana using a broad, theoretical methodology, disagrees with the work of the former to essentialize slavery on the plantation. The discussion about slavery is complex, particularly in the context of the global plantation system, though unfortunately outside the scope of this short, critical investigation. Tomich, synthesizing the work of the second wave of plantation scholars, emerges with the concept of the commodity frontier, which, while rejecting both modes of production theory and dependency theory, explains how the plantation functions as a tool of imperialist expansion and introduces new commodities to the international market. Finally, Manjapra moves beyond the previous scholarship, introducing the idea that the global plantation complex is linked to the modern prison industrial complex and investigating the plantation’s role in the historical development of racial capitalism. Importantly, he highlights how the global plantation complex is a dynamic historical process rather than an archaic, defunct vestige of pre-industrial capital accumulation, which presents the opportunity to rethink how it is defined.
The global plantation complex is the engine of imperialism; its continued maintenance is necessary to fuel the ceaseless march of capital accumulation through the regime of enforced underdevelopment. Historically, it has been a settlement institution, binding both labor and capital to the land, opening new frontiers for the injection of capital, establishing channels of unequal exchange, thus introducing new commodities to the markets of the imperial core. Today, the global plantation complex continues not only in the form of the global food system—much of our food is produced in the Global South or harvested and processed by migrant workers under semifeudal conditions—but also in the form of the prison industrial complex, which, in addition to serving as the Band-Aid patching over the socioeconomic crises manufactured through neoliberal capitalism, more importantly, provides a cheap, captive labor source ripe for capitalist exploitation.
In other words, the global plantation complex is the central nervous system of the capitalist world order. Thus, if we are to strive for genuine liberation from the shackles of capitalism, we must fight for the destruction of the global plantation complex. A better world is possible.
Bibliography
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[1] Per Lloyd Best, a total economic institution encompasses a production arrangement in which both the land and the workforce are entirely subjected to the authority of capital, in this case, the authority of the planter (Beckford 9).