A Continuum of Free and Unfree Labor: The Condition of Laborers Across the
Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century
Abstract
The undeniable legacy of genocide, murder, slavery, capitalism, and colonialism
perpetuated by the British ruling elite in the nineteenth century through their reliance on
concomitant and complementary economic infrastructures, such as merchant, industrial, and
financial capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and plantation slavery, consequentially
produced an intersectional component to the capitalist exploitation of enslaved people, agrarian
peasants, and wage-laborers. In analyzing the historiographical development of the ‘rise’ of
capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the enslaved, and private property, the principal
inquiry of this research project has been to uncover how free and unfree laborers both suffered
from an extractive form of exploitation that directly resulted from a capitalist mode of
production.
The conclusion to this research seems to suggest that both free and unfree laborers were
jointly essential to the development of capitalism and shared in an oppressive and dehumanized
relationship to the bourgeoisie and private property, as the products of both of their labor were
wrongfully expropriated and converted into profits for the same ruling class. With the binary
opposition between free and unfree labor dissipated, an exploration of the degrees of exploitation
occurring on the same spectrum yields a more substantive analysis of the consequences of
capitalism as an economic system overall. Disrupting the romanticized narrative of capitalism
explicitly relying on “free labor” through the incorporation of enslaved laborers into such
paradigm still reverberates today, as it remains the predominant system governing our global
economy.
Nicolas Blaisdell
Professor Almeida-Beveridge
Discourses on Enslavement
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
17 February 2017
Blaisdell 1
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest
and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the
commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production (823).
– Karl Marx, ​Capital, Volume I
It is not analytically most useful to define either “proletarian” or “slave” in
isolation, since these two vast categories of toiler were actually linked intimately
by the world economy that had, as it were, given birth to them both (97).
– Sidney Mintz
A Continuum of Free and Unfree Labor: The Condition of Laborers Across the Atlantic in
the Nineteenth Century
The end of the eighteenth century marks a crucial transitory moment in European and
transatlantic history as Britain emerges as a dominant political and economic world power.
Accompanying the early sixteenth to late nineteenth century ‘rise’ of English empire is an
undeniable legacy of genocide, murder, slavery, capitalism, and colonialism perpetuated by the
British ruling elite through their reliance on concomitant and complementary economic
infrastructures, such as merchant, industrial, and financial capitalism, the transatlantic slave
trade, and plantation slavery. In this paper, I will explore and analyze the historiographical
relationship between depictions of free and unfree labor vis-à-vis the historical preponderance of
capitalism as the dominant economic system in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.
My analysis brings together the works of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thomas Spence, Robert
Wedderburn, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels to show that through the discursive
representations of both wage-labor and enslaved people, a new picture surfaces, in which the
binary opposition between free and unfree labor is subverted and replaced with a spectrum of
Blaisdell 2
oppression. I begin my analysis with an examination of a brief history of capitalism as unearthed
by Cugoano. Next, I consider how the effects of the privatization of land and property united the
the agrarian poor in England, enslaved people in the West Indies, and newly established
industrial proletariat against an intrinsically shared antagonist, the transatlantic bourgeoisie.
Culminating the developments by Cugoano, Spence, Wedderburn, Marx and Engels, Sidney
Mintz’ recent analysis provides a particularly useful framework for shaping contemporary
discussion of the conditions of free and unfree laborers.
In his 1787 fiery dialectic ​Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery​, Quobna
Ottobah Cugoano, an ex-enslaved person, boldly chastises the practice of slavery, while he
simultaneously integrates slavery and colonialism into the history of capitalism. One of the
central themes of ​Thoughts and Sentiments​ is that those who “steal, kidnap, buy, sell, and
enslave,” or the “merchandisers of the human species,” are a part of a larger economic
infrastructure that permits their cruel and exploitative practices (Cugoano 51). For Cugoano, the
reason for slavery’s legal and economic tenacity is that “contracting companies of merchants”
and “rich slave-holders” utilize their exorbitant wealth and status to “take the lead in matters of
government” to normalize their “infamous ways of getting rich” (70-1). Through his
predominantly economic characterization of slavery and association of the slave trade to
state-capitalist entities, like the Royal African Company, Cugoano splices together the
despicable history of slavery and that of capitalism (73). He then elucidates how the historical
development of European economic expansion and transition to capitalism as a mode of
production necessarily entails the usage of slave labor and plunder of the global South, just “as
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the Spaniards” looted “the Peruvian vessels of gold” (71). Based on Cugoano’s close scrutiny of
the global interdynamics of Britain’s economy, unfree labor is manifested as an integral feature
of eighteenth century capitalism. Writing from the vantage point of a person who is immediately
witnessing these events, the significance of Cugoano’s writing cannot be more pertinent to
contemporary research of the development of capitalism and slavery.1
A few decades later, Thomas Spence, Robert Wedderburn, Karl Marx, and Friedrich
Engels uncover how the unprecedented ascendancy of private property in the late eighteenth to
mid-nineteenth centuries is the pivotal matrix of enslavement for people existing within the
capitalist world economy. In his monumental work “The Restorer of Society to its Natural
State,” Thomas Spence grapples with the immediate repercussions of the privatization of
previously quasi-communal land for the agrarian poor in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth
century, as well as pioneering a theoretical framework for a revolutionary land redistribution
program. For Spence, the unequal ownership of the land between the privileged elite and landless
farmers is the “pillar that supports the temple of aristocracy” (Spence 74). With the privatization
and monopolization of the land by the British aristocracy being the “whole root of the evil,” the
only viable option for Spence, as Engels similarly advocates fifty years later in terms of the wage
system, is “nothing less than [the] complete extermination of the present system of holding land”
(79, 77). Although the primary purpose of “The Restorer of Society to its Natural State” is to
illustrate the economics of capitalist monopolization of land and outline a potential
redistribution, Spence demonstrates that discussions of slavery are an inevitable component for
Cugoano’s work ​Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery​ relied on an imaginative reinterpretation of
William Robertson’s ​The History of America​ (1777).
1
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this type of discourse. Provided the intrinsic relationship between the slave trade, slavery, and
capitalism, Spence confirms that the abolition of oppression will necessitate discussion of all
three systems. Of the people benefiting from privatized land, Spence identifies “monopolisers
and forestallers, plundering nabobs, slave traders, corrupt statesmen, traitors, and all sorts of
gripping miscreants” (70). Spence also directly links the justifications of slavery with the
rationalizations of the dispossession of the landless poor, as both are bolstered by a
romanticization of private property. The ruling capitalist elite deploy the “same arguments” to
“defend one kind [the slave trade] of traffic as the other [land privatization]” (71). Through this
connection of wealth deriving from privatization and the slave trade, Spence reveals a common
thread between the two modes of ensnarement.
A disciple and close friend of Thomas Spence, Robert Wedderburn, son of Scottish
planter, James Wedderburn, and the enslaved person, Rosanna, expands on the dual role of
private property in oppressing the British proletariat and the enslaved in the West Indies. In his
1817, “Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica” recorded in ​The Horrors of
Slavery​, Wedderburn decisively attempts to deliver a “fatal” blow to the root causes of
oppression. Directly speaking to the enslaved Jamaicans, he reminds them to “keep possession of
the land you now possess as slaves... for once you give up the possession of your lands, your
oppressors will have the power to starve you to death” and then proceeds to use the “sufferings
of the European poor” as an example (Wedderburn 82). Through Wedderburn’s foreboding to
the dispossessed enslaved people of Jamaica, he suggests there is a fundamental connection
between the type of exploitation outlined in Spence’s model of early nineteenth century agrarian
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capitalism and that of plantation slavery. The sources of power for both the landed aristocracy
and the plantation owners derives from land ownership and private property. In addition,
Wedderburn claims that without the right of land ownership, “freedom is not worth possessing,”
even if other political rights and citizenship are guaranteed (82). For Wedderburn, a person is
never truly emancipated unless their basic human needs, such as housing, food, water, and
clothing, are regarded as inalienable rights. Despite the need for both unfree and free laborers to
challenge the privatization of land to fight the extraction of surplus labor, Wedderburn
distinguishes between their condition. While both are victims of the coercive effects of private
property, the difference is that the “European poor” are deprived of land ownership and the
enslaved people of the West Indies are the “​property​” (his italics) (55). Hence, through the
privatization of land and property, the enslaved are even more degraded than their European
counterparts, while both are subject to the spectrum of capitalist oppression.
The industrial world of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and unregulated privatization
continues to be the underlying genesis of the transatlantic continuum of exploitation and
oppression of underprivileged, free and unfree, laborers. In his article “The Position of England,”
Friedrich Engels isolates “private property” as “the basic form of alienation,” specifying
“[human society] cannot be anything but private and its rule cannot be anything but the rule of
property” (Engels 17). Echoing the conclusions of Spence and Wedderburn, Engels signifies that
this contemporary capitalist mode of production places property “upon a pedestal” and has
become “the world’s master,” which is “more inhuman and all-pervasive than serfdom” (17). By
invoking the concept of master and enslaved, Engels invites deliberation on the position of the
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slave trade and slavery vis-à-vis the surge of private property to being the pinnacle of Britain’s
economy. Explicating this connection, Karl Marx engages the issue of private property and
slavery in an article regarding the Duchess of Sutherland’s condemnation of slavery. In “The
Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery,” Marx draws attention to the alleged hypocrisy of the
Duchess of Sutherland condemning “Negro slavery [sic]” while simultaneously “appropriat[ing]
to herself ​seven hundred and ninety-four thousand acres of land​, which time immemorial had
belonged to the clan” (his italics) (Marx 143, 146). In Marx’s article, he, like Spence, also
addresses the similarity between defenses of land privatization and defenses of slavery.
Satirizing Mr. Loch’s apology of the Countess of Sutherland, Marx asks “why, then, should the
slave-holders in the Southern States of North America sacrifice their private interest to the
philanthropic grimaces of her Grace, the Duchess of Sutherland” (148). Through his parody of
Mr. Loch’s attempt to vindicate landlordism, Marx confirms the insight illuminated by Spence
that both systems, privatization and slavery, rely on the same arguments to justify their existence.
Due to the concurrent capitalist exploitation of enslaved and free laborers across the
nineteenth century transatlantic, the socio-economic status of each group is a highly contested
area in modern scholarship. The question as to whether or not West Indian enslaved people can
be considered a hyper-exploited portion of the proletariat presents itself in Sidney Mintz’ article
“Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?,” David Brion Davis’ ​Inhuman Bondage​, and C.L.R.
James’ ​The Black Jacobins​. In his book ​Inhuman Bondage​, David Brion Davis clarifies what
Mintz means by the categories of “proletarian and “slave” converging “in practice” (Mintz 96).
In the chapter titled, “Slavery in Colonial North America,” the amalgamation of the economy of
Blaisdell 7
plantation slavery and that of Euro-American capitalism is described through the intermingling
roles of wage-laborers and enslaved people. For instance, Davis reports how “owners” profited
from “slave labor in iron manufacture, shipbuilding, mining,” as well as the unpaid harvesting of
traditional cash crops (Davis 125). Another key feature of plantation slavery is that “[enslaved
people] were often leased out by their owners or even allowed to hire out their labor,” which
meant that “slaves often worked alongside white farmers” (129). Through Davis’ depictions of
the uneven and combined2 applications of slavery, the functional roles of enslaved people and
wage-laborers can be viewed as part of a perplexing and interdependent system of economic
relations. Davis’ representation of the complexity of the interconnectedness of wage and unpaid
labor is verified through C.L.R. James’ description of the enslaved in Haiti immediately prior to
the Haitian Revolution. In his work ​The Black Jacobins​, James explains how the enslaved in
Haiti “were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time,”
since they worked on “huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain” (James 86). The
presence of enslaved people in factories and working alongside free wage-laborers exposes just
how difficult it can be to dissociate each other solely from their economic positions.
The intersectionality between British wage-laborers and enslaved people is one of the
primary purposes for pursuing the investigations directed by this paper. The ultimate pursuit is
not to establish which class of people suffered more or were exploited more, because the answer
to that question is bluntly that the enslaved did. In discussing the historiographical account of the
development of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the enslaved, and private property,
2
The methodological approach of uneven and combined development is further explained in Anievas and
Nisancioglu’s recent work, ​How the West Came to Rule​ (2015).
Blaisdell 8
the principal intention has been to discover how an international capitalist mode of production
predicated on the privatization of land necessitated the extraction of surplus value from the labor
of free and unfree workers, thereby creating an Atlantic proletariat class. As previously noted
through the discursive analysis of Cugoano, Spence, Wedderburn, Marx, Engels, and many
others, both free and unfree laborers were equally essential to the development of capitalism,
shared in an exploitative and dehumanized relationship to the bourgeoisie and private property,
as the products of their labor were wrongfully expropriated and transfigured into profits for the
same ruling class. With the binary opposition between free and unfree labor dismantled,
exploration of the various degrees of exploitation occurring on a spectrum allows for a more
substantive analysis of the consequences of a capitalist mode of production. Incorporating the
plight and revolt of enslaved people into the narrative of capitalism still reverberates today, as
capitalism still remains the predominant system governing our global economy.
Blaisdell 9
Work Cited
Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nisancioglu. ​How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical
Origins of Capitalism​. London: Pluto, 2015. Print.
Cugoano, Ottobah. ​Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings​. Ed.
Vincent Carretta. New York, NY: Penguin, 1999. Print.
Davis, David Brion. ​Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World​. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Engels, Friedrich, “The Position of England. The Eighteenth Century.” Marx and Engels. 9-31.
James, C.L.R. ​The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution​.
New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. ​Articles on Britain​. Moscow: Progress, 1971. Print.
Marx, Karl. ​Capital​. Ed. Friedrich Engels and Ernest Untermann. 4th ed. Vol. 1. New York:
Modern Library, 1906. Print.
Marx, Karl, “The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery.” Marx and Engels. 143-149.
Mintz, Sidney W. “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?” ​Review (Fernand Braudel Center)​,
Vol. 2, No. 1, 1978, 81–98. Print.
Spence, Thomas. “The Restorer of Society to its Natural State.” ​The Political Works of Thomas
Spence​. Ed. H. T. Dickinson. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Avero, 1982. 69-92. Print.
Wedderburn, Robert. ​The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings​. Ed. Iain McCalman. New
York: Marcus Wiener, 1991. Print.