The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean by Nick Nesbitt (review)

Reviewed by: The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean by Nick Nesbitt Philip Kaisary Nick Nesbitt. The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 274. Ever since the publication in 1944 of Eric Williams's monumental and pathbreaking Capitalism and Slavery, debate has raged over the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Moreover, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, a remarkable upsurge of scholarly work which has captured a broad public readership has addressed the capitalist dimensions of Atlantic slavery, affirming the plantation-based mode of production as indispensable to global capital accumulation. Into this maelstrom enters Nick Nesbitt's The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, a timely, provocative, and magisterial intervention that makes plain what these debates have been missing for the past eighty years. The novelty and theoretical brilliance of Nesbitt's new book can be discerned at the outset by the stated focus on "the nature of capitalist slavery and colonialism as social forms." (1, emphasis added.) In the book's bracing opening chapter, for example, the focus on social form enables Nesbitt's argument that the entire, long-running historicist debate inaugurated by Williams's famous study "has entirely and without exception … missed the forest for the trees" (17). "Empiricist, data-driven" argument and counterargument have been, Nesbitt reveals, "utterly inadequate to address the radical question Williams places before us, that of the relation of slavery and capitalism" (19). Problematizing "circular," "backwards," and anti-theoreticist reasoning (33), Nesbitt quite brilliantly reveals the shortcomings of arguments that have maintained because slavery generated prodigious wealth it gave birth to modern capitalism. After all, as Nesbitt reminds us, from "Croesus of Lydia to the Spanish plunder of the Americas … the annals of history brim with amassed riches, profits and palaces" (19). As such, the terms deployed by Williams and those who have followed in his wake are simply "incapable of supporting (or disproving)" the proposition that slavery was "decisive" in the development of global capitalism (19). Therefore, instead of entering an historiographic debate over profits, productivity or political economy, Nesbitt sets out on the path of theoretical clarification. Chapter 1 offers an excoriating literature review that makes the case that the relation between slavery and capitalism is best conceived of via Marx's concept of social form. Chapter 2 then reconstructs Marx's categorical analysis of capitalist slavery to reveal the implications of Marx's insistence that under the capitalist social form enslaved laborers are commodities incapable of generating surplus value. The reward for such painstaking reconstructive work is the revelation of "the specifically capitalist form of chattel slavery" (103). Chapter 3 opens the book's second part in which the focus shifts to "Black Jacobinism" and addresses C. L. R. James's three-part explanation (the idea of freedom, a resolute mass struggle, and—most controversially—leaders of genius) for the Haitian Revolution's successful destruction of the capitalist social form of plantation slavery. Chapter 4 examines the competing social forms that replaced slavery in St. Domingue/Haiti from 1791 to 1820 in relation to "the subsumption of Haiti within the expanding order of global capitalism" (131) and the categorical concept of a "modern proletariat" as elaborated by James and Marx. The book's fifth and final chapter adroitly teases out contradictions in Aimé Césaire's repeated calls for the industrialization of Martinique and the "quasi-ecological critique of industrial civilization" elsewhere in his writing (177). Similarly, Nesbitt notes, we can also observe a contradictory celebration of industrialization cheek by jowl with a lyrical paean to the Haitian natural world in the fiction of Jacques Stephen Alexis. Finally, in a rousing culmination that resonates powerfully "in our twenty-first century of global warming and ecological devastation" (176), Nesbitt argues that in Suzanne Césaire's essays we encounter a refusal of appeals to industrialization, a "vehement critique of the ideology of development," and the identification of the capitalist social form of wage labor as a causal explanation for Antillean injustice and inequality (184). The Price of Slavery is a richly theorized intervention into the contemporary debate...