Michael Zeuske: The Second Slavery as a Global Phenomenon:

The Second Slavery as a Global Phenomenon: How Dependent Was Capitalism on Slaveries and on Enslaved People? Michael Zeuske, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies Slavery research, a field of historical research (with centers in the US and Brazil) has been established for about 15 years. It understands the main slavery societies of the Americas (US, Brazil and Cuba/Caribbean) as independent formations of capitalism and modernity (Second Slavery). This means that in modernity, in close intertwinement to the “industrial modernity” of Europe, there was an American “slavery modernity” (1800–1890). The article asks on this basis about the close dependence, even interdependence on equal terms of the two modernities. But it goes even further, positing, on the basis of the concept of “capital of human bodies” (and individual biographies), enslaved people from pre-modern territories as actors of modern slavery systems in both “slavery capitalism” and in the “world economy” of industrial capitalism since 1840. As we know, this capitalism was discursively subject to the abolition of slavery and Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, this globalizing capitalism depended on millions of non-free and half-free workers, often from local slaveries worldwide.

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