Another signature contribution: at the heart of Sweetness and Power lies
an understanding of the history of capitalism in the Atlantic world that
goes far to explain slavery’s enduring legacy. Mintz was among the first
historians—again, recall that he was an anthropologist foremost—to write
about Atlantic slavery as a unified system, internally differentiated by
commodity and colony in ways that shaped the lives of enslaved people
and the prosperity of plantation society. Mintz’s inversion of
conventional history upended a long-accepted “fact” that capitalism
arose within Europe’s borders. For Mintz, capitalism began instead in
the New World, in the slaving colonies that created the capital that
fueled Europe’s economic shift. Here’s how he described it in a 2013
email to Boston Review editor Deb Chasman:
My point—it is now absorbed into what is called “common knowledge”—was
that Western civilization really first “rose” in its colonies; and of
all those colonies, the first were the sugar colonies. It could not have
been possible for Marx to argue that way because for him there could be
no capitalism without a proletariat, and the proletariats arose in Europe.
Recent lauded books (Greg Grandin’s Empire of Necessity, Sven Beckert’s
Empire of Cotton, Ned Sublette’s American Slave Coast, Daniel
Rassmussen’s American Uprising) pick up on the scholarship launched by
Mintz to explain how we live today—still—with the blood of enslaved
Africans on our hands.
full: http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/sidney-mintz-in-memoriam
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