Cheapness and (labor-)power: The role of early modern Brazilian sugar plantations in the racializing Capitalocene. (February 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Eichen, Joshua R
• Other Names: Baldwin Andrew guest-editor.; Erickson Bruce guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Environment and planning. Volume 38:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 35
• Page End: 52
• Publication Date: 2020-02
• Subjects: Race -- Anthropocene -- Capitalocene -- world-ecology -- the state -- plantations; Human geography -- Periodicals; Human ecology -- Periodicals; Spatial behavior -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Periodicals; Sciences sociales -- Périodiques; Ruimtelijke ordening; Social sciences; Periodicals; 304.2305
• DOI: 10.1177/0263775818798035
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0263-7758

Abstract

This essay looks at the historical geography of sugar plantations in Northeast Brazil during the 16th- and 17th-centuries to critique the spatio-temporality of the discourse of the Anthropocene. I argue that sugar plantations were key places in early systemic cycles of capital accumulation with their grim calculus of cheap labor-power and acceptable deaths. Sugar plantations were simultaneously prototypical racializing state actors and part of the emergent relations of capital changing the climate. With their rationalized, time-disciplined labor for processing cane into sugar, plantations were not only fundamentally proto-industrial sites, but also one of capital's laboratories of modernity. They were primordial sites of proletarianization, of spatio-temporal patterns that repopulated the Americas and central in the production not of the Anthropocene but of the racializing Capitalocene.