The concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion. This article examines the conceptual framework and methodological procedures that inform this interpretation. It reformulates the concept of the capitalist world-economy by emphasizing the mutual formation and historical interrelation of global–local relations. This open conception of world-economy permits the temporal-spatial specification of the zones of the second slavery. In this way, it is possible both to distinguish the new zones of the second slavery from previous world-economic zones of slave production and to establish the ways in which they are formative of the emerging industrial world division of labor. From this perspective, analysis of sugar production in Jamaica, Guyana, and Cuba discloses spatial-temporal differences between what would otherwise be taken as apparently similar historical-geographical complexes. This comparison demonstrates how world-economic processes produce particular local histories and how such histories structure the world-economy as a whole. This approach locates the crisis of slavery during the nineteenth century in the differentiated response to processes of world accumulation, rather than the incompatibility of slave production with industrialization and open, competitive markets. More generally, it calls attention to the continuity of forms of forced labor in the historical development of the capitalist world-economy and to the ways that processes of capitalist development produce social-economic differentiation and hierarchy on a world scale.

中文翻译：

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第二次奴隶制和世界资本主义：历史探究的视角

第二奴隶制的概念从根本上重新解释了奴隶制与资本主义的关系，它呼吁人们关注美国南部、古巴和巴西出现的广泛的新奴隶商品生产区，这是 19 世纪工业化和世界经济扩张的一部分。本文研究了为这种解释提供信息的概念框架和方法程序。它通过强调全球-地方关系的相互形成和历史相互关系来重新构建资本主义世界经济的概念。这种开放的世界经济概念允许对第二奴隶制区域进行时空规范。这样，既可以将新的第二奴隶制区与以前的奴隶生产世界经济区区分开来，也可以确定它们形成新兴工业世界分工的方式。从这个角度来看，牙买加、圭亚那和古巴的食糖生产分析揭示了在其他情况下被视为明显相似的历史地理复合体之间的时空差异。这种比较说明了世界经济过程如何产生特定的地方历史，以及这些历史如何构成整个世界经济。这种方法将 19 世纪的奴隶制危机定位于对世界积累过程的不同反应，而不是奴隶生产与工业化和开放竞争市场的不相容性。