Varieties of Political Economy in Capitalism with Slavery: Comments on David Eltis’s Essay and his Contributions to Brazilian Historiography

Abstract

This essay dialogs with David Eltis’s article in this issue of Almanack and highlights Eltis’s contributions to Brazilian studies of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It focuses on the historical relationship between “capitalism” and “slavery,” particularly the “second slavery” of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on changing Anglo-American and Luso-Brazilian “political economies.” Like Eltis’s text, it is especially concerned with the synergy, or lack thereof, between “external” and “internal” factors in determining regional and national economic growth. In the spirit of the forum at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in which Eltis’s article was originally presented and debated, this essay emphasizes a historiographical approach aimed particularly at undergraduate and graduate students in History, the main audience at the original seminar.