The Roots of Capitalism is the first text in Studies on Historical Materialism, a new series from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. This series interrogates the pasts of the modern world from the standpoint of historical materialism – a method that explains history through material conditions and class struggle but insists that the dialectic between imperialism and anti-colonial struggles is central to how the modern world is made.

Foreword

Vijay Prashad

There is a certain comfort in the stories that empires tell about themselves. These are stories of ingenuity, of discovery, of the steady march of reason and science. In these stories, capitalism appears almost as an inevitability, the natural flowering of human progress in Western Europe, propelled by technological innovation and the so-called Enlightenment. What these narratives leave out is not incidental but foundational: the violence that made the modern world.

Prabir Purkayastha’s The Roots of Capitalism: Slavery and the Sugar Trade is an intervention into this cultivated amnesia. It insists that we look directly at the historical record and recognise that capitalism did not emerge from the gentle unfolding of markets and machines but from the brutal reorganisation of the world through conquest, enslavement, and extraction. Much of this study was written during Prabir Purkayastha’s 225-day incarceration in Rohini Central Jail in Delhi, India, on scraps of paper passed back and forth and discussed with those of us who visited him. It compels us to reconsider what we mean when we speak of the origins of capitalism and to ask: whose history is being told, whose suffering is being obscured, and what was the cost?

At the heart of this study is sugar, not just as a commodity but as a social relation. Sugar was among the first truly global commodities, binding together continents in circuits of production, exchange, and finance. Its cultivation required vast tracts of land – seized through genocide in the Americas – and immense quantities of labour, supplied through the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Sugar, in this sense, was not simply produced; it was made possible through a system that treated human beings themselves as commodities.

What Purkayastha demonstrates with clarity is that the plantation was not an archaic or pre-capitalist institution. On the contrary, it was one of the earliest sites of modern capitalist organisation. Here we see the integration of agriculture and industry, the careful accounting of costs and returns, the calculation of labour productivity, and the ruthless logic of replacement. Enslaved people were reduced to units of capital, their lives measured against their market price. The plantation, as Sidney Mintz observed, was both field and factory. The immense profits generated by slavery and plantation agriculture were not peripheral to European development; they were central to it. Sugar production, the trade in enslaved people, and the associated industries (shipping, insurance, refining, and finance) formed an interconnected system that fuelled capital accumulation on a global scale. The wealth generated in the Caribbean and the Americas flowed into European cities, underwriting the growth of industries and financial institutions. The sugar refineries of London, Bristol, and Liverpool were among the earliest industrial workplaces. They processed the raw sugar produced by enslaved labour, transforming it into commodities for mass consumption and for re-export across the globe.

To speak of capitalism without speaking of slavery is therefore to tell only half the story. It is to accept a narrative that sanitises the past and obscures the structural violence upon which the modern world was built. Purkayastha’s work aligns with a long tradition of radical scholarship, from Eric Williams to Walter Rodney, that has sought to restore this missing history. But it also advances the discussion by focusing closely on sugar as a lens through which to understand the broader dynamics of capitalist development. What emerges is a picture of capitalism not merely as an economic system but as a global project of domination that involved the reorganisation of land, labour, and resources across continents; the destruction of existing societies; and the creation of new hierarchies of race and power. The interdependence of sugar and enslaved people as commodities illustrates this vividly: one cannot be understood without the other. This history is not merely of academic interest. The legacies of this system persist in the inequalities that structure our world today. The wealth accumulated through slavery and colonialism did not disappear; it was institutionalised in the financial systems, property relations, and global divisions of labour that continue to shape our present. To understand capitalism’s origins is therefore to better understand its contemporary forms and its enduring injustices.

There is also, in this work, an implicit challenge to how we think about resistance. The system described here was sustained by violence, but it was also contested at every stage by the enslaved people1 who resisted their bondage, by those who exposed the brutality of the trade, and by movements that sought to dismantle it. To recover this history is not only to confront the crimes of the past, but also to recognise the struggles that sought to overcome them.

William Cowper’s satirical, anti-slavery poem ‘Pity for Poor Africans’ – printed and distributed in 1788 by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and used as part of their campaign – begins with an unequivocal declaration:

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see;
What, give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea?

Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch, and Danes,
Will heartily thank us, no doubt, for our pains:
If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will,
And tortures and groans will be multiplied still.

READ MORE: https://thetricontinental.org/study-sugar-and-slavery/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

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ETHANOL FROM SUGAR CANE AS AN EXTENDER FOR
AUTOMOTIVE FUEL IN AUSTRALIA

Submission by CSR Limited to the Senate Standing Committee on National Resources Inquiry into the Replacement of Petroleum-based Fuels by Alternative Sources of Energy — 

January 1980

SUMMARY (i) 1.

INTRODUCTION 1

2. ETHANOL: A FUEL EXTENDER WITH ESTABLISHED TECHNOLOGY

Description of ethanol and its uses 2 Production of ethanol 3 Performance of ethanol/petrol blends 5

3. OPTIONS FOR PRODUCTION OF FUEL ETHANOL
"On farm" versus central processing 6 Suitable crops 7

4. SCOPE FOR ETHANOL FROM SUGAR CANE
Long term potential 9

Regional development concept:

an immediate solution 10 5. ISSUES FOR GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY 13

APPENDICES
1. Treatment processes for distillery effluent 15

2. Ethanol as a fuel extender 20

3. Energy balance considerations for ethanol
production from sugar cane 26

4. Copy of Press Release concerning Sugar Industry Consultative Committee on Fuel Alcohol 31

https://digitalcollections.qut.edu.au/1464/1/Ethanol

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PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….