History and totality in the work of Dale Tomich

Movement, history, and totality

Tomich’s theoretical perspective, while rooted in an engagement with classic historiographical discussions like the “transition debate” and the Wallerstein-Brenner debate (or non-debate, in Giovanni Arrighi’s classic formulation), is best grasped within the context of the literature on capitalism and slavery. Unlike many authors who view capitalism and slavery as either a non-dialectical unit of equally interchangeable terms or a non-dialectical duality of distinct and independent elements (Parron, 2023), Tomich presents an analytical framework that elucidates the differences between capitalism and slavery in the global processes of labor abstraction and synthesis within the circuit of world capitalism. In this section, we argue that his unique approach stems from his refusal to transform economic history into a rigid, scientific system governed by closed and trans-historical categories. His perspective echoes the critique made by the young Lukács of the neo-Kantian foundation of Marxism in the early 20th century, a critique that later evolved into Adorno’s negative dialectics. Ultimately, it was the dialectical rejection of rigid categorization that enabled Tomich to duly historicize the nuanced relationship between capitalism and slavery.

The debate surrounding the relationship between capitalism and slavery, born with the release of the seminal work of Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944, can be broadly divided between his Marxist supporters and the “new economic” historians. This clear division between the two camps to some extent remains alive until today. While his advocates emphasize slavery’s pivotal role in the industrialization of Europe and the United States, and some argue that industrialization eventually led to the demise of slavery, critics reject both assertions. They contend that industrialization sprang from the dynamism of free economies and slavery was entirely compatible with industrial progress. Despite the differences in their working hypotheses, the two groups share common methodological approaches. Authors from both sides typically pinpoint a single constant causal factor – be it productivity, industrialization, abolitionism, or slave rebellion – to explain the rise and fall of slavery. And their explanations are framed as “general theses” about slavery: either viewing human bondage as an antiquated and archaic mode of production, or as an institution efficiently allocating resources for utility maximization in any historical context. Over the years, both sides have gathered a large volume of empirical data to substantiate their respective positions.

When Tomich entered the debate in the 1980s and 1990s, he shifted its focus from empirical arguments to theoretical and methodological issues, in a step that resonated with the core challenge of modern philosophy as articulated by the young Lukács and later elaborated by Adorno. In the 1920s, Lukács critiqued the emergence of ahistorical scientism that had taken hold in economic thought after the Methodenstreit at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century (Hodgson, 2002). Lukács argued that both liberals and Marxists of his time had abandoned Marx’s primary contribution to social thinking: his dialectical method rooted in Hegelian philosophy. According to Lukács, these thinkers perpetuated an intellectual tradition stretching back to Descartes, which culminated with the work of Kant. This tradition reduced the complexities of the world – its diverse temporalities, social rhythms, and unique ecologies – to quantifiable data, general laws, and formalistic categories typical of the logical unity of modern reason.

The critique of the formalism of modern reason, articulated by both Lukács and his influential interpreter, Theodor Adorno, is of paramount importance here. Despite their distinct perspectives on the problem of “ontology” in social thinking, they jointly advocated for reinstating the “revolutionary principle of Hegelian dialectics” at the core of Marxist thought. Embracing a dialectical approach that situates history at the forefront of social inquiry, they asserted that the strength of Hegelian dialectics lies in the notion of concepts as “concepts in movement” – ideas that resist becoming rigid by striving to express the fluidity inherent in social relations (Adorno, 2015, 2021). From this standpoint, history permeates social thought through concrete concepts: the understanding that a concept must encapsulate real content generated within historical relations. The dialectical concept, shaped through continuous transformation, challenges the autonomy of mental representations that are characteristic of orthodox scientism.

Equally significant is the dialectical approach to the concrete concept, which urges the social analyst to transcend the apparent simplicity of an isolated event. Instead, the concrete concept compels examination in the context of the intricate relationships that traverse and shape the object under scrutiny. This method interprets individual phenomena as integral facets of a larger whole, recognizing them as “moments of the whole,” wherein the “whole” expresses the dialectical process of their making (Lukács, 1974: 42, 164). To truly grasp totality, one must perceive analytical concepts themselves as comprehensive and concrete entities (Kosik, 1976).

The restless presence of history within concepts distinguishes critical theory from the logical operations that crystallize the meaning of categories like dictionary entries or textbook definitions. Thus, the objective of critical theory becomes the exploration of dynamic determinations: the nuanced layers of meaning inherent in phenomena, “situated at different levels of practice” (Lukács, 1974) or simply in the multistratigraphy (Vielschichtigkeit) of the thing (Adorno, 2021). Recognizing the internal multiplicity of social phenomena, dialectical thinking acknowledges that concepts and their realities are inherently unstable, dynamic, and contradictory. From this viewpoint, contradiction doesn’t emerge from the interaction of discrete realities; rather, it emerges through the multiple determinations of the social form that clash with themselves within historical processes.

Having access to the renewal of Marxism through a variety of references, from Lukács himself to Karl Korsch and Karil Kosik, Dale Tomich was the first to integrate critical theory’s dialectical treatment of concrete concepts, totalities, determinations, and contradictions into the discourse on capitalism and slavery. His pioneering approach involved understanding slavery’s commodity frontiers as social forms within the framework of world capitalism. This perspective allowed Tomich to investigate the contradictions inherent in 19th-century slavery within the historically specific material and social conditions of each frontier, rather than relying on simplistic dichotomies such as industrialization-archaism, archaism-efficiency, or politics-economics. Tomich’s unique contribution lies, ultimately, in his ability to transcend the conventional separation between history and theory. He produced a form of writing that avoids both pitting history against theory and blending them into an indistinguishable amalgam, putting forth instead theoretical history as a groundbreaking perspective for producing historical knowledge.

Reconsidering the Capitalism and slavery debate

Tomich’s perspective on the capitalism and slavery debate stemmed from his understanding of social form as a multiscale articulation of commodity-mediated processes. Most authors had flattened the historical conditions for the reproduction of slave commodity frontiers in the New World into a single abstract and general level, treating them as if they were all either destined for success or bound to fail. In contrast, Tomich recognized that each mercantile frontier, being a complex network of various scales, had its own unique conditions that determined its rise and collapse. Instead of merely supporting specific working hypotheses, Tomich criticized the methods used by most in the field and proposed alternative ways of thinking. His approach aimed to avoid viewing slavery either as a distinct mode of production or as a mere allocative institution, since the former reifies slavery as a self-standing and discreet reality while the latter dissolves slavery’s historical specificity into the abstract logic of capital as an undifferentiated whole. Against this backdrop, Tomich treated the commodity frontiers of slavery as social forms within capitalism, conceptualizing each frontier as a set of multi-scale relationships formed through the material organization of local production, the reproduction of labor within and outside slave societies, and global processes of accumulation. The seemingly unique and irreducible aspects of slavery only gained expression within global processes of abstraction and synthesis, while the abstract potentialities of slavery emerged through the material organization of production. The social form is, in Tomich’s writing, a concrete concept.

In his seminal work Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar (1990), for example, while examining the French colony of Martinique, Tomich observed the challenges faced by the French master class, challenges arising from a complex interplay of global processes and local factors in the post-Napoleonic world order. On one hand, the reorganization of world markets led by British capital pushed France toward an inward model of economic development, setting colonial planters in competition with sugar beet producers for French metropolitan markets. Simultaneously, the specific material and social conditions at smaller scales also played a crucial role. Despite possessing capital and technology, French slavers in Martinique failed to mechanize the production process fully. The widespread adoption of steam mills required factors like forest reserves for fuel, a suitable agrarian structure for sugar supply, and a flexible labor market to provide workers where needed. Martinique lacked these conditions: existing class relations and ecological limitations prevented the large-scale adoption of cutting-edge technology in sugar production.

Unlike Martinique, Cuba was better positioned to take advantage of the broader context of expanding industrialization and global markets in the first half of the nineteenth century, ultimately shaping the trajectory of Martinique itself (Tomich, 1988). Here we can see one of the key characteristics of Tomich’s way of thinking, which is to understand divergent trajectories as expressing distinct historical temporalities within a single contradictory totality. And it was from his analysis of the Cuban expansion that emerged his most popular concept: the “second slavery”, which was formulated to shed light on the expansion of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States during the 19th century. His recognition of diverse historical conditions governing the rise and fall of slave-based commodity frontiers (1988, 2004) thus allowed him to understand how these three different American spaces not only had a number of similar characteristics, but shared common contradictory processes that ultimately shaped each other over that period.

The concept has inspired many works, but its reception has not always been faithful to Tomich’s original approach. At times the concept has been interpreted in an empiricist or one-sided manner that simply implies an inherent compatibility between slavery and the modern, scientific rationality of industrial capitalism, which to some extent is not far from some of the original formulations of the new economic historians. Tomich advocated for a much more complex perspective. He emphasized the need to consider the specific material, social, and political conditions of each slave frontier within the broader context of global processes of capitalist accumulation when addressing the debate on slavery and capitalism (1988, 2004, 2014, 2015). This approach aimed to prevent the oversimplification of slavery, urging scholars to resist the temptation of reducing it to broad, catch-all classifications that overlook its intricate and varied realities.

The importance of the concept of “second slavery” is also not restricted to the nineteenth century. One could argue that it can help us understand the relationship between slavery in the industrial era (which is true), but that it is less significant for the early modern period, when “first slavery” societies were built in the Americas. Such a view could be reinforced by the focus of the so-called New History of Capitalism on the nineteenth century U.S., which in a way has reinterpreted the work of Williams to discuss the early republican period in the U.S. The strength of Tomich’s approach, however, is less about specific concepts than his way of looking at concepts themselves and history, as shown by his explorations of the earlier period as well. In a 1992 article (still little known outside Brazil), he put the relationship between slavery, wage labor, and the global circulation of commodities at the center of his account of the historical origins of capital. In the conclusion, he noted that “both the history of slavery in the Americas and of wage labor in Europe must be understood in their relationship to the whole – the global process of accumulation and the struggles against this accumulation – and not only in terms of their own “internal” histories”, largely echoing the work of Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco and Barros de Castro, who made very similar considerations in their interpretations of the relationship between different forms of labor in the capitalist world economy (for an overview, see Marques, 2022).

Ironically, as Tomich and others in and around the Fernand Braudel Center (such as Philip McMichael, Sidney Mintz, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, among others) were developing great contributions to the whole debate on capitalism and slavery, the debate itself was increasingly neglected by historians. The field of Atlantic History is a case in point: the two main books offering programmatic assessments in the United States have almost no room for Eric Williams and the whole capitalism and slavery debate (Bailyn, 2005; Greene and Morgan, 2009). Still, one of the best assessments of the field came from Tomich, who highlighted the centrality of commodity chains for the historical development of this so-called Atlantic world, with a fluid interpretation of its boundaries and the same methodological rigor and innovation that we can find in all his writings. His views indirectly suggested how methodological nationalism could enter a supposedly innovative new field, which not rarely treated different empires as discrete, self-encompassing entities (as had been the case in much of the writing that isolated capitalism from slavery or the other way around).

False dilemmas of contemporary historiography

The time is ripe for a reconsideration of Tomich’s perspectives. The last two or three decades have been marked by historiographical debates on the issue of scales of analysis, the history of capitalism, and the global environmental crisis. The work of Dale Tomich offers ways forward in all these debates. He was not the first nor the last to tackle these, but few have done it with the same methodological coherence and brilliance.

Historians reacted in various ways to the challenges that the world crises of capitalism imposed on the social sciences in the 1960s, retreating from economic history to cultural studies and reducing the scale of analysis, as reflected in the development of microhistory or regional studies of social history more generally. The development of the field of Global History in the 1990s was in a sense a reaction to this, but more recently the dissatisfaction with these broader narratives has also produced awkward solutions, such as the so-called “Global Microhistory.” This is a false dilemma, as we have seen in the way Tomich explored the world-historical significance of a place like nineteenth century Martinique. And this is a false dilemma not because the micro offers an unmediated view into the macro, which then becomes a collection of incongruent particularities, as some microhistorians seem to believe, but because the possibility of knowledge of historical processes lies precisely in the relations between these different scales. In his words, “we must take into account both similarity and difference as we shift ground-figure relations and continually move back and forth between different analytical levels in order to grasp the complexly structured spatial-temporal relations constituting the social historical world” (2011). From the perspective of a relational approach, such as the one offered by Tomich, the micro versus macro debate makes no sense.

This is also the case for a reconstructed history of capitalism, as has become recently in vogue with the debates on the so-called Great Divergence and the emergence of the New History of Capitalism. The work of Pomeranz has indeed reopened the debate on capitalism and slavery, but some of the methodological problems that permeate the discussion are still the same that one could find in the criticisms of the New Economic History, even if the conclusions are the opposite (slavery in the New World as a key component of British industrialization). Like New Economic Historians, Pomeranz also has a “dualistic conception of universally valid economic categories that are independent of time and space and external contingent factors that are necessarily operative in particular times and places”. As a result, “capitalism is naturalized as exchange for the market, and slavery is reduced to extra-economic coercion” (Tomich, 2020: p. 103-104). In fact, the naturalization of capitalism is such that the concept itself was eventually dismissed by Pomeranz as another Eurocentric invention, following in the footsteps of Jack Goody and what one could call the “new anti-eurocentrism.” In their view, capitalism is largely synonymous with markets, which are transformed in a trans-historical category that can be found over time and space for the last 5.000 years or more. This is a great example of what Wallerstein described as a form of “anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism,” in which historically specific categories are reified and projected to different time periods and societies across the world, reproducing the Smithian myth of the homo economicus.

Thus, Dale Tomich’s persistent critique of the methods of economic history, from the NEH of the 1960s to the Great Divergence, is indeed crucial if we are to write a history of capitalism that does not reproduce the categories and logic of capital, as Marx knew only too well. In this sense, his calls for a theoretical history point to the need for a constant reevaluation of our own categories and the development of a relational approach - or concepts in movement - capable of tackling the complexity of the world.

Finally, the recent interest in the history of capitalism has also been stimulated by the global environmental crisis that has fueled and combined with various other structural crises. This has the potential to renew the field of environmental history, which has largely followed other strands of the historiography since the crisis of the 1960s, eventually dismissing economic subjects and what they came to describe as “declensionist narratives”, which emphasized environmental degradation and collapse. The search for the roots of the present global eco-crisis, however, is nonetheless reviving the debate on the environmental dimensions of capitalism as a historical system, an aspect that has always been part of Tomich’s approach, even if not always explicitly. In the 1990s, James O’Connor (1997: 25), in his assessment of the field of environmental history, highlighted the methodological strength of “Dale Tomich’s masterpiece, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, constructed on a Russian doll model to deal with political, economic, and social/cultural themes (which also implicitly integrates geography and nature).” The truth is that the catastrophic crisis of our time is making the so-called declensionist narrative a reality, further stimulating the need for a total history capable of accounting for the multiple layers of historical reality and social change. And the approach developed and perfected by Tomich over the decades, as O’Connor noted in 1997, offers one of the best ways of doing this. All the different aspects that we have discussed until here - his dialectical use of historical concepts, the efforts to understand capitalism and slavery or various Atlantic empires as forming a larger totality, the refusal to separate power, ecology, and the everyday life into different spheres, and the comprehension of the relations between the multiple layers of reality as the key to social analysis - ultimately offers a tool to understand not only the past, but also the present.

A somewhat personal note

The authors of the present essay have engaged with the work of Dale Tomich and the works of each other for over a decade. Besides being an inspiration for a large part of what we have both done over the years, our relationship with Dale became even stronger after the beginning of the end of the Fernand Braudel Center, which officially concluded its activities on June 30, 2020. A couple of years before that, we started our conversations with Dale for the creation of a new center at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), which could operate as a sort of heir of the FBC. Dale worked hard to make the transfer of the FBC library (and much of his own personal library) to our university possible, along with the establishment of an extremely rich network that had also been built over the years at the FBC. The Centro UFF de Estudos sobre Desigualdades Globais (https://cdg.uff.br) has taken forward some of the principles that Dale Tomich helped create and develop over the decades at the FBC, such as the interdisciplinary and long durée investigations of social phenomena. We want to finish with this note because Dale’s contributions were not only intellectual, although these are monumental by themselves, but also institutional, creating opportunities for the development of a new generation of engaged and critical social scientists in Brazil. Obrigado por tudo, Dale.