Capitalism did not arise after slavery had disappeared. It grew up alongside slavery and was built in important part through the labor of enslaved people.
Capitalism grew up with slavery
From the 1500s onward, European merchants and colonial powers conquered land in the Americas, seized Indigenous territories and transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic in chains.
The plantation produced for the world market
The sugar, cotton, tobacco and other commodities produced by enslaved workers were not mainly consumed by the plantation owners themselves; they were produced for sale on a growing world market. The plantation was therefore very different from the largely self-contained estates of earlier societies — it was tied to merchants, banks, shipping companies, insurers and manufacturers thousands of miles away. Slavery became part of the developing capitalist world economy.
The profits from the slave trade and plantation production helped accumulate the wealth that financed capitalist development. Sugar poured into European markets. Cotton produced by enslaved workers supplied the textile mills that became one of the driving forces of the Industrial Revolution. Marx put the connection plainly in 1847: “Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.”
Marx: original accumulation was original expropriation
The enormous fortunes created through slavery did not arise because a few individuals were unusually hardworking or thrifty. The economists called the process through which the conditions for capitalism were created original accumulation. Marx said it “ought to be called Original Expropriation.” Where they presented the first great fortunes as the result of saving and thrift, Marx showed that their real history was conquest, slavery, colonial plunder and the seizure of land and other means of production from the people who depended on them.
Original expropriation created both sides of the capitalist relation: wealth and means of production concentrated in the hands of one class, and workers separated from the means of producing their own livelihood. People driven from the land had little choice but to sell their labor power to those who owned the factories, machinery and materials.
Free labor and slave labor, side by side
Modern capitalism therefore developed through different forms of exploited labor at the same time. In Europe, wage labor became increasingly important; across much of the Americas, capitalist merchants and plantation owners relied on racialized chattel slavery.
There was an important difference between the two. The wage worker is legally free and sells labor power for a limited period of time. The enslaved worker was treated as property: the slaveholder claimed ownership not merely of the worker’s labor power but of the worker.
But this difference did not place enslaved workers outside the developing modern economy. The great plantations were large-scale workplaces producing commodities for the world market, where hundreds of enslaved workers could labor together under one system of production, surveillance and punishment, their labor connected directly to the mills, ports, banks and markets of the emerging capitalist economy. C.L.R. James, writing about the Haitian Revolution, emphasized how this concentration of enslaved plantation workers gave them some of the characteristics of a modern proletariat.
The enslaved fought as workers
And they fought as workers. Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose in revolution. They destroyed slavery, defeated armies sent by the great European powers and created independent Haiti — the first successful slave revolution in history.
In the U.S., enslaved Black people were also decisive actors in destroying slavery. During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands withdrew their labor from the plantations, escaped to Union lines, supplied information and assistance to Union forces and joined the Union Army. W.E.B. Du Bois called this movement a general strike of the enslaved. The plantations depended on their labor, and when enslaved people withdrew it on a mass scale, they weakened the economic foundation of the Confederacy and transformed the character of the war.
Slavery fell, capitalism and racism survived
Slavery was abolished in the U.S., but capitalism survived. The former slaveholders lost their legal ownership of Black workers, while the capitalist system continued to exploit labor through wages, debt, land ownership and racial oppression.
Nor did the methods associated with capitalism’s violent beginnings disappear. Capital continues to seize land, dispossess Indigenous peoples, destroy subsistence economies and drive people into wage labor. Marx’s account of original expropriation therefore describes not only something that happened centuries ago but a process capitalism repeatedly reproduces in new forms.
Racism also did not disappear with slavery. The slave trade and plantation system developed elaborate racial ideas to justify the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and after emancipation those ideas were adapted to new conditions — segregation, colonialism, superexploitation, mass imprisonment and other forms of national and racial oppression.
The history of capitalism and the history of slavery cannot be separated. The wealth accumulated through slavery helped build modern capitalism; enslaved workers produced for the capitalist world market and became a powerful force in the class struggle themselves. Their history also shows something fundamental about Marxism: oppressed people are not simply victims of history. They make history.
Additional reading
Value, Price and Profit — by Karl Marx (1865). Marx explains that what economists called “original accumulation” ought more accurately to be called “Original Expropriation” — the historical separation of working people from the means of labor.
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 31: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist — by Karl Marx (1867). Marx traces the rise of industrial capital through colonial conquest, the slave trade, plunder and the violent expropriation that accompanied capitalism’s birth.
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 — by W.E.B. Du Bois (1935). Du Bois shows how enslaved Black workers acted collectively during the Civil War, withdrawing their labor from the plantations in what he described as a general strike.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution — by C.L.R. James (1938). The classic Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution and the revolutionary power of the enslaved plantation workers.
Capitalism and Slavery — by Eric Williams (1944). The classic study of how Atlantic slavery and the triangular trade contributed to the development of British industrial capitalism and how changing capitalist interests shaped abolition.
Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History — by David McNally (2025). A Marxist account of plantation slavery as part of the development of modern capitalism and of enslaved workers as a “chattel proletariat.”