The Ends of the Earth: Slavery, Capitalism, and the Making of the Modern World

Abstract

The Ends of the Earth examines the machinery of labor coercion that built the modern world. It argues that capitalism depends not on the supersession of coercion but on its continual reproduction through manufactured necessity – hunger, debt, enclosure – laundered as market freedom. Moving beyond institutional definitions of slavery, the dissertation treats coerced labor as a spectrum of modalities structurally entangled across regions and regimes. Rather than aggregating case studies, The Ends of the Earth traces global interconnections: Enslaved workers in Cadiz and Setubal producing the salt that enabled New England to feed the Caribbean sugar plantations; enserfed Russian ironworkers in the Ural Mountains forging the nails that held together the slave ships and the plantation houses; enslaved Africans cutting cane in Barbados with tools hammered from Swedish ore. Each commodity chain reveals how local practices of domination were integrated into a planetary economy of extraction. The Ends of the Earth follows the routes of salt, sugar, iron, fish, and hunger as they carried coerced labor across continents, binding together regions and peoples usually studied in isolation. My dissertation demonstrates that slavery was not an aberration within capitalism but its very logic, a logic that persists through the quiet violence of necessity endlessly produced.