This thoughtful book explores the contested relationship between slavery and capitalism. Tracing slavery's integral role in the formation of a capitalist world economy, Dale W. Tomich reinterprets the development of the world economy through the "prism of slavery." Through a sustained critique of Marxism, world-systems theory, and new economic history, the author develops an original conceptual framework for answering theoretical and historical questions about the nexus between slavery and the world economy.

Part I: Slavery in the World Economy
Chapter 1: Capitalism, Slavery, and World Economy: Historical Theory and Theoretical History
Chapter 2: World of Capital, Worlds of Labor: A Global Perspective
Chapter 3: The "Second Slavery": Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy
Part II: The Global in the Local
Chapter 4: World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868
Chapter 5: Spaces of Slavery: Times of Freedom-Rethinking Caribbean History in World Perspective
Chapter 6: Small Islands and Huge Comparisons: Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist Modernity
Part III: Work, Time, and Resistance: Shifting the Terms of Confrontation
Chapter 7: White Days, Black Days: The Working Day and the Crisis of Slavery in the French Caribbean
Chapter 8: Une Petite Guinée: Provision Ground and Plantation in Martinique-Integration, Adaptation, and Appropriation
Chapter 9: Contested Terrains: Houses, Provision Grounds, and the Reconstitution of Labor in Postemancipation Martinique