by Facundo Rocca
The familiar landscape of economic modernity is typically drawn from the “Manchester model” and the British Industrial Revolution: a scenery of technical innovations and the purported discovery of economic rationality that gradually optimized productive practices. This archetypal account, however, leaves three fundamental points out of sight. First, the simplification of labor was not merely the outcome of a technical or “scientific” change—an attunement of practice to rationality; it required a profound redefinition of what work is. A conceptual and ontological recasting—prefigured in theoretical discourse—was necessary for work to appear as an abstract, measurable, and universal activity. Second, as numerous scholars (discussed below) have shown, the decisive innovations in labor organization and the earliest inventions of scalability were not pioneered in European workshops, but in the colonial plantation. There, modular simplification, extraction-oriented rationality, and mass coordination of effort were first systematized and inserted in global circuits of exchange. Third, the emergence of the modern economy was inseparable from more-than-human ecologies. Abstract labor and value were grounded in material operations that transformed not only human practice—or the way humans manipulate natural goods—but the lands, bodies and non-human worlds themselves.
This piece develops a historico-conceptual argument that weaves together theoretical and historical debates to show the extent to which the plantation prefigured the abstract space of production that would later shape modern notions of labor. It also argues that this simplification of space, which grounded abstract labor, was always a more-than-human affair. I track how historical research and recent posthuman theories help us place the initial form of productive rationalization in the colonial field. From this point of view, it could be grasped how, long before modern workshops sought to purify work from all “non-productive” attachments, plantations had already enacted a parallel abstraction: by stripping both humans and non-human beings of their relational entanglements, they transformed them into discrete, interchangeable and scalable units of productive capacity. I also underline how this process had the concrete fabrication of a real emptied land as its fundamental condition of possibility. A clearing of land to make space for cultivated production that emerges as the colonial origin of economic modernity.
Bringing this earlier history to the front may not only deepen labor history, but help us foreground the ecological and more-than-human dimensions of economic modernity from the outset, and explore how a heightened historical sensibility to non-human worlds may be required in order to truly excavate the roots of our contemporary “market mentality.”
From Motley Work to Simplified Labor:
Inventing the Abstract Space of Modern Production
If work has come to appear as a self-evident condition of human history, its modelling as abstract, individualized labor organized by markets and proprietary relations is neither natural nor spontaneous. Rather than the optimal form of world-building achieved by historical progress of civilized manners or reason, labor figures as a convoluted and violent invention, open to deep historical destabilization. Unearthing its historicity requires tracing the ruptures that transformed the concepts that shape its meaning and practical reality: the dissolution of the ancient Oeconomica, the irruption of the abstract time of capitalist valorization, and the institutionalization of disembedded markets of fictitious commodities.
But before the multivarious existent forms of work could become simplified modern labor, exclusively oriented to profit, a new type of space, a locus where to enclose it, had to be invented. It would become a landscape of technical limits: an emptied space where only the gestures deemed productive may be placed and reorganized under new goals, laws and authorities.
As I argued in “How Reason Encountered Work,” the Encyclopédie stands as a pivotal moment in this invention. Diderot and d’Alembert’s project transmuted the dense worlds of gestures, rituals, and the varied relations of enmity and fraternity that once occupied the space of the arts mécaniques into a plane of modern knowledge. Detached from its communal body and disassembled into fragments, it was rendered measurable. Thus, the production of goods was thought to finally obey a model of reason. One that implied that the métiers’ obsolete ways of living in and making the world should be abandoned. The Enlightenment’s most famous printing enterprise reimagined a purified realm of production by subtracting work from its embeddedness in the actual worlds of artisans. As I argue in that think-piece, the Encyclopédie was less a celebratory archive of crafts than a prefigurative utopia of a blank space, the modern shopfloor, where to place the new ideal model of abstract labor.
But if a new realm of production could be imagined for Parisian ateliers by the enlightened intellectuals, this reimagining was nonetheless predated by a centuries-long and worldwide real experimentation with forms of abstract production, simplified worlds, and uprooted labor: the colonial plantation. The colonial testing grounds of the Caribbean and the Atlantic slave trade were brutal laboratories of economic modernity where native ecologies were effaced, human beings violently deprived of their home worlds, and landscapes reduced to scalable cash crops devoid of robust vital interconnections.
In a similar vein, many scholars have already argued that the plantation represents not a premodern remnant but a genuine founding point in the making of the modern world. Black radical intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson, for example, challenged the self-exculpatory perspective that detaches modernity from slavery. World-systems theorists also questioned the linear assumptions about capitalism’s date and place of birth. Sidney Mintz strongly argued that Caribbean plantations, going back to the sixteenth century, were “landmark experiments in modernity”: sites of significant technical, social, and economic innovation that prefigured industrial labor organization, mechanization, individualized socialization, and large-scale global economic enterprises. Significantly, contemporary historians have insisted on the plantation’s crucial role in perfecting techniques of efficiency and surveillance later associated with machine discipline, modern management, or even Charles Babbage’s influential blueprints for automated workshops. Moreover, the supposedly strict boundaries between “free” and “unfree” labor have also been scrutinized, as it is increasingly clear that capitalism’s resort to “free” wage labor was structured upon a wide and shifting spectrum of coerced, dependent, indentured, semi-free, and contract-bound forms of labor. What mattered for the emerging capitalist order was not the formal status of the worker but the capacity to extract bodily effort in a simplified and disciplined form.
Overall, these accounts tend to center their analysis in the violent reshaping of human effort through brutally precise management, technical innovation and sheer scale of production and circulation. From this point of view, economic modernity or capitalist rationality and practices emerges within a broader interconnected history beyond Europe’s enclosures and workshops. However, most of these analyses tend to overlook the fundamental non-human side of this key colonial experimentation. Exploring these “hybrid agro-industrial landscapes” of colonial empires may provide us with further insights.
From Human Communities to More-Than-Human Landscapes:
Modular Simplification of Life as a Landmark of Modernity
From a different starting point, post-humanist scholars Donna Haraway and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing have similarly insisted on the plantation as the origins of our modern epoch. Specifically, they proposed the “Plantationocene” as a name for our present era, in order to underscore the colonial roots of our current ecological crisis and the non-European origins of economic modernity, but also the ways world-making was more-than-human.
Tsing explicitly traces the main characteristics of economic modernity back to the plantation and its logic: scalability, “modular simplification,” and commodification understood as the transformation of living beings, human and non-human, into “non-social elements.” Modernity, for Tsing, is marked by its prioritization of the scalable—that which can expand without altering its framework or opening itself to unexpected encounters.
But scalability is not natural: life-worlds are complex and fragile entanglements of barely stabilized randomness, not easily expandable models. Scalability has to be produced. The first paradigm for this fabrication of scalable enterprises is, according to Tsing, the sugar plantation. Its logic implies transforming parts of nature and living beings into abstract elements stripped of their worldly interconnections so they can be weighed for value: the cane into commodified sugar; human labor into productive discipline, skill, and efficient coerced effort; the landscape into a brutal monoculture. This modular simplification increases profit, thus, enabling unprecedented gains and sweeping global transformations but only at the cost of a systematic “thinning” of worlds, that is, the erosion of ecological and human complexity and diversity.
This perspective acutely highlights, in my view, that the ecological devastation associated with capitalism is not an accidental or late-stage externalization but constitutive of modernity as a damaging episteme and praxis that continues to shape how societies conceive, organize, and circulate bodies, goods, and values. Both in theory and in practice, it brings our attention to the fact that the first to suffer the violence of modern abstraction were American natives, enslaved Africans, as well as non-human ecologies.
Despite the historical violence it exerted, the plantation also harbored disruptive forces, what Tsing calls “feral proliferations“: the reemergence of life’s unruliness. Plantation-encouraged diseases are an exemplary—though catastrophic—expression of such alternative topographies. The persistence of non-scalable beings that resist deliberate cultivation; the appearance of unexpected life-forms or new interspecies entanglements in the ruins of plantations and industries; the refusals and inventive alternatives forged by human or non-human assemblages all stand as restorative or resistant forms of feral proliferations.
If such beings can proliferate in the barren land of modernity it is because, ultimately, scalability remains an impossible ideal. The plantation itself only existed precariously, encircled by the lush tropical jungles or dense woodlands. A wild landscape where unheard-of species lurked, and maroon communities organized revenge against planters and slave traders. Infectious diseases, ecological pushbacks, indigenous resistance, and slave revolt continuously kept the colonizers’ expansion vis a vis simplification at bay.
This tension between modular simplification and life’s unruly non-scalability was not a passing contradiction but, as Tsing argues, an intrinsic dynamic of capitalism. And it was in the colonial plantation that this dynamic first took systemic form. Following Tsing, the plantation can thus be interpreted as the inaugural scalability experiment of capitalism: not a mere historical curiosity or a settled past catastrophe, but a formation that continues to structure our present. And it is a structure that implies both human and non-human life-forms and worlds.
Precisely at the center of this foundational cultivation of abstraction lies a singular plant: Saccharum officinarum, commonly known as sugarcane. First domesticated in the islands of Melanesia, this sweet crop was gradually carried westward through Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Persian Gulf, and the Islamic Mediterranean. Its transplantation to the Atlantic marked a decisive rupture. From the 1430s onward, the Portuguese transformed the recently colonized Madeira, and, later, the rest of the so-called “fortunate islands” into experimental sites where large-scale monoculture, coerced labor, and increasingly mechanized milling techniques were first combined. These islands—described as “plantation laboratories,” initial examples of European “biological imperialism” by Crosby—prefigured what would later define the sugar colonies of the Americas. By the 1500s this model was transferred to Brazil. Pernambuco emerged as a major node in the nascent sugar complex that articulated European capitals, an Asian crop, American land, African slaves, and a rapidly expanding world market.
The Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil intensified this Atlantic circulation of technical know-how, financial networks, and plantation expertise. The Portuguese Empire would then reclaim the land, and many planters and technicians resettled in Barbados and other islands controlled by the British Empire. This catalyzed the “sugar revolution”: from a profitable commodity, sugar was made into a world-making agro-industrial regime that reconfigured the world economy.
By the eighteenth century, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue had become the “pearls of the Caribbean,” the most profitable colonial territories. Jamaican sugar not only fueled British commercial and industrial expansion but also shaped emerging scientific institutions. The experimental procedures, measurement techniques, and material epistemologies associated with Baconian “new science” were deeply entangled with plantation rationality. Meanwhile, the staggering productivity of Saint-Domingue radiated technical knowledge toward Europe, leaving traceable marks in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
Throughout this history we find a symmetrical simplification of human and non-human beings. On the one hand, modular simplification structured the very biology of plantation crops. Sugarcane, due to its complicated sexual reproduction—especially in the new American environments—could only be propagated through stalk cutting, producing clones. This reinforced the modular logic of the plantation by securing standardized phenotypes and synchronized ripening across vast fields. Rendered radically non-social, sugarcane existed as a man-made serial clone, deprived even of reproductive relations within its own species. On the other hand, enslaved Africans were not merely coerced into labor but violently attempted to make into non-social entities. Uprooting human beings from kinship networks, cosmologies, language and land, the slave trade aimed to supply production with brute labor power stripped of any non-productive attachments.
And yet the plantation was never fully able to extinguish the non-scalability of human and ecological interdependence. A monoclonal monoculture would eventually encounter its utmost vulnerability to deadly new encounters: plantation diseases that would regularly make its fantasized scalability a rotten landscape. The modular landscape of plantation crops, as Sylvia Wynter famously notes, was also juxtaposed with the slave’s plot: parcels of land where a subaltern polyculture took root, sustaining the lives of enslaved people, preserving fragments of African culinary and agricultural knowledge, and cultivating Black agency, community, and values. From this alternative landscape, slave resistance and revolt would emerge and eventually set the slavery regime ablaze.
Modernity, however, would retain the lesson learned in this experiment: profit thrives on simplification, on the deliberate destruction of relationality. And this lesson was learned far before artisans were deprived of their communal life, by brutally tearing human and non-human beings apart from their vital social and worldly embeddedness.
Clearing the Land:
Modernity’s Original Terraformation of Worlds into Emptied Space
From Madeira to Saint-Domingue, the plantation profited on cash crops and forced labor reduced to mere factors of production and reorganized under the pure logic of a technicity oriented to optimization, no matter the cost or violence. But the simplification of plantations—or we could say desocialization—depended on a previous and more foundational gesture: the clearing of land.
Uprooted plants and enslaved humans must be transplanted somewhere. And this new soil had to be itself deprived of any dense entanglements in order to only leave space for the non-social elements of the plantation. Eradicating local populations and ecologies was a prerequisite of the plantation: a modular process needs an emptied land in order to scale up. A modular space, thus, must be opened out of inhabited native worlds. Following Tsing again, we may speak of an original terraformation, rather than a primitive accumulation in the origins of economic modernity. As the Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias related to European publics: before conquest, “the land was uncultivated almost everywhere, and so little worked through cultivation that, like a bare subject, it yielded no plants or seeds other than those produced by nature itself.” Written in 1571, what this announced was clear: to make cultivated use of the New World, its landscapes had to be remade; its “uncultivated” natures effaced. Centuries later, the famous entry on Amérique in the Encyclopédie, pennedby Diderot himself, similarly insists on the alleged incapacity, rather than unwillingness, of Native Americans to clear the land as a sign of their sauvagerie, their backwardness. Scalable agriculture serves as proof of the “cultivated ways” of Europeans.
It is well known that colonial imperial expansion had to produce the legal fiction of terra nullius, a no man’s land, out of the impious Americas to justify and rationalize the land grab and its annexation to European sovereignties. Less remarked though is the fact that American soil was made nullius not merely in form but in its utmost material reality. It was concretely made barren: unexpected biological imperial weapons such as swine influenza or smallpox, on top of the human yielded violence of the conquest, killed millions of Native Americans, plummeting the local population and literally emptying the land in many parts of the New World. Furthermore, the ecological worlds of the Americas will be systematically destroyed, reshaped and remade to either harvest the cash crops of tropical plantations, accommodate the productive agriculture arrangements proper of European soils -what Crosby called “Neo-Europes”—or trimmed into forms that pleased western aesthetics of nature and the bucolic.
This emptying of land, just as primitive accumulation, could not be made once and for all. It must be constantly reinforced and reenacted. The unruliness of native life could always reengulf the space opened for mere production. Thus, clearing the land systematically appears as the founding mark of culture in the technical manuals, political commentaries and philosophical treaties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The very entry for “Colon” in the Encyclopédie states that a settler is “the one who inhabits a colony, who clears, plants, and cultivates the land there.” References to this défrichage, or clearing, also figures prominently in the entries on cotton, indigo, or cacao.
Just as the European workshop would later be purified—stripped of artisanal lively communal practices—in order to become a space of rationalized labor, the American soil had to be cleared of messy ecological and social entanglement to accommodate the scale of plantation production that made the colonies fruitful subjects. A colonial rooting of scale that would shape the very market mentality of economic modernity. Indeed, abstract soil or space seems to predate abstract time or value.
Looking from the ground up, the birthplace of modernity’s economical reason lies not in the mechanized workshops of Manchester and Liverpool, nor solely in the enclosures of the British countryside, but on stolen American land violently cleared and replanted with sugarcane, indigo, or cotton.
This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Facundo Rocca is a professor and researcher at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from both UNSAM and Université Paris 8. His research focuses on the problems of politics and government at the intersection of conceptual history, the history of nineteenth-century socialist thought, Marxism and post-Marxism, as well as contemporary materialism and posthumanism.
Edited by Matias X. Gonzalez
Featured Image: Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Romain, pour l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert. “Sucrière,” 1762, Vol 22. Recueil de planches 1. Public domain, courtesy of the Institut de France.
