Felix Wemheuer: Chinas große Umwälzung. Soziale Konflikte und Aufstieg im Weltsystem, Köln 2019; Stefan Schmalz: Machtverschiebungen im Weltsystem. Der Aufstieg Chinas und die große Krise, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2018; Kai Strittmatter: Die Neuerfindung

Abstract

The role of the slavery-based plantation economy in the development of capitalism has preoccupied many generations of scholars. This is related to a number of very important questions, the answers to which have a lasting impact on narratives about modernity and the ways it emerged in what is often called the early modern times. Was slavery-based production good for the initial accumulation of vast fortunes that became the precondi-tion of modern capitalism, but ultimately incompatible with a capitalism based on the marketization of labour that is “freely” offered and demanded? Or did the history of slavery and other forms of forced and coerced labour, regardless of the moral scruples that became public for religious reasons (in England and the USA) or out of a predomi-nantly secular-humanist motivation (in France), accompany capitalism until the social counterforces of decolonization were strong enough to shake off this form of particularly crass exploitation (even if not inconsiderable remnants persist to this day)?

Biographical Note

Thorben Pelzer (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

Since September 2017, Thorben Pelzer holds the position of university lecturer for Society and Culture of Modern China at Leipzig University. He graduated in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and East Asia Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Further, he studied at Osaka University, at Tongji University in Shanghai, and at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. He is an alumni of the German Merit Foundation. As a social and cultural historian of the Republican period, he currently researches Chinese engineers who studied in the USA.