Plantation Energy: From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline

Energy and Abolition The history of the second slavery shows that no fundamental incompatibility existed between slaveholding and technology-driven production. In fact, their merger created incredible wealth and status for slaveholders. First in Great Britain and then continental Europe and the United States, industrialization was aided by a surfeit of capital, the influx of cheap commodities, experiments in factory production, and the development of disciplinary techniques from the plantation zone. Factories imported the plantation’s model for energetic exploitation but improved on the relative inflexibility of its labor arrangement. Histories that attribute the abolition of slavery to the institution’s technological obsolescence or to a critical mass of white abolitionist sentiment tend to obscure the role slaves themselves played in resisting their captivity. Waves of rebellions and resistance drove up the cost of operations, helping shift the capital calculation to the side of “free labor.” Furthermore, abolitionism was not a final rejection of the economic and social relations of slavery; the globalization of modernity that followed the decline of transatlantic slavery “was financially, organizationally and technically conditioned by the slave system,” and its “post-emancipation structures of recruitment, management and disciplining of international labour reproduced the essential economic relations of slavery.” Instead of acknowledging these inheritances, “bourgeois historiography” (in Cedric Robinson’s phrasing) boasted of abolitionism’s moral awakening, thus screening industrial capitalism from the grievances of the white working class. With the elimination of the problematic category of the slave, the symbolic and discursive conflation of black bodies with industrial machines that had underwritten the plantation’s political economy was seemingly cut short. In the whitened factory, a different kind of apparatus was needed to refine production and discipline labor, one that attenuated the violence of the plantation while retaining the relation it had established between human and machine—a relation that treated the body as (merely) another part in the production machine. | 568 American Quarterly By the mid-nineteenth century, this task was being advanced by those working on the science of heat energy (thermodynamics) who transformed the terms of European physics by describing the movement of matter—from molecules to the sweep of the universe—in terms of usefulness and dissipation of energy. This was a cosmos for the era of steam-driven production. In the 1820s, the French scientist Sadi Carnot was concerned with improving the efficiency of steam engines and directed his investigations at the “motive power of fire.” In the 1840s the German physicist Rudolph Clausius and the Scottish natural philosopher William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) rediscovered Carnot, who had died at a young age and whose work was largely ignored for two decades. Combining his experiments on heat with Gottfried Leibniz’s notion of vis viva, or live force, they each theorized that an abstract, conserved, and transformable energy motivated the movement of matter. By the early 1850s, both Thomson and Clausius had published their findings, each fully stating the first law of thermodynamics: the total energy of the universe remains constant, and thus in the transfer of force from one object to another all energy is conserved. The upshot was that all forms of energy—heat, kinetic, potential, elastic, electrical, magnetic, and so forth—were equivalent; in the performance of work, one object transfers much of its energy to another object, and whatever energy is not transferred remains in the object or is transformed into another form of energy. With the first law, productive power was no longer limited to the fixed motion of the human body, mules, windmills, and their attached devices: it was something stored, released, transferred, and perfectly conserved throughout nature. This reimagining of energy directly supported burgeoning industrial capitalism: “Physics is not only about Nature and applied just to technology, its essential function is to provide models of capitalist work.” Thermodynamics suggested a “generality and flexibility in . . . productive arrangements” that provided a natural explanation for the political economy of the factory. Thomson extended the reach of his dynamical theory of heat to the human body by recruiting the work of the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz investigated energy in the context of muscle metabolism, which led him to theorize energy—or Kraft, in the original German—to be a separate and quantifiable substance that activated the movement of matter, both living and inert. Making explicit reference to the labor of the industrial working class, Helmholtz explained that food stores energy within its nutritional content that is released as heat by the body when muscles perform work; in the terms of Kraft, this work is exactly equivalent to the productive force generated by the factory’s steam engines—“the body, the steam engine, and the cosmos were | 569 From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline . . . connected by a single and unbroken chain of energy.” Recall that at the time, sugar produced with slave labor was helping “to fill the calorie gap for the laboring poor, and ha[d] become one of the first foods of the industrial work break.” It was within this Atlantic circulation—of (“free” and coerced) metabolic energy, calories, and fossil fuels that thermodynamics was investigated. Something bothered the calculations of Thomson and Clausius. Despite the first law’s prediction of energy’s conservation, which implied its recoverability, the scientists’ independent experiments returned the problem that a portion of the original heat produced by a system could not be recovered to do work again. Heat performs work when it is released at a higher concentration relative to its environment. This occurs, for instance, when a chemical reaction breaks the bonds of complex molecules, such as those composing coal or organic matter. As a result of the reaction, lower energy molecules are formed and surplus energy is released as heat that motivates the movement of surrounding matter. As this heat energy escapes, it diffuses toward equilibrium with its environment. This unrecoverable quantity of heat is not destroyed—such an outcome would violate the first law—but it becomes useless, at least in the industrial context in which thermodynamics was theorized. In his 1865 text, Clausius named this property of heat systems entropy, giving a name to the observation that hot matter tends to cool. Entropy measures the quantity of a system’s energy unavailable for doing work, and the second law of thermodynamics—the work of Clausius, Thomson, and others—states that entropy in a closed system tends toward a maximum. On a cosmic time line, the second law explained the inevitable heat-death of the universe, an ineluctable diffusion of useful energy into cold evenness, a prediction that allied European physics to Christian theology. Thermodynamics explained the limit to a livable universe and to the human control of nature on a microscopic level. The number of molecules in any system is too vast and collisions too complex to be measured and tracked; hotter molecules collide with cooler ones and produce a complex admixture that can be measured only in aggregate. Entropy marks not only the limit of usefulness but an epistemological limit, too, by naming the point at which nature’s microscopic complexity passes the limit of control into probability and indeterminacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, entropy was rearticulated as the tendency of an ordered system to drift into disorder. On this symbolic register, the term floated freely as a signifier that could be applied to all kinds of complex systems and became associated with waste, uselessness, and chaos. Cara New Daggett names British thermodynamics a “geo-theology” because it incorpo| 570 American Quarterly rates the earth, society, and the individual into a natural justification for the work ethic and an explanation for the eventual running down of the universe. With energy and entropy, thermodynamics cast industrial productivism as laws of physics. Indeed, the thinkers of this science made little effort to hide their alignment with industrial efforts at the time—whether it be the globalizing British, late-arriving Germans, or emerging American Empire. Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise draw attention to the specific scientific laboratories, marine engineering networks, and machines that incubated the work of thermodynamics. These local networks were aimed at advancing the reach of empire, and they were linked to a global circuit of people, ideas, commodities, and machines. Sugar and cotton plantations were central to Europe’s industrial engineering efforts and acted as what José Guadalupe Ortega calls “laboratory plantations” whose production and management techniques were documented and circulated back to Europe, dispersing the ideas of the plantation. This circuit included the thinkers of energy. James Thomson, who worked alongside his mathematically minded brother William (Lord Kelvin) to develop energetic physics, superintended “the construction of several large centrifugal pumps for drainage of sugar plantations” in Jamaica and Demerara (Guyana), where the violence needed to compel human beings to perform the grueling work that would later be done by machines, spurred powerful slave rebellions earlier in the century. Thermal physics gave scientific authority to the technological and political changes that were catapulting British and American wealth and spurring continental industrialization in anticipation of the dash for Africa’s industrial resources. While racial capitalism disavowed the right to own human property, it drafted its protocols for the extraction o