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JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 
 

Sugar, Slavery, and Creative Destruction: 
World-Magnates and “Coreification” in the Longue-Durée 
 
Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz  
University of Maryland 
korzen@umd.edu 
 
Corey R. Payne 
Johns Hopkins University 
cpayne@jhu.edu 

 
 

Abstract 
Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in 
historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on 
a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the 
development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth 
centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and 
periphery. Namely, we challenge the notion that these zones consist of geographical spaces that, since very early in 
the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production of raw materials 
(periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have been trans-historically relatively 
free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in peripheral ones. We argue that, prior to the nineteenth 
century, the world-economy is not only characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various forms of 
labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but also one in which core-like and 
peripheral activities (that is, those providing access to relatively greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly 
bounded geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that a longue-
durée analysis of sugar production by enslaved labor illustrates not merely processes of peripheralization, but of 
what we call coreification. 
Keywords: Sugar, Slavery, Atlantic, Historical Capitalism, Core, Periphery, Semiperiphery, Peripheralization 
 

ISSN: 1076-156X   |   Vol. 25 Issue 2   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.893   |   jwsr.pitt.edu 

 

      

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Recent scholarship in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ 
and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism (Karatasli 2017; Karatasli and Kumral 2018; Pasciuti and 
Payne 2018; Clark and Beckfield 2009; Mahutga 2006; Jorgenson 2006; Babones 2005; Kentor 
2000). While this literature engages in vigorous debates regarding classificatory schemas, no 
recent work (to our knowledge) critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these 
zones. In this contribution, we explore sugar production by enslaved labor from the sixteenth to 
the late-eighteenth centuries to challenge commonly held assumptions: namely, the notion that 
these zones consist of geographical spaces (mainly, precursors of national states) that, since very 
early in the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production 
of raw materials (periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have 
been trans-historically relatively free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in 
peripheral ones. 

Although the concepts of core, semiperiphery, and periphery are central to world-systems 
analyses, there has been a persistent analytical bifurcation in how these concepts have been used. 
Since the beginning of this perspective, world-systems scholars have emphasized that the tripartite 
differentiation results from the mix of changing economic activities contained within various 
territories (e.g., nations). For example, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974; 1979) argues that through 
changing mechanisms and with shifts in their location, some economic activities (core-like) 
produce comparatively high profits and thereby derive a greater share of the wealth generated by 
the world division of labor. Other activities (peripheral) feature low-profits and derive the least 
benefits from the world division of labor. Such a depiction emphasizes change over time in the 
activities providing access to greater or lesser shares of wealth (e.g., textile manufacturing had 
been a “core” activity but eventually became “peripheralized”), in the geographical location of 
these activities (e.g., with countries having the potential to “move” between zones), and in the 
specific mechanisms producing unequal distributional outcomes (e.g., colonialism played a central 
role up to the nineteenth century, but eventually became less relevant). In other words, which 
economic activities are core, and which ones are peripheral, as well as where these activities are 
located, has world-historical specificity. 

But alongside this understanding of core and periphery as involving ever-changing and 
connected processes of production and accumulation, there has been a parallel tendency to use 
these categories as entailing persistent attributes, centered around the idea that an exploitative 
relationship between core and periphery is always manifested simultaneously through spatial 
location, economic specialization, and forms of labor control. While this “categorical” approach 
nominally adheres to the notion that core and peripheral refer to processes and activities rather 
than fixed spaces or states, its adherents tend to assume teleological continuities in the spatial 
location of the “core” and “periphery”—with the imperial centers of the early capitalist world-
economy evolving into wealthy national states, and colonial outposts becoming poor ones.1  

                                                                                                                                                             
1 Besides the normative appeal of its emphasis on ever-expanding exploitation and polarization, this “categorical” 
approach has been compelling because it helps simplify research tasks. It lends itself to the classification of “cases” 
into the relevant categories by drawing on easily available indicators (for example, share of agriculture in GNP or 
exports becomes an easily available proxy for peripheral status). From such points of view, the entrenched tendency 
to portray core and peripheral areas as national territories is not only understandable, but useful. 



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Using a “world-historical” approach, with its greater emphasis on global, relational processes, 
is more difficult: for example, no activity can be presumed to be core-like or peripheral universally 
across time. It is problematic to a priori or retrospectively assume which economic activities have 
been “core” or “peripheral”—from a more world-historical perspective, whether activities are core 
or peripheral (i.e., the profits they yield), is contingent upon constantly changing forces of 
production and competition (Arrighi 1990; Arrighi and Drangel 1986; Karatasli 2017).2  This is 
why Giovanni Arrighi (1999: 125) indicates that world-system analysts, 

 
must be prepared to unthink what many…have come to regard as the quintessence 
of world-systems theory. This is the idea that, in spite of their extraordinary 
geographical expansion, the structures of the world capitalist system have remained 
more or less the same ever since they first came into existence in the ‘long’ 
sixteenth century… [This] hypothesis does not stand up to historico-empirical 
scrutiny, and even worse, it prevents us from getting at the heart of the capitalist 
dynamics, both past and present.3   

 
We argue in this contribution that in global sugar circuits prior to the nineteenth century we 

find not only a world-economy characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various 
forms of labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but a world-
economy in which “core” and “peripheral” activities (that is, those providing access to relatively 
greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly bounded geographically as they would become in 
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between the sixteenth and late-eighteenth centuries, there 
was a gradual process of differentiation, resulting from the uneven ability of relevant actors (e.g., 
workers, enterprises, governments) to protect and enhance their relative command over resources 
and well-being. For much of this period, coercive labor exploitation was in fact the defining 
characteristic of some of the most innovative and profitable (or, core-like) economic activities at 
the time.4  

We begin with a review of our World-Magnates Database, which sets the direction of this 
paper and illuminates patterns to be explained through historical research. This section provides 

                                                                                                                                                             
2 Such an emphasis on the continuous transformation of products and production techniques as a defining characteristic 
of historical capitalism can be found in Marx (1867) and Schumpeter (1942).  
3 Building from Terence K. Hopkins, it is useful to conceive of classificatory schemas as very preliminary steps in the 
research process. Categorical methods should “serve, not to govern the structure of design as it [conventionally] does, 
but instead, in preliminary work, to help isolate subjects for detailed inquiry or, in summarizing work, to help collate 
the result of several detailed inquires” (Hopkins 1982a: 32). Moreover, “[p]ut sharply, the cases necessary for the 
statistical [categorical] portion of inquiry must be presumed essentially homogenous (members of a sample of a 
universe); the instances necessary for the historical portion must be presumed essentially heterogenous (members 
respectively of universes of one)” (Hopkins 1982a: 43). This is similar to Abbott’s (1991, 2001) suggestions that 
narrative accounts are better suited than quantitative causal models to map the singularities of social change, and to 
Baronov’s (2018) distinction between “analytical” and “holistic” approaches. 
4 As synthesized by Fogel (1989: 10), “[i]t was virtually uninterrupted economic success for more than 200 years that 
made [modern slavery] thrive and grow to monstrous proportions.” 

 



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the stylized facts of the temporal and geographical development of sugar production by enslaved 
labor. Next, we explain how the development of the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink 
some prevailing notions of core and periphery—arguing that a longue-durée analysis of sugar 
production by enslaved labor illustrates an example, not of early peripheralization, but of what we 
might call coreification, which we define as the processes by which critical nodes in commodity 
chains (e.g., in production and distribution) are transformed to provide access to extraordinary 
levels of wealth, through arrangements that temporarily shield these nodes from competitive 
pressures. The final section further elaborates this argument by focusing on the processes of 
innovation and Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that characterized the development of the 
sugar commodity chain.5  

 
The Sugar Commodity Chain: A Brief, Stylized Account 

It is hard to exaggerate the key role of sugar in the world-economy during the formative stages 
of the modern world-system. The mere scale of the sugar circuits was impressive. The world sugar 
market attained a considerable degree of integration already in the sixteenth century, and 
production of sugar grew in importance in the subsequent centuries. This is not a new claim—
dating from Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power, scholars of modernity have long understood the 
importance of sugar production (and, specifically, the transformation of sugar from a luxury to a 
consumer good) in the foundation of the world-economy. Sugar “has been one of the massive 
demographic forces in world history” (Mintz 1985: 71). By the mid-1700s, as indicated by 
Blackburn (1997: 403), “sugar overtook grain as the most valuable single commodity entering 
world trade. Around mid-century total annual American exports were worth £7.5 million at 
wholesale prices in Europe; if the commerce in the increasingly sought-after by-products–rum and 
molasses—is added, the total rises to £9 million, or nearly a fifth of European imports.”6  
Moreover, sugar was the principal staple associated with slavery: “[b]etween 60 and 70 percent of 
all Africans who survived the Atlantic voyages ended up in one or another of Europe’s sugar 
colonies” (Fogel 1989: 18).  

The importance of the sugar commodity chain for wealth accumulation between 1500 and 
1800 is identified in our World-Magnates Database, comprised of the wealthiest individuals in 
historical capitalism. In brief, the social sciences have lacked the longitudinal and global data that 
can trace how processes of creative destruction have shifted the frontiers of wealth accumulation 
over time. To reassess key social science assumptions and address the lack of appropriate data on 
the issues at hand, we advance a global database that can be used to provide a more empirically-
based account of the specific activities and spatial locations that have served as epicenters of 
wealth accumulation in the modern world-system. The dataset is comprised of individuals—

                                                                                                                                                             
5 In its most basic sense, Schumpeter (1942: 83) defines “creative destruction” as a “process of industrial mutation 
that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly 
creating a new one.” We expand on this concept in the following sections. 
6 Galloway (1989: 88) indicates that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “[f]or England, France and Portugal 
sugar was by far the most important colonial import: in the case of England, each year after 1660, sugar exceeded the 
combined value of all other of its colonial imports; in 1774, sugar accounted for half the value of all French imports 
from her West Indian colonies and, over the colonial period, sugar made a half of Brazil’s exports.” 



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historical equivalents of today’s billionaires—who can be used as an indicator of epicenters of 
wealth accumulation, and hence serve to map out unfolding processes of creative destruction (see 
Korzeniewicz and Payne forthcoming). Due to the riches of these individuals, they left behind an 
imprint in the historical record that is accessible through appropriate bibliographical and data 
searches.  From these searches, we have currently compiled data on approximately eight-hundred 
world-magnates operating between 1500 and 1930. This is not an encompassing and definitive list 
of the world-magnates—nor is it intended to be. Just as maps of the physical universe are always 
incomplete, so too are maps of historical capitalism.7   

In the Schumpeterian sense, these world-magnates offer insights into processes of creative 
destruction because these individuals are the primary beneficiaries of the creation of new 
epicenters of wealth accumulation. In the world-systems sense, world-magnates help identify the 
most profitable activities in the world-economy and can serve as a proxy for understanding the 
development of core- and peripheral- activities and areas (Korzeniewicz and Payne forthcoming).8  
The rise and fall of world-magnates can help identify how processes of creative destruction are 
clustered temporally, spatially, and/or in specific production, trade, and investment networks. Such 
an indicator can be extremely productive, systematically grounding Schumpeterian notions of 
creative destruction in historical data and tracing, over time and on a global scale, the changing 
configurations of innovation.9  

As shown in Figure 1, as early as the sixteenth, but particularly in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, the sugar commodity chain (with all its backward and forward linkages) 
served as one of the most important foundations of both financial and material wealth 
accumulation for these world-magnates. The earliest merchants and financiers in the mid-to-late 
1500s invested liquid capital in sugar (and other colonial) trade at a time when most riches were 
invested in illiquid landholdings. Then, in the mid-1600s, we start to see world-magnates who are 
invested not in the trade of sugar, but sugar production itself—owners and operators of sugar 
plantations in the New World. These dominate the world-magnates’ sugar-based activities through 
the mid-1700s, when plantation owners disappear from the data and merchants appear once more. 

 
 

                                                                                                                                                             
7 For more information on our data and procedures, see our online appendices available at: http://www.world-
magnatesdatabase.com/  
8 Classifying activities as core or peripheral based on their relative yield (i.e. their economic impact) builds from a 
long history of world-systems studies in this area. Arrighi (1985: 244) wrote that, because core-like activities yield 
greater profits than peripheral activities, “residents of the [core] must command a large share of the total surplus 
produced in the world-economy while residents of the [periphery] must command little or no such surplus [...]. [T]his 
difference must be reflected in a [...] differential between the per capita GNP of residents in the two types of states.” 
Arrighi and Drangel (1986) empirically examined the relative yield of economic activities (though not the activities 
themselves) to confirm that this was, in fact, the case. Karatasli (2017) updated and extended this method.  
9 This amounts to a version of what McMichael (1990) calls “incorporating comparison.” Such a method begins 
through the study of the parts and, by juxtaposing them together, creates an understanding of the whole. We aim to 
explicitly do this using ‘epicenters of wealth accumulation’ as the parts which we bring together to illuminate the 
characteristics of the whole—in this case, highlighting processes of creative destruction in the historical development 
of capitalism. Such a method overcomes functionalist comparison methods that have a preconception of the whole. 

http://www.world-magnatesdatabase.com/
http://www.world-magnatesdatabase.com/
http://www.world-magnatesdatabase.com/
http://www.world-magnatesdatabase.com/
http://www.world-magnatesdatabase.com/


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Figure 1: Stylized timeline of wealth-generating activities of World-Magnates, 1500-1800 
  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

Source: World-Magnates Database (Korzeniewicz and Payne forthcoming)  
 
But the prominence of sugar circuits did not represent a static paradigm. The expansion of 

the sugar commodity chain between the mid-fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries involved the 
interrelated rise and decline over time of various centers of agricultural production and 
manufacturing: Madeira and the Canary Islands, São Tomé, Brazil, Barbados. This spatial fix is 
evident in our World-Magnates Data: for example, one of the earliest individuals in our data is 
Bartolomeo Marchionni (1449-1523), an Italian merchant operating out of Lisbon. He made his 
riches in sugar production in Madeira. Later, we see the Rodriguez d'Evora family (circa sixteenth 
century), and individuals like Ottavio Centurione (circa 1640) becoming exceedingly wealthy from 
sugar production in Brazil. Finally, by the mid-late seventeenth century, we begin to see 
individuals such as James Drax (1615-1662), Jean Pellet (1694-1772), and William Beckford 
(1709-1770) whose sugar riches were based in Barbados and the English Caribbean. In the 
sequence at hand, the rise of new regions within the sugar commodity chain entailed the decline 
of established areas of production, making “the story of each of the sugar regions [...] a story that 
is both comparative and interrelated at the same time” (Schwartz 2004a: 13). The data on world-
magnates thus points us towards two phenomena which prompt further research: the centrality of 
sugar production in the early modern world-system and the succession of regions which became, 
over time, epicenters of growth of sugar production and commercialization.  

While there were previous centers of sugar production and commerce in the Mediterranean 
and Asia, the growth of these activities in Madeira and the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century 
brought forth some patterns that would later prevail on an even larger scale as the commodity 
chains came to expand elsewhere. Most importantly, sugar production in Madeira and the Canary 
Islands involved a “system of a few mills and a large number of cane growers, both dependent on 
a coerced labor force” (Schwartz 1985: 10). Additionally, many investors in sugar production in 
Madeira and the Canary Islands, as well as the skilled personnel initially used to establish sugar 
mills, were from other regions—most importantly, Genoese, but also Catalan and Flemish 
merchants—all “anxious to encroach on the Venetian near-monopoly of Levantine sugar 



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production” (Blackburn 1997: 109). Thus, here already, “[t]he foreign merchants, wealthy 
millowners, technical specialists, and a captive, ethnically distinct work force are all recognizable 
characters in the scene that sugar set throughout the Western world” (Schwartz 1985: 11). 

On the other hand, “on Madeira [...], the full plantation complex was not yet apparent in the 
sixteenth century; slave forces were limited, properties were often small, and a class of small 
farmers who grew cane but did not own mills were also characteristic of the island” (Schwartz 
(2004a: 16).  Moore (2003: 100) argues that, more importantly, sugar production in Madeira and 
the Canary Islands entailed “a "metabolic rift" whereby nutrients flowed out the countryside and 
into the cities at a geometrically increasing volume and rate,” generating rapid ecological 
degradation (e.g. soil depletion and erosion). What’s more, existing research suggests that the use 
of enslaved labor was not as extended in Madeira or the Canary Islands as it would become later 
in São Tomé and Brazil (Vieira 2004: 58). Facing new opportunities for expansion elsewhere (e.g., 
São Tomé), and suffering the impact of soil depletion, sugar production in Madeira or the Canary 
Islands rapidly declined: in Madeira, for example, “[b]y the 1530s the sugar economy on the island 
was in full crisis and the inhabitants were abandoning their cane fields and turning toward the 
planting of vineyards” (Vieira 2004: 48).10  

The major difference between São Tomé and both Madeira and the Canary Islands is that in 
the former, “the Portuguese finally abandoned Mediterranean forms of land tenure and labor in 
favor of large plantations worked by African slaves” (Galloway 1989: 58). Thus, H.S. Klein (1999: 
14) points out that in São Tomé, “[b]y the 1550s there were some sixty mills in operation on the 
island producing over 2,000 tons per annum and some 5,000 to 6,000 plantation slaves, all of 
whom were Africans,” and Schwartz (1985: 13) indicates that “[i]n the early sixteenth century, 
São Tomé brought together the technical skills and organization of the Mediterranean sugar 
complex and combined them with a constant labor source on a scale formerly impossible.” More 
broadly, Klein (1999: 14) argues that “[i]n terms of plantation size, the universality of slave labor, 
and production techniques, this was the Atlantic island closest to what would become the American 
norm.” 

In São Tomé, the difficulties encountered in promoting European colonization, the lack of a 
sizable local population, and the proximity to mainland Africa each provided incentives for a much 
more extensive use of enslaved labor, and indications are that the sugar mills were considerably 
larger than those that had characterized Madeira and the Canary Islands. However, the 
characteristics that provided for São Tomé’s comparative advantages would over time become a 
constraint. For example, its proximity to mainland Africa (as well as the geographical 
characteristics of the island) provided opportunities for resistance by enslaved Africans. By the 
late-eighteenth century, the Portuguese colony began to suffer at the hands of revolts by enslaved 

                                                                                                                                                             
10 Other variables contributed to the declining importance of Madeira and the Canary Islands, including the 
“impoverishment of soils,” the 1526 plague, and perhaps insect blight (Vieira 2004: 48). Moore (2009; 2010) argues 
that such environmental changes were much more significant than competitive pressures in leading to the decline of 
sugar production in Madeira and its subsequent relocations throughout the world: “[t]he extractive and agricultural 
character of frontier industrialization under conditions of ceaseless capital accumulation meant that not only was 
ecological exhaustion a fact of life in these areas, but that ecological exhaustion was a major impetus to further 
capitalist expansion and to the system's cyclical fluctuations” (Moore 2000: 412). 



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Africans and foreign invasions (Galloway 1989: 60). Combined with the difficulties encountered 
by Europeans seeking to colonize the area, who faced high mortality rates due to tropical diseases, 
sugar production in São Tomé eventually would come to be perceived as beset by significant 
disadvantages, particularly compared to emerging opportunities in the territories of the Americas 
newly “discovered” by Europeans. 

Although showing evidence of growth decades earlier, “[t]he Brazilian sugar industry, 
concentrated in the captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco, flourished after 1570. From that date to 
the middle of the seventeenth century Brazilian sugars dominated the European market” (Schwartz 
2004b: 161). The rapid rise of Brazilian production is illustrated by estimates of the origin of sugar 
supplies in sixteenth-century Antwerp: In 1552-3, 51 percent of sugar came from São Tomé and 
no significant share from Brazil; By 1590, 86 percent came from Brazil and barely 2 percent came 
from São Tomé (Stols 2004: 260). By this time, competition from Brazilian sugar undercut prices 
from elsewhere by up to 50 percent (Galloway 1989: 54). 

For entrepreneurs aiming to meet growing demand within this world market, the territory we 
would eventually come to know as “Brazil” offered significant comparative advantages for sugar 
production. Some of these advantages related to the environment—soil conditions, rainfall rates, 
the accessibility of the region to transatlantic trade routes, the availability of natural resources for 
use as raw materials. These comparative environmental advantages were combined with the rapid 
incorporation of enslaved labor into sugar production in the late sixteenth century. Thus, “In the 
mid-1580s one third of Pernambuco’s labor force was African. By the 1620s Brazil’s sugar zone 
was a land of blacks and mulattos rather than Indians and mestizos” (Lang 1979: 29). Similarly to 
Madeira and the Canary Islands, wage workers and small and medium farmers were part of the 
arrangements that prevailed in the sugar industry, but as in São Tomé, enslaved Africans played a 
much more predominant role (Vieira 2004: 61). 

Gradually over time, the profitability of sugar production in Brazil was overtaken by the 
British Caribbean. One key reason for this change was the Portuguese-Dutch conflict in Brazil, 
which interrupted trading and production activities (Batie 1975: 15; Green 1988). Moreover, 
although producers from Brazil were able to establish a niche early on by producing a higher-grade 
sugar than elsewhere, one of the consequences of this characteristic was that there were few 
incentives for investors in Portugal to focus on sugar refining, an activity that became centered in 
Antwerp first, later in Amsterdam, and eventually in France and England. In turn, these refiners 
were eventually able to mobilize protectionist measures in their own favor, further limiting 
opportunities for the white sugar producers in Brazil. 

Eventually, planters in Barbados found ways to gain a competitive edge vis-à-vis Brazilian 
enterprises. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, there “was a shift in the center of sugar production, 
away from the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands and Brazil to the British Caribbean, as the 
tiny island of Barbados became, for a while, the world’s leading sugar producer” (McCusker and 
Menard 2004: 289). The turn to sugar production in Barbados was swift, taking place over little 
more than a decade (between the mid-1640s and mid-1650s), when the growth of sugar production 
in Barbados “enabled [the island] to become the most prosperous 17th-century insular colony on 
the globe” (Batie 1976: 1). For Dunn (1969: 4), “[a]lmost certainly the exports to England from 



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this small island of less than one hundred thousand arable acres were more valuable in 1680 than 
the total exports to England from all the North American colonies.” 

Once Barbados came into the sugar industry, prices for the lower qualities of sugar underwent 
a long decline. By the 1720s, in Brazil, competition led to a general inflationary trend and 
stagnation (Schwartz 1985: 163). The growth of producers in Caribbean shut off Brazil from 
several European colonial markets, while increasing the cost of key supplies (e.g. enslaved labor). 
The process by which this occurred was complicated and gradual. Sugar commanded relatively 
high prices in the first half of the seventeenth century, as the Portuguese-Dutch conflict in Brazil 
disrupted an important supply source for several decades (Batie 1975: 15; Green 1988). Planters 
in Barbados had certain characteristics that positioned them well to profit from these opportunities: 
landholdings were large, planters were able to move away from the leases to small and medium 
farmers that had been the norm to a greater extent just a few years earlier, and African enslaved 
labor came into “abundant supply” as a result of the disruptions of production in Brazil (Green 
1988: 404). Simultaneously, fortuitous political circumstances contributed to the shift towards 
large-scale sugar production: the civil conflict in England in the 1640s curtailed “normal 
communications between England and the Caribbean,” restricted the previous access of island 
planters to British indentured servants, and likely opened opportunities in islands such as Barbados 
for Dutch competitors (Green 1988). 

As limits were reached to the continued expansion of plantations in Barbados, production and 
exports of sugar expanded in the British and French Caribbean particularly after the mid-eighteenth 
century (Blackburn 1997: 405). Producers of sugar in the French and English Caribbean benefitted 
from restrictive mercantile policies in their home countries that “effectively relegated Brazilian 
exports to Portuguese and Mediterranean markets” (Galloway 1989: 86).11  

It is relevant to note that “[t]he slave population and sugar economy of Barbados had reached 
a plateau” around the middle of the eighteenth century (Blackburn 1997: 405), indicating that 
limits had been reached for the horizontal expansion of production. In this context, “The planters 
turned [...] to increasing the value-added of their final product by ‘claying’ the muscovado … Some 
enslaved Africans had to be trained for the skilled work of claying, but in an old colony with an 
experienced labour [...] force this posed no problem. Consequently, planters earned more from 
crops the size of which rose little” (Blackburn 1997: 405-6).12  

 
Sugar, Wealth and Coreification 

How are we to understand the recurrent spatial relocation of sugar production by enslaved 
labor over the course of several centuries? One tack would be to portray this process primarily as 

                                                                                                                                                             
11 The growth of sugar production during this period was slower in the Spanish Caribbean, as it “was hindered by a 
constant drain of people and financial resources to the mainland, where gold and silver seemed far more glamorous 
than sugar” (Schwartz 1985: 16). There were some efforts to establish sugar production in Española, Puerto Rico, and 
Cuba, but these remain modest through the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries. It was only in the nineteenth 
century that the Spanish Caribbean would experience a rapid expansion of sugar production in Cuba, with the growth 
of ingenios that incorporated the latest technological innovations (Tomich 1990: 203). 
12 Planters from Barbados would play a role in the eventual expansion of plantations elsewhere in the West Indies, in 
the Guianas, and in the continental United States (see Dunn 2000; Roberts 2016). 



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the outcome of expansionist colonial policies aiming to transform external arenas into sources of 
cheap raw materials. But there is an alternative lens through which to understand this spatial 
relocation. This expansion of the sugar circuits can be understood as an expression, not simply of 
peripheralization, but of what we might call coreification. 

As indicated earlier, seventeenth and eighteenth-century elites in the sugar commodity chains 
gained access to extraordinary levels of wealth. Fogel (1989: 24) notes that “throughout the 
eighteenth century, the great slave plantations of the sugar colonies, with profits averaging about 
10 percent on invested capital, were the largest privately-owned enterprises of the age and their 
owners were among the richest of all men.” Sokoloff and Engerman (2000: 221) indicate that 
“[t]he economies that specialized in the production of sugar and other highly valued crops 
associated with extensive use of slaves had the highest per capita (including slaves) incomes in the 
New World.” Compared to much of the rest of the New World, in 1774, “[t]he West Indies 
evidenced the highest level of per capita wealth and income” and goes on to note, “and also the 
greatest degree of inequality” (Garcia S. 1993: 54). 

The expansion of the sugar commodity chain in time and space provides an indicator of the 
extent to which innovations and the wealth they secured provided incentives for other actors to 
replicate such strategies.13  From this point of view, that the expansion of sugar circuits in Brazil 
(for example) was successful and profitable is demonstrated precisely by the emergence of 
competitors trying to capture key niches in the sugar commodity chain by mobilizing both business 
enterprises and state forces. The new institutional arrangements in areas that had been more 
marginal to world trade circuits (e.g. the Caribbean) yielded both success in capturing new niches 
of production and a relative decline for the older and more established areas of the commodity 
chain. At a micro level, this was sometimes manifested in the physical movement of individuals 
(and/or their capital) from one location to another. 

Thus, the patterns of growth of the sugar commodity chain suggest we must abandon the 
preconception that coercive labor arrangements have always been intractably tied to inefficient 
forms of organization of production and markets, associated with a stagnant periphery.14  In Latin 
America and the Caribbean, enslaved labor was used in plantation agriculture, a high-yielding 
activity that constituted a world epicenter for the creation and accumulation of wealth. Sugar 

                                                                                                                                                             
13 As noted long ago by Adam Smith (1976: 128), “The establishment of any new manufacture, of any new branch of 
commerce, or of any new practice in agriculture, is always a speculation, from which the projector promises himself 
extraordinary profits. These profits sometimes are very great, and sometimes, more frequently, perhaps, they are 
otherwise; but in general they bear no regular proportion to those of old trades in the neighborhood. If the project 
succeeds, they are commonly at first very high. When the trade or practice becomes thoroughly established and well-
known, the competition reduces them to the level of other trades” (I, Ch. X, Pt. 1, p. 128). This is the process that 
Schumpeter focuses on through the concept of “creative destruction.” 
14 One influential narrative, developed primarily within the field of economics, argues that plantation agriculture left 
as its legacy institutional systems of high inequality that eventually came to impede growth. In this narrative (e.g., 
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2002; Coatsworth 1993; Engerman 1981), these institutions stand in stark contrast 
to those that prevailed in areas such as New England, where the simultaneous development of greater equity, 
democracy and property rights provided a stronger stimulus for economic growth in the nineteenth century and 
thereafter. Ultimately, according to this interpretation, the social arrangements characteristic of areas with a greater 
early prevalence of wage labor proved more compatible with the fundamental logic of a capitalist world-economy. 
The relational issues emphasized in our own contribution call for a very different narrative. 



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plantations represented, in their own time, what Joseph Schumpeter (1942) would characterize as 
innovative activities, yielding extra-ordinary levels of wealth. The “extractive institutions” 
provided crucial competitive advantages to the elites benefiting from such arrangements, and they 
did so by providing an effective basis with which to promote wealth maximization and economic 
growth for several hundred years. 

In the Schumpeterian model, the introduction and clustering of innovations constantly 
transform existing economic and social arrangements, and drive cycles of prosperity (characterized 
by intense investment in new productive opportunities) and depression (characterized by the 
broader absorption of innovative practices and the elimination of older activities). In this pattern, 
what might constitute innovative characteristics at any one point in time might eventually evolve 
into constraints that provide competitive opportunities for others at a later point in time. The 
growing competitive pressures (or peripheralization) of some products and activities entailed a 
process of change that evolved over time. This is an important modification of prevailing 
interpretations. Most often, certain activities and modes of labor exploitation are treated as if they 
were always peripheral (characterized by greater competitive pressures) or core-like (characterized 
by institutional arrangements shielding them from competitive pressures). Thus, for example, the 
production of sugar with enslaved labor is treated by many as peripheral from its inception, and 
the refinery of sugar with wage-labor as core-like. 

Instead, we would argue that at key points in the expansion of sugar production and trade, the 
production of sugar with enslaved labor in Latin America and the Caribbean had many of the 
features associated with core-like activities—notably, the key role of innovations as a means of 
deflecting competitive pressures and the high command over wealth secured through these 
activities. It is only over the centuries considered in this paper that such activities were subjected 
to greater competitive pressures through the uneven development of new arrangements of political 
regulation that became clearly differentiated by national boundaries. 

To the extent that peripheralization entails exposure to the greater competitive pressures (or 
even “destructive” forces) entailed in creative destruction, we should take stock of its parallel and 
necessary counterpart: what we call coreification. Coreification entails the processes by which 
commodities and critical nodes in their respective chains of production and distribution come to 
yield extraordinary levels of wealth, shielded (e.g., through innovation or any other “creative” 
forces) from competitive pressures. In this sense, coreification is the process through which 
activities become (or remain) core-like. Coreification is as crucial a dimension of creative 
destruction as peripheralization. As in peripheralization, the precise character and location of the 
processes entailed in coreification changes over time, rendering creative destruction a world-
historical, relational phenomena subject to empirical study. We analyze this process of 
coreification for sugar production by enslaved labor in the next section. 

 
Sugar and Creative Destruction 

This line of interpretation has been precluded because much of the existing literature tends to 
portray sugar plantations as lacking in innovation. For example, Schwartz (2004a: 4) indicates that 
“[t]he traditional slave-based sugar estates [...] did not prove to be very committed to technological 
innovation or to adapting mechanical improvements in order to lessen the burden and cost of labor. 



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Their ratio of productive factors of capital, labor, land, and technology remained relatively stable 
over long periods of time.” Similar conclusions have been advanced, among others, in the classical 
works by Prado (1967) and Furtado (1963). Such arguments belie a very narrow conceptualization 
that is often rooted in the assumption that only wage labor relations yield conditions that lead 
employers to pursue increasing productivity in a search for a higher surplus.  But many of the 
features of the expansion of sugar circuits represented what Joseph Schumpeter (1942) would 
characterize as innovative efforts, yielding extra-ordinary levels of wealth. These innovations were 
not limited to technological changes in the organization of the labor process, but included a broader 
range of spheres. Schumpeter (1942: 68) wrote of revolutionary innovations which “periodically 
reshape the existing structure of industry by introducing new methods of production [;] new 
commodities [;] new sources of supply [; and] new trade routes and markets to sell in…” In this 
sense, we can understand innovation in organizational, technological, and geographical spheres. 

 
\Spatial Innovation 

Historically, the introduction of “new commodities” and the opening of “new trade routes and 
markets to sell in” (Schumpeter 1942: 68) have often entailed spatial innovations. This was clearly 
the case with sugar and slavery—where the commodification of nature and labor intertwined with 
territorial expansion and new movements of capital(ists).15  Over the course of the period under 
consideration, this spatial innovation was driven in part by states’ efforts to expand territory as a 
power-enhancing strategy.16  

Lang (1979: 29) argues that the agricultural settlement of Brazil was pursued by the 
Portuguese king as a strategy to check the expansion of French interests, and that important royal 
subsidies (e.g., enslaved Africans provided at “one-third the usual customs duties”) were provided 
to make plantation agriculture feasible. Schwartz (2004b: 161) points out that “engenhos were 
exempted from the tithe (dízimo) for ten years by a series of laws designed to stimulate the industry, 
and [...] many senhores de engenho found ways to continue to avoid taxation thereafter.” In the 
early settlement of Brazil by the Portuguese, land incentives and tax exemptions were provided to 
potential builders of engenhos, who were supposed to establish fortified defense and process cane 
from surrounding areas. 

Such observations highlight the fact that the pursuit of specific strategies of accumulation of 
wealth was at times the outcome of the pursuit of greater power. In the pursuit of power by states, 
competitive advantages and disadvantages were generated by means of shifting patterns of 
political regulation. In fact, from this point of view, the pursuit of changing strategies of 
colonization and colonial expansion by states (in competition with other states) was itself an 
important aspect of innovation over time. For one example from our world-magnates data, 
Bartolomeo Marchionni (1449-1523) was a Florentine banker and merchant who operated 

                                                                                                                                                             
15 This is a process that shares some similarities with what many have called the “spatial fix” (Harvey 2001; Silver 
2003; Moore 2000, 2003). While these authors emphasize the movement of capital across space, we understand both 
capital mobility and state-led territorial expansion as forms of geographic innovation during this period. 
16 Thus, Giovanni Arrighi (1994: 32-34) argues that the pursuit of territorial expansion by state rulers—despite not 
being governed by a capitalist logic—often generated profitable opportunities for capitalist expansion. 



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primarily from Portugal. He was eventually known as the “richest banker in Lisbon,” but got his 
start as the chief merchant in sugar from the Madeira islands. He used the riches he accumulated 
from this trade to become a chief financier of exploratory voyages to Guinea, Brazil, and India. In 
1500, a joint enterprise under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral “discovered” Brazil. 
Eventually, Bartolomeo Marchionni became the first merchant to ship enslaved Africans to the 
Indies. His trajectory highlights the importance of colonial expansion in capitalist innovation. 

Through the period considered here, “the market for protection increased” (Lane 1979: 47), 
and some states were more effective than others at providing protection and regulating markets. 
For example, the perceived success of the Dutch East India company made Dutch commercial 
policies, broadly, a model to follow (Davies 1970: 17). On the other hand, as in the case of the 
Royal African Company in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, some elites had initial 
success in securing political support for regulation of the trade of enslaved Africans, only to soon 
find political tides reverse and opponents unite in promoting more open trade. Success would come 
to be measured, for example, in the extent to which sugar production and trade could develop into 
an important source of fiscal revenues for states. According to Blackburn (1997: 173), “Taxes were 
paid on Brazilian sugar both at the port from which it was dispatched and at its Portuguese 
destination… Over time the incidence of these duties drifted upwards as royal officials exploited 
the strength of Brazil’s trading position. Brazil’s sugar trade in 1627…account[ed] for 40 per cent 
of total revenue.” 

One of the primary mechanisms through which sugar markets came to be regulated was by 
the extension and/or restriction of commercial preferences by the European states. For example, 
“[b]y the 1640s [...] the rise of competing sugar economies, first on Barbados, and then in the 
Dutch and British Caribbean, and the introduction of exclusionist policies, such as the English 
Navigations Acts of 1651, changed the relationship of Brazilian sugar to its traditional markets. 
Whereas Brazilian sugars had supplied about 80 percent of the London market in 1630, by 1670, 
that figure had dropped by half” (Schwartz 2004b: 166). Later, by the early 1800s, several 
European countries, such as France, would introduce tariffs on the higher grades of sugar: thus, in 
Martinique, for example, “high protective duties and a virtual monopoly of the French market 
encouraged colonial planters to produce low quality sugar. Indeed, metropolitan sugar refiners 
forced up the surtax on the higher grades of colonial sugar to prevent competition from the colonies 
and to satisfy their own demand for raw sugar” (Tomich 1990: 187). In this sense, the relative 
ability of certain nodes in the commodity chain to capture wealth was directly constrained by the 
ability of other actors within this chain to deploy political power in their favor. Thus, “the often 
sordid business of factional politics was itself a kind of entrepreneurship” (Gettleman 1959: 213). 

More directly, markets were also regulated by the ability to deploy military force. For 
example, access by the planters and merchants of Brazil and São Tomé to sugar markets in Europe 
were severely disrupted by the fighting between the Portuguese crown and the Dutch through much 
of the first half of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, there were persistent conflicts within 
and between many different layers of the colonial system. Fights broke out among colonizing elites 
from the same imperial power—such as the conflicts between Sir William Courteen and the Duke 
of Carlisle in the 1620s in Barbados. There were also tensions in the relationship between the 
colonists and the imperial centers—local sugar elites often complained about taxes, trade 



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restrictions, or territorial expansion strategies (Koot 2007; Roberts 2016). As in the adaptability 
with respect to other elements of production, elites, here too, were able to adapt to (while striving 
to change in their own favor) changing political and military circumstances. 

We should note that commercial preferences and the deployment of force also produced 
unexpected effects. Just as they benefitted those to whom preferences were extended, they also 
provided opportunities to those who could find innovative ways of securing profits that bypassed 
restrictions (or took advantages of trade disruption). For example, piracy and contraband long 
served as a strategy to bypass the restrictions on trade imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese 
crowns (Galloway 1989: 87). Moreover, while the Dutch successfully undermined Portuguese 
control over Atlantic trade, they were not able to secure themselves a monopoly over this trade, 
and instead opened markets to competitors (Davies 1970). In fact, when some efforts were made 
by the West India Company to establish a trade monopoly on sugar from the Americas, individual 
Dutch entrepreneurs opposed this monopoly, and successfully established their own alternative 
circuits of trade (Green 1988: 413). Likewise, the Royal African Company in the 1670s and 1680s 
briefly succeeded in establishing monopolistic controls over the trade in enslaved Africans 
between Africa and the Caribbean, only to give way to less regulated trade after the late 1690s 
(Pettigrew 2013). As illustrated by these instances, there were limits to the ability of imperial 
interests in the metropoles to impose restrictive policies upon the same elites that drew much of 
their own legitimacy from colonial authority.17  

Unintended effects were also present in relation to war: the efforts by the Dutch to challenge 
the Portuguese in Brazil unwittingly reinforced some aspects of sugar production and trade in that 
same area. This can be seen in the efforts of the Dutch after many engenhos are destroyed or 
rendered idle during the 1630s: “The Dutch West India Company (WIC) eventually confiscated 
many of the mills abandoned by those Portuguese who joined the resistance or who fled to Bahia. 
These properties were then sold to Dutch or Portuguese investors as the Company sought to 
vertically integrate the industry by controlling the production as well as the commercialization of 
sugar” (Schwartz 2004b: 166). Braudel (1984: 233) argues that, in part as a result of the difficulties 
of the large Dutch ships in reaching “the shallow inlets on the coast where the smaller Portuguese 
vessels came and went as they pleased, [..t]he odd paradox of the Dutch occupation of the sugar-
producing Nordeste was that it interrupted the flow of Brazilian sugar to Amsterdam, where it had 
previously been plentiful; and the price went up as well.” 

 
Organizational and Technological Innovation 

Beyond the shifting balance of forces between colonizing states, the period under 
consideration also entailed technological and organizational innovation, largely characterized by 
a growing differentiation between enterprises and states. In the initial expansion of private property 
in Brazil, the entrepreneurial production of sugar was not differentiated from the deployment of 

                                                                                                                                                             
17 Thus, “[a]fter 1689, when colonists witnessed the growing strength of the British Empire and realized that the 
advantages of a centrally controlled empire— privileged access to markets and protected shipping—outweighed the 
costs of regulation, they finally were willing to abandon the demands for free trade that they had made since the 1650s” 
(Koot 2007: 163).  



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force: one and the same individuals (e.g., the donatários) carried out both. However, there was a 
rapid change towards greater specialization. For example, the eventual appointment of a governor-
general, who “was concerned with war and police, not directly with the organization of sugar 
production” (Lane 1979: 43). By the 1630s,  

 
[t]he new senhores de engenho were of humbler social extraction than those who 
had built mills in the sixteenth century; sugar-making was no longer the special 
preserve of viceroys, aristocrats, merchant princes and powerful religious orders, 
even if the latter had some fiscal privileges (Blackburn 1997: 173).   

 
In the process, there were new tensions in the relationship between governments and elites. 

For example, plantation elites and sugar merchants, who had originally been given significant 
subsidies in taxation, reacted strongly to the increase in taxes introduced by local authorities in 
response to conflicts with the Dutch: regardless, “by 1648, over 80 percent of taxes in Pernambuco 
were derived from sugar production and commerce” (Schwartz 2004b: 170). More broadly, this is 
indicative of the relationship between the projection of political power and the pursuit of economic 
interest. Here, it is important to take into account that most studies have portrayed the plantation 
system in terms of the growth of a single world division of labor: but one should tie this also to the 
rise of a multiplicity of states, along with the practices (e.g., growing importance of law, 
bureaucratic policy-making) that were part and parcel of this rise. 

 The extent of technological innovation that characterized sugar production has been 
underestimated.18  As we argued above, these underestimations may be engaging in a posteriori 
thinking, projecting the fact that sugar production eventually came to be viewed as a peripheral 
activity. In contrast, Schwartz (1985: 125) writes: 

 
[t]he Brazilian system (for sugar production) was in the seventeenth century 
considered the best as was evidenced by the desire of other colonial powers to copy 
it. Portuguese sugar masters and other specialists were employed in Mexico in the 
period between 1580 and 1640, and the English in Barbados learned how to make 
clayed sugar by sending people to Pernambuco to acquire the needed skills. Only 
in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Brazilian sugar economy was in crisis and 
Caribbean rivals had developed some new techniques, did the Brazilian sugar 
industry begin to acquire a reputation for being traditional and backward; even then, 
the charge was undeserved. 

 
In addition, the work of enslaved labor was increasingly coordinated in a flowing labor 

process. As such,  
 

[I]t is not surprising that contemporaries referred to the engenhos as fábricas, for 
they were in many ways precursors of the modern factory in their organization. 

                                                                                                                                                             
18 See Engerman (1973). 



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With the possible exceptions of mining and shipbuilding, no other activity in the 
sixteenth century combined so complex a process by integrating technology, 
management, and labor under conditions remarkably like the modern assembly line 
(Schwartz 1985: 152). 

 
Mills were located close to the cane fields, and quick transportation of the cane was required 

immediately following the harvest (Galloway 1989: 16). Upon its download, the cane was pressed 
(through instruments that became more complex and effective over time) to extract its juice. The 
juice, in turn, was then subjected to various stages of heating and/or boiling (requiring large 
amounts of fuel), to separate raw sugar separated from molasses (see Galloway 1989; Tomich 
1990). This heating process required considerable skills from the overseeing personnel to ascertain 
the right amounts of time and heat required to produce an optimal product (Galloway 1989: 57). 
The raw sugar would then be subjected to various refining procedures to remove impurities and 
produce white sugar. 

The innovative character of sugar production in Brazil involved the type of sugar being 
produced in this region. One of the characteristics of sugar production in Brazil is that it produced 
a higher grade of the commodity than what characterized the Atlantic islands earlier, or Barbados 
later (Schwartz 2004b: 179). The white sugar produced in Brazil was referred to as “clayed” sugar. 
Galloway indicates that the procedure could be found used in Morocco prior to the fifteenth 
century: “sugar was ‘clayed’ by placing waterlogged clay over the top of the [raw sugar] cones. 
The water from the clay percolated through the sugar, leaching out the lingering traces of molasses 
and made a sugar loaf that was whitest near the clay and graded into dark brown at the base.” 
While crude, claying was a refining process that allowed sugar producers and merchants in Brazil 
(but also eventually in the French and British Caribbean) to capture greater profits that those 
available if limited to the export of raw sugar. Moreover, as we discuss below, the existing 
information does suggest that the eventual displacement of Brazilian producers was attained only 
gradually through the combined impact of greater specialization of Caribbean producers in raw 
sugar, and of European intermediaries in refining. 

Other technological innovations included the circa-1610s introduction of the vertical three-
roller mill in Brazil, producing fewer impurities in the sugar juice than horizontal rollers, and 
requiring fewer steps in the initial processing of the cane (Schwartz 2004b: 163). According to one 
estimate, the average production by enslaved labor in Brazil rose from 0.25/0.40 tons to 0.5 tons a 
year after the introduction of the new technology (Barrett and Schwartz 1975: 542). These 
technological changes and the subsequent increased profits led to an expansion of the industry: 
“[b]etween 1583 and 1612 the number of sugar mills grew from 115 to 192; by 1629 there were 
around 350 mills, capable of producing from 15,000 to 22,000 tons each year” (Blackburn 1997: 
173). 

Later, plantations in Barbados adopted a battery of cauldrons (rather than a single one) for 
the process of clarifying and evaporating the cane juice until its transformation into raw sugar 
(Galloway 1989: 77). This innovation facilitated the enlarged scale of production that 
characterized sugar production in Barbados and eventually additional innovations were introduced 
(Galloway 1989: 97-8). Moreover, rather than a mere transplantation of existing techniques, 



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planters in Barbados transformed the extent of integration of various stages of the sugar labor 
process: prior sugar production “had always been organized according to what we might call the 
dispersed system, in which smaller farmers grew sugar that was processed at a large mill owned 
by a neighboring planter [...]. Barbadians discovered that they could increase efficiency by 
concentrating growing and milling through an integrated system of production” (McCusker and 
Menard 2004: 297). Adopted between 1650s and 1680s, during which time there was some 
“persistence of the dispersed system,” as there were some constraints in adopting “what would 
eventually become the integrated plantation’s hallmark and the major source of its productivity 
advantage over the dispersed system: gang labor with its lock-step discipline and liberal use of the 
whip to force slaves to work as hard as possible” (McCusker and Menard 2004: 301). These 
changes included a more extensive use of enslaved Africans, who in the 1660s and 1670s became 
more numerous than the previously prevalent indentured white servants (Beckles 1982). 

 
Innovations in Enslaved Labor 

Geographical relocation was an important dimension of these changes in enslaved labor 
processes. As indicated earlier, a crucial competitive advantage for sugar producers in São Tomé 
was their ability to use their proximity to mainland Africa to draw more heavily on an enslaved 
labor force than had been the case in Madeira and the Canary Islands. There is some evidence that 
over time, however, proximity to Africa also became a comparative disadvantage, as it provided 
opportunities for greater resistance among the enslaved workers (e.g. Schwartz (2004a: 10)). 

Similar constraints emerged in Brazil. Sugar plantations were built with the deep and 
fundamental inequalities of slavery in the distribution of both wealth and power. Over time, the 
extent of inequality was altered both by the incorporation of actors who could make claim to 
intermediate social standings (e.g., as smaller farmers in Barbados or white European colonists in 
Brazil), as well as the social mobility that occasionally characterized other actors over time (e.g., 
the rare ability of individual enslaved persons to eventually lay claims to special skills or even 
property, or the collective ability of some groups to claim political rights previously denied). These 
shifts entailed greater social heterogeneity, within a set of social arrangements that were 
simultaneously characterized by a very high level of inequality.19  Such processes of mobility 
might have been one of the constraints that in each case tended to erode the relative competitive 
position over time.20  

In this sense, the concept of “enslaved labor” for an understanding of the logic of the 
development of the sugar commodity chain between the 1500s and the 1800s is just as broad a 
category as the concept of “wage-labor” would be to understand the developments of the past two 
hundred years.  Just as the nature of “wage-work” in the twentieth century differed significantly 
from time to time and place to place and encompassed a wide range of occupations, so was the 

                                                                                                                                                             
19 This was manifested at all social levels. For example, in the case of Brazil, Schwartz (1985: 268) points out that 
“[b]y the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Bahian elite had become a more heterogeneous group, and although 
sugar planters still predominated, there were other sectors of the economy and other professions that thrust men 
forward.” 
20 To assess these issues more carefully, greater research is needed on patterns of stratification and mobility over the 
period under consideration. 



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case with enslaved labor. Slavery differed significantly over time and place, and likewise 
encompassed a very wide range of actual life experiences. 

 
Coreification Reprise 

Schumpeter (1942) purposefully did not restrict his notion of innovation to technological 
change or manufacturing. He emphasized that epicenters of wealth shifted constantly and are not 
associated with any particular array of products, market networks or institutional arrangements. 
New forms of raw material production, the capacity to engage in innovative forms of deploying 
territorial or political power, rent-seeking behaviors, or any other shift entailing “the setting up of 
a new production function” (Schumpeter 1942: 87) are just as likely to be a source of creation and 
destruction as any other innovation labeled by some as more “productive.” From such a 
perspective, we argue, the territorial expansion of plantations, the incorporation of enslaved labor 
into production, and shifts in the patterns of commercialization of sugar, were all significant 
instances of Schumpeterian innovation that translated into coreification during the period under 
consideration.21  

Of course, one might question whether the rhythm of innovative transformation that 
characterized the sugar commodity chain was as intense as suggested by Schumpeter’s (1942: 82) 
characterization of capitalism as a process of “mutation… that incessantly revolutionizes the 
economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new 
one.” The patterns of development observed in this article suggest that just as core and peripheral 
activities only became clearly differentiated over a period of centuries, so might the rhythms of 
innovation have accelerated over time in their temporal span: change might appear to have moved 
only slowly in the sugar commodity chain when compared to technological transformations in the 
nineteenth century, but the same holds for the latter when compared to the shifts undergone by the 
information industry over the last twenty years. In this sense, the speeding up of social-time itself 
is part and parcel of the changes at hand. 

The drive behind these innovations came from a variety of sources. These included 
landowners, merchants, and entrepreneurs who found opportunities for capturing wealth and 
engaging in upward social mobility by engaging in sugar production and trade, as well as farmers 
and small producers seeking to make a livelihood, persons of African origin resisting their 
enslavement, governments seeking to enhance their ability to rule, and states pursuing territorial 
expansion. The geographical relocation of sugar production and trade entailed a broad range of 
actors who, deploying all kinds of strategies to enhance their social and/or political standing, each 
contributed (sometimes intentionally, most often unintentionally) to world-historical change. 

 

                                                                                                                                                             
21 This is what is implied in Engerman’s (1973: 59) characterization of slavery: “free land is not a sufficient condition 
for the existence of slavery. It is, rather, the cause of a demand to institute slavery. Free land, and labor scarcity, lead 
the landowners to adjust by forming a cartel rather than bidding up wages. The cartel response is a set of institutional 
arrangements permitting forced labor, and it is important to examine the ability of the cartel to form and hold together, 
as well as the nature of the political system which permits these institutional innovations to be enforced” (emphasis 
added). From a different perspective, focusing on the interaction between colonialism and underdevelopment, similar 
points about property relations are made by Walter Rodney (1972). 



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Conclusion 
The narrative presented in this contribution belies the idea that nodes in a commodity chain 

are, by virtue of their location in a hierarchical network, “core” or “peripheral.” Instead, we 
emphasize that a better understanding of these commodity chains requires a focus on substance 
over formalism, or how various dimensions of creative destruction are manifested in particular 
times and places. As indicated in this paper, the expansion of the sugar commodity chain can be 
understood as driven by successive innovations in overlapping spheres, including technological 
changes in the organization of production from field to refinery, in forms of labor control, in 
geographical expansion and relocation, in the organization of consumption markets, and in the 
networks involved in trade. 

The large-scale production of agricultural commodities through the deployment of enslaved 
labor comprised major innovations that characterized capitalism for at least three hundred years. 
These innovations yielded significant levels of wealth. Hence, to capture the meaning of creative 
destruction for world-systems analysis, we need to focus not just on peripheralization, but 
coreification. For the longue durée of historical capitalism, neither peripheralization nor 
coreification are tied to specific commodities, productive activities, forms of labor control, or 
geographical areas. Building from Schumpeter, we have argued in this paper that peripheralization 
and coreification are two sides of a single flexible process, a process of creative destruction, that 
is at the heart of historical capitalism.  

Eventually, the innovative features of the sugar commodity chain as a whole became 
subjected to the same tensions that we identified in the sequence of its expansion. What constituted 
a competitive advantage in earlier periods, by the nineteenth century would develop into rigidities 
—e.g. technological lags or limited domestic markets—that would provide competitive 
opportunities to alternative patterns of social organization centered around wage labor and greater 
access to property rights. 

Nevertheless, we have aimed to challenge major assumptions at the heart of the use of ‘core’ 
and ‘periphery’ in world-systems analyses. First, we challenge that these activities have been 
geographically contained by national states which have always had core or peripheral 
specializations, by showing that productive activities only gradually became bounded by national 
boundaries. The case of sugar production by enslaved labor shows that core-like activities existed 
in the same colonial outposts that would eventually be dubbed ‘peripheral’ states. Second, we 
challenge that wage-labor is inherently more core-like than coerced labor by showing that both 
production by and systems of enslaved labor themselves were incredibly innovative for hundreds 
of years. The elites engaged in these activities reaped incredible wealth and sought nearly constant 
transformation of production and exchange in order to increase profitability. As such, we conclude 
not only by confirming the long-standing world-systems claim that production by enslaved labor 
in colonial outposts was compatible with historical capitalism, but also by finding that such 
arrangements were at the core of capitalist innovation and expansion. 
 
About the Authors: Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz is Professor and Chair in the Department of 
Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Corey R. Payne is a Ph.D. student in the 



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jwsr.pitt.edu   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.893 

414 

Department of Sociology and a graduate researcher in the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at 
Johns Hopkins University. 

 
Acknowledgements: Pedro Vieira (UFSC, Brasil) collaborated in a much earlier version of this 
paper. We’re thankful for feedback on this paper from the editors, the anonymous reviewers, and 
from colleagues at several conferences, including the “XII Colóquio Brasileiro em Economia 
Política dos Sistemas-Mundos” at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil) and 
“Rethinking Europe from the Caribbean” at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg (Germany). 
 
Disclosure Statement: Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of 
the article’s text. Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon 
submission of the article to the journal. 
 
 
 

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