Convivial and Unequal Labour Patterns in Historical Capitalism from the Perspective of Peripheral Knowledge Production

This paper's underlying premise is that by defining capitalism as a social form of “free” wage labour centred on the urban industrial wage worker, the 19th-century social science paradigm presents limitations in taking into account geographically and socially peripheral labour forms - the coerced (unfree) and non-wage labour - as integral to capitalism. Hence, the aim is to contribute to a more global historical sociology by rethinking the narrow dominant concept of labour from the viewpoint of peripheral knowledge production and forms of exploitation and oppression at the margins of political-economic power and sociological production. First, I will present Brazilian historical social science’s contributions to the theorisation and conceptualisation of labour organisation from the viewpoint of coerced, racialised and feminised labour in historical capitalism. I will examine how the reconceptualisations of capitalism as a historical socioeconomic system from the standpoint of slavery as a “totally expropriated” unfree labour (Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco 1969, 1978), gender inequalities (Heleieth Saffioti 1978), racial and sexual division of labour (Lélia Gonzalez 1979) and “wounded captive bodies in the scene of subjugation” (Denise Ferreira da Silva 2019, 2020) contribute to a broader and relational notion of labour organisation articulating legal and social hierarchies. In the second moment of this paper, in dialogue with these critical relational perspectives, I will inquire into the contributions of recent Brazilian micro- and macro-historiography to the understanding of how changing political and economic structures created conditions for the configuration of mutually constitutive convivial and unequal labour patterns in the 19th century.