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.”