Rocío Zambrana

“Metamorphosis of Value” is the first philosophical contribution to emerging histories of the rise of capitalism in the early modern Iberian world. It engages debates about the relation between capitalism and slavery that center British and Dutch political economy in accounts of the birth of capitalism. Attention to Spanish and Portuguese articulation of the trade with captives beginning in the fifteenth century and spanning to the seventeenth century is crucial to understanding capitalism. Speculation, rather than labor, is its mark. The book studies speculative devices such as the “asiento de Negros,” the “pieza de Indias,” and maritime insurance theorized as epistemic protocols that posit value through the suspension of production. It also explores mare clausum and mare liberum doctrines as a site of primitive accumulation. It thereby transforms the idea that the “secret of capitalism is not the factory but the plantation,” as Sylvia Wynter writes, showing that the secret is not the organization of labor in the plantation or later in the factory but the speculative world of trade and finance.