ABSTRACT
Given continuing debate about the plantation system, this introduction examines some of the theoretical issues surrounding the recruitment, reproduction, and dissolution of its workforce, and in particular the free/unfree character of its social relations of production. It begins by confronting two interrelated revisionist interpretations of production relations on the plantation: on the one hand neoclassical economic theory, and on the other the 'culturalist' arguments derived from moral economy, survival strategies and resistance theory, (re-) interpretations of the plantation regime which involve either a denial or a dilution of its unfree element. By contrast, it is suggested here that the free/unfree dynamic structuring production relations on the plantation, and the specific trajectories of the latter (depeasantisation, peasantisation, proletarianisation, deproletarianisation, reproletarianisation), are determined historically by class struggle (waged from above as well as from below).
