#I mean sometimes I feel like it verges on pointless tautology

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

Labor history is precisely the environment in which I first noticed this kind of thing, I had a graduate reading seminar in left-wing radicalism when I was doing my first Master's degree and seemingly every book had this wild speculative quality. It's been a while since I was really in the weeds of it all but one of the main works that stands out to me is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's the Many-Headed Hydra which tries to wrap English labor movements with abolitionism as if it were all one self-consciously unified struggle which I just do not think even their own analysis supports

The thing I just read was in a collection responding to the 1619 Project and trying to situate American slavery in a hemispheric/Atlantic context and this guy was writing about three different models of colonization in early Virginia and how there was this small band of Puritan settlers in the 1620s who opposed arbitrary power and so maybe they would have been antislavery in the way that the Puritans of Massachusetts were antislavery, at least in the sense that they wouldn't rely so heavily on slavery, but the reason that Virginians relied so heavily on slavery is that the main cash crop that they adopted was tobacco and it was the only thing they could really grow for a profit in that climate and they used slaves to grow it because that was the only way to turn a profit doing it so really the mass adoption of slavery has less to do with the religious conviction of settlers in a given area and more to do with the climate of the area and the kind of agricultural regime the climate supported and also the general assumption of the entire colonizing venture which was in the main an effort to generate profit; and then he argues the vision of labor exploitation that dominated in Virginia arose during the English Civil Wars as a result of that particular group's ability to mobilize and capture the legislature but that is the group that had all the money so of course they're the ones who managed to consolidate as happens constantly in human history. We don't even have evidence by his own admission that this Puritan group would have been any softer on slavery, he just thinks that in their silence and the analogy of Massachusetts that maybe they would have been antislavery. And then he doesn't even engage with the fact that these Puritans were themselves a tiny minority. "If they had had their way then Virginian history could have been totally different" OK but in what way was that ever going to happen? Show me the moves by which this incredibly unpopular idealistic religious movement expands enough to take power. They just didn't have the numbers. How would they ever have gotten them??

In order to make a compelling case for how Virginia could have developed otherwise in a broader colonial world in which all European colonies including the Puritan colonies in the Northeast were heavily implicated in slavery and the slave trade you need to demonstrate a compelling example of European colonization that does not rely overwhelmingly on the extraction of profit from the New World and/or that is not dictated by the environmental possibilities of the area settled. I don't mean to say that history is entirely deterministic but events tend to follow a logic and an English colony being antislavery would radically differ from the model of almost every other colonization venture. Where are the turning points? When could Virginia have rejected slavery and why would they have done it? What would they have done otherwise?

The real problem is that most Leftist scholarship is not interested in the world as it is, but the world as it should be, and they need to make these incredibly strained arguments for how history could have gone otherwise specifically to plant the idea that life could be different now but I just don't find it compelling in almost any instance, precisely because it is based on imaginative and speculative reading in defiance of events as they occurred, and wishful projection on silences in the written record.

Leftist historians are always like "there's nothing pre-ordained about history look at how rich with possibilities everything is" before admitting that almost all their alternative visions are based on speculative reading of vanishingly thin source bases and then showing how the rich people won yet again