Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity: Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference

Abstract

The Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its uneven incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that despite colonial capitalism seeking to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process. In effect, while colonial capitalism wields various techniques to incorporate Indigenous and African life worlds, there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not reproduce the logic of capital. Highlighting two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx’s notion of subsumption, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, however, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary political projects.

Introduction

In his reflections upon the modern concept of history, Reinhart Koselleck (2018) suggests that time cannot be reduced to a linear diagram that progresses from one moment to another. Rather, as sedimented layers, there are manifold historical temporal forms that synchronically commingle via the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Never totally lost to history, a thick stratum of multiple times lay in tension where they periodically erupt into historical events (p. xiii). Holding a critique of both capitalism and imperialism, Koselleck eschews modernity’s singular conception of history that is punctuated by a rectilinear structure of progressive sequences, and instead affirms the potential of plural histories that tend towards irreducible heterochronicity and immiscibility (Koselleck, 2004, 2018: 250).

Drawing from Koselleck, the view of modern time that this paper seeks to bring into view can be identified through a layered mix of historically contingent circulating representations, experiences and technologies of time. Accordingly, the development of modern time does not index a single, homogeneous, linear temporality, as older analysis of modern time suggested they are; rather, they entwine together many diverse forms of social and non-human time that are best understood as heterochronic (Bear, 2014: 7–8). ¹ Most dominant in modern time is the abstract temporal logic of capitalism, which has come to be associated with the universal measure of value in labour and exchange relationships. Broadly speaking, Marxist historians examine how modern time subsumes the qualitative heterogeneity of human labour into abstract labour time. It does so through shifts in social-property relations corresponding to medieval life, textile manufacture and industrial capitalism. Focused on how social relations are shaped by capitalism’s processes of production and the imperative to realize capitalist value, this frame elucidates how power is exercised over labour by intensified time discipline. In this regard, the clock has come to play a vital role in the organization of labour power in addition to the standardized and synchronized tempos of industrial labour regimes. Marxist thinkers have developed tools that allow us to analyse how these processes have always come into conflict with diverse temporalities in addition to the contingent forms of heterochronicity that emerge in relation to them (Adam, 1999; 118; Bear, 2014: 7–8; Glennie, 2009; Harootunian, 2017: 228; Innis, 2004; Landes, 2000 [1983]; Lim, 2009: 72; Marx, 1992 [1885]; May and Thrift, 2001; Postone, 1993).

Drawing on this rich tradition, my paper analyzes how the abstract time reckoning of capitalism is never uncontested; instead, it develops through uneven encounters with diverse social and non-human times within the colonial context. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the context of the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that these diverse Indigenous and African temporalities, which are expressive of what we can broadly call human and cultural difference, are not totally subsumed and converted into an assumed singular and homogeneous temporality of capitalism. In other words, despite all the disciplinary techniques available to capitalism, there are always excess forms of life that are necessary for the spread of capital but cannot be totally incorporated by it (Murthy, 2015: 126). To this end, theories of racial capitalism in addition to the Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its conflictual incorporation of multiple socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people.

To illustrate these processes, this paper is split into three principal sections. In the first, I examine how capitalist time has come to define a universal metric of value in labour through key shifts in early capitalist social-property relations related to the spread of sound signals, textile manufacture and industrial relations. What is missing from this analysis, I argue, is a planetary account concerning the role of colonialism in the development of capitalist time and how colonial labour regimes underpin much of the wealth that secured Europe’s rise to global power. As a corollary, the second section analyzes how heterochronic capitalist time develops through the colonial context of the Caribbean sugar complex, including the appropriation of Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological temporal rhythms; the time discipline of the latter as an enslaved workforce; and the ecological spatio-temporalities of sugar cane production itself. That Indigenous and African temporalities shape modern heterochronicity beyond being acted upon by the exceptional and hyper-agential imperial Western centre allows us to disrupt Eurocentric conceptions of modernity and time that obscure the role of the non-West in its (re)constitution (Hobson, 2021: 16; Mills, 2020). In the third section, I emphasize that Indigenous and African conceptions of time are a significant feature of human and cultural difference that have been preserved despite their conflictual incorporation into the colonial capitalist disciplinary tempos of the sugar complex and resulting forms of heterochronicity that emerged in relation to them. To demonstrate this, I highlight two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx’s notion of real subsumption and formal subsumption, and suggest that the spread of capitalist time does not imply the eradication of cultural remnants from the past (Murthy, 2015: 124). With this, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of alternative, non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. These processes, however, inscribe their own emergent dialectics and may not promise an effective grounding for an oppositional politics that resist colonial capitalist relations. In this regard, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary conservative politics that are grounded, ontologically, in timeless cultural residues and continue to advance the progressivist logics of colonial capitalism.

Abstract ‘Clock’ Time and Early Capitalist Social-Property Relations

What we know as modern time, or simply ‘clock time’, is universally recognized. Organized by globally inscribed time zones, the clock arranges social life by a temporal structure punctuated by sequenced divisions that are equal and measurable. Perry Anderson (1992) captures the essence of isochronic clock time by suggesting, ‘each moment is perpetually different from every other [but] is also the same’ (p. 30). While clock time has not completely subsumed other forms of temporal experience and has the potential to be resignified to challenge dominant forms of time (Bastian, 2017: 43), it is the principal metric for organizing social life within capitalism and attendant institutions. With this, various authors have traced the management and techniques of representation of time within modern institutional formations (e.g. Bear, 2014; Beck, 1992; Luhmann, 1993; Marx, 1992 [1885]; Weber, 2008 [1922]). For instance, the temporal logics of modern bureaucracies, including factories, banks and corporations, emerged from Christian routines and military administrations, but were represented as universal, secular practices (Adam, 1999; Bear, 2014: 6; Foucault, 2012; Weber, 2008 [1922]). In addition, the tempos of the state unevenly authorize, structure and distribute political power (Agathangelou and Killian, 2016; Clark, 2019; Cohen, 2018; Gokmenoglu, 2022; Pursley, 2019). The political time of the nation form, in another register, was founded upon the attempt to produce temporal simultaneity among diverse communities rooted in the representations of homogeneous historical and cultural time based on kinship metaphors (Anderson, 1991; Allen, 2008; Bear, 2014, 2007; Kaplan, 2009; Stoler, 1995). Furthermore, technologies of time including navigational tools index forms of time reckoning related to non-human environmental forces often connected to deep natural time (Bear, 2014: 7; Gould, 1987; Higman, 2020; Mackenzie, 2001; Pickering, 1995; Pickering and Guzik, 2008; Povinelli, 2016). Within these diverse settings, the practices of modern time seek to order and arbitrate between conflicting heterogeneous forms of time (Bear, 2014: 7).

This section builds upon this work; however, I do not focus upon examining the complexity of modern time as it relates to institutional bureaucracies, the state and nation form, or technological mediations. Instead, I analyse its development vis-à-vis the unfolding of early capitalist social-property relations. Accordingly, various Marxist thinkers index the social processes of production that transformed the societal significance of temporality throughout the 14th century into 19th century (Benjamin, 1974 [1942]; Dohrn-van Rossum, 1996; Glennie and Thrift, 1996; Landes, 2000 [1983]; Le Goff, 1980; Martineau, 2015: 30; Postone, 1993; Thompson, 1967). For instance, Postone (1993) examines how a stratified and multifaceted production system achieves social resonance. And while I question if the commodity relation is fully achieved in the section ‘Subsumption and the Postcolonial: Affirming the Persistence of Historical and Cultural Difference’, for Postone (1993), ‘the historical origins of the conception of abstract time should be seen in terms of the constitution of the social reality of such time with the spread of the commodity-determined form of social relations’ (p. 202). Seeking to chart such origins, various thinkers examine the rise of abstract time vis-à-vis merchant class social-property relations within the Italian city states and other European urban locals (Le Goff, 1980; Martineau, 2015: 54). For instance, Jacques Le Goff (1980) examines how market opportunism, linked to the emergence of complex trade networks in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, gave rise to practices of temporal harmonization that aimed to coordinate disparate markets and trade routes (Le Goff, 1980; Martineau, 2015: 64). With this, we can foreground major shifts in industry, specifically textile production, that correspond to the 14th century spread of sound signals in various urban centres.

The spread of sound signals such as work bells is of interest because they relate to novel forms of temporal discipline that emerged during the crisis of the feudal agrarian economy in this period. Waning land productivity meant a decline in demand for market goods, which led to a parallel crisis in the textile industry and subsequent shift towards large-scale export as opposed to small-scale local market production (Martineau, 2015: 56; Postone, 1993: 209). As a result, sound beacons spread throughout textile producing urban centres to discipline labour by publicly marking the intervals of the start and end of the workday in addition to marking the interval for meals. It should be noted that despite the interest in work bells, Le Goff, Martineau and Postone do not account for the diversity of unsynchronized time signals that mediated social rhythms in medieval Europe. For instance, there were sound signals associated with liturgical offices and movement of the clergy in addition to sound signs for the closing of city gates that corresponded to the diurnal cycle in addition to agricultural regimes based upon the non-human animal signals such as the cockcrow (e.g. Arnold and Goodson, 2012; Atkinson, 2012, 2016; Bradbury and Collette, 2009; Corbin, 1998; Garrioch, 2003; Howard and Moretti, 2009; Smith, 1997; Stevens, 1995; Wilkin, 2015).

Despite the diverse array of overlapping unsynchronized sound signals that punctuated social life in this period, Marxist thinkers focus upon the class tensions that emerged as a result of these processes. For instance, the shortage of labour in the period following the Black Death of 1348–1350 empowered labourers to improve working conditions by silencing work sound signals in various towns, and they even sought to appropriate work bell signals for their own interests. Also, the variable workday, then marked by the natural diurnal cycle, became a major site of contestation. Workers moved to increase their wage that had dramatically declined in real value and, as a result, the representation of what constituted a ‘workday’ became a site of conflict. Workers, for instance, attempted to delink the measure of labour output from the dependence upon the existing variable structure of daylight. In response, merchants turned this struggle to their benefit by attempting to regulate productivity via constant time measurement. And while the merchant class depended most on control over trade networks for the reproduction of their social power (Martineau, 2015: 57–59), the imperative to increase productivity was an important characteristic in this period.

Utilizing sound signals, merchants focused upon the difference between the value of cloth manufactured and the wages they paid (Postone, 1993: 210). As a corollary, the ‘working day’ was captured as an object of intensified temporal discipline to increase surplus value, and to allocate value in the form of wages and profit (Heydebrand, 2003: 150). This corresponds to the labour theory of surplus value, which is contingent upon the intensity of labour, and is indexed by ‘the value of labor over and above that which is necessary to maintain and reproduce the life of the worker and the subsistence of labor, in general’ (Heydebrand, 2003: 152). With the work bell, for instance, time emerged as an incipient abstract form to discipline labour output by constant measurable intervals through the category of productivity. Abstract time, in this regard, disrupted or rather entwined with the concrete temporal relationships towards the natural rhythms of nature (Heubener, 2020; Smith, 1997) and cannot be delinked from the social processes of production and circulation of the commodity form (Postone, 1993: 211). While the first mechanical clock was built around the year 1300, municipalities only situated them upon towers and churches in the second quarter of the 14th century within England, Germany, France and Italy (Martineau, 2015: 51; Postone, 1993: 212). Furthermore, abstract time did not become universalized and generalized for centuries. Rather, rural environments continued to be structured by variable and dependent concrete forms of time; namely, ‘processual concrete time, the time of the life on the land, the time which springs out from the bulk of social and reproductive life that is expressed in cultural forms’ (Martineau, 2015: 75). Even in urban centres, only a small class of wage earners and merchants relied upon the constant divisible sequencing of time via mechanical clocks (Postone, 1993: 212).

At this point, it is important to note that the transition from the time consciousness of the medieval period, in relation to governmentality to the time consciousness of industrial capitalism, is far more complicated than many thinkers suggest. Despite this, the point here is that with the development of industrial capitalism within Britain, clock time featured as an important mediation in social time through the qualitative reorganization of social-property relations. E. P. Thompson (1967) argues that the enhanced synchronization of labour along with more exacting temporal systems of routinization indexed a particular socio-cultural sensibility of what he calls ‘time orientation’. This form of time reckoning corresponds to an internalization of temporal discipline that tyrannically structures daily rhythms according to the imperatives of capital and is punctuated ‘at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronisation of labour’ (Thompson, 1967: 69). For Thompson, ‘time orientation’ has replaced ‘task orientation’ whereby daily rhythms are calibrated by the ‘logic of need’ to complete particular tasks.

While it is true that Britain’s capitalist industrialization was a key driver in the escalation of time discipline, there is a tendency among some Marxist historians to obscure how global processes shape social time relations. Relevant here is the Political Marxist tradition of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood who, like Thompson, adhere to the Eurocentric Big Bang theory of Western expansion. Structured by the ‘logic of immanence’, the Big Bang paradigm suggests that capitalist modernity spontaneously exploded into the West and subsequently developed slowly over a unilinear and teleological trajectory. In this account, external colonial and imperial processes that shape European capitalist industrialization are obscured in favour of endogenous causal factors (Dussel, 1998: 3–5; Hobson, 2021: 16, 240). For instance, Wood states, ‘we cannot go very far in explaining the rise of capitalism by invoking the contribution of imperialism to “primitive accumulation” or, indeed, by attributing to it any decisive role in the origin of capitalism’ (Hobson, 2021: 240; Wood, 2007: 148). Absent, in this narrative, is the role of imperialism and the appropriation of non-Western temporal experiences in Europe’s breakthrough to capitalist modernity and its resulting heterochronic temporal structure.

This impulse is expressed through the persistent examination of the Western transition from feudalism to capitalism (for further critiques of this position, see Khan, 2022; Lindner, 2010; Robinson, 2000 [1983]; 2019 [2001], when no such emphasis was found in Marx’s mature writing such as the Grundrisse. In the latter, the mention of feudalism was scant and only used for illustrative purposes, whereas in Capital, he emphasized primitive accumulation as an ongoing process that was not bound by the geographical limits of Europe. And while it is true that Marx discusses feudalism in Capital, it is largely used for illustrative purposes to explain what occurred in Europe and, in a curious footnote, even Japan (Harootunian, 2017: 6; see also Anderson, 2010). Accordingly, Harry Harootunian (2017) points out that ‘the centrality accorded to the category of feudalism, simply reflecting a local variant of tribute, reinforced the West’s claim to a privileged universalism, providing an unquestioned model of imitation in the development of capitalism in societies outside Europe’ (p. 5). To this end, typical Political Marxist accounts of time remain wedded to a Eurocentric framework that obscures the role of non-Europe and forms of concrete time in the constitution of capitalism and the heterochronic character of abstract labour time. Alternatively, if we examine the contradictory and layered tempos of abstract modern time and its circulation within the colonial context, our analysis of modern time becomes strained and full of dilemmas. With this, I seek to foreground the mediation of divergent experiences of social and non-human forms of time that are a product of the ‘clash of diverse and antagonistic temporalities’ (Bear, 2014: 19; Negri, 2003: 68).

The Caribbean Sugar Complex and the Appropriation of African, Indigenous and Non-Human Socio-Ecological Rhythms

Third World and Black Marxist scholars argue that racial capitalism underpins European imperialism through the appropriation and exploitation of labour, land and resources from the global South. Accordingly, this section advances that analysis by foregrounding how the diverse temporalities of Caribbean sugar production and attendant systems of slave labour were incorporated into, and generative of, capitalist forms of heterochronic industrial temporal relations. And while slave labour is typically not associated with the free form of labour power that corresponds to the capitalist mode of production, one cannot discount the plantation’s productive capacities and the market their consumption requirements afforded the metropolitan centre (e.g. Cesaire, 2001 [1950]; Fanon, 2005 [1961]; James, 1989; Mintz, 1985: 60; Ortiz, 1995 [1940]; Robinson, 1999; 2000 [1983]; 2019 [2001]; Rodney, 2018 [1972]; Tomich et al., 2021; Williams, 1944). As Frantz Fanon (2005 [1961]) states, ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples’ (p. 58). With this, the Caribbean sugar complex not only served as a model for the Lancashire cotton-based industrial revolution and corollary disciplinary rhythms, but materially underwrote it through the profits extracted from enslaved peoples (Hobson, 2021: 217; Williams, 1944). The plantation shaped the rise of heterochronic abstract clock time by instituting a syncretic relationship between several vectors: the development of long-distance navigational techniques to expand plantation slavery in the Caribbean; the appropriated processual concrete durations of Indigenous and African socio-ecological knowledge; the time discipline of the latter as an enslaved workforce; the ecological spatio-temporalities of sugar cane production itself; and the provisioning of low-cost food substitutes and calories for the labouring classes of the metropole.

Centuries and perhaps millenniums passed before sugar departed Asiatic India, moving into Arabia and Egypt, then crossing along the islands and coastlines of the Mediterranean basin to the Atlantic Ocean and into the Indies of America (Ortiz, 1995 [1940]: 39) The English began sugar production through knowledge acquired, in part, from the Dutch and Portuguese colonial plantation agriculture on the Guiana coast (Mintz, 1985: 39). Within the Caribbean, the British sugar complex expanded rapidly from Barbados in the 1640s and violently absorbed over 252,500 African slaves in the coming years. Furthermore, after the subsequent invasion of Jamaica in 1655, it absorbed over 662,400 slaves over the next century (Mintz, 1985: 53). As a result of Britain’s expanding trade network within the Caribbean following the Sugar Revolution was the parallel expansion of voyages across the Atlantic. This, in effect, corresponded to the boom in the trade of enslaved African peoples:

[S]lave traders notoriously applied a brutal equation to the balance between delivering the largest number of people to the markets in the Caribbean and the cost of provisioning for extended voyages. Making the navigation of the middle passage less hazardous potentially made it more profitable, though without necessarily reducing the heavy mortality of the enslaved. (Higman, 2020: 297)

The goal of increased speed under sail in this period required the British and French to plot longitude in the Caribbean by establishing the temporal coordinates in the port of departure. As a result, the development of accurate abstract time measurement techniques and attendant navigational instruments was shaped by the concerns of reducing the mortality rates of enslaved people at sea, diminishing losses in the trade of colonial commodities and waring colonial maritime naval forces seeking to gain advantages over the islands of the Caribbean in the 18th century (Higman, 2020; see also Campling and Colas, 2021; Mawani, 2018; Reidy and Rozwadowski, 2014). The convergence of these various interest’s punctuates Kevin Birth’s observation in Objects of Time: ‘the artefactual determination of time does not represent a coherent, consistent cultural system . . . but represents instead the sedimentation of generations of solutions to different temporal problems’ (Bastian, 2017; Birth, 2012: 2). Building colonial institutional capacities to help resolve such temporal problems, the imperial British Hydrographic Office was established in 1795 and served as a vital institutional appendage to support the expansion and speed of British commercial trading circuits and to reduce the loss of vessels in uncharted waters. In response, the French also established their Bureau des Longitudes in 1795 in hopes this could restore the nation’s waning naval power. Shaped by oceanic European imperial missions, the need to organize and incorporate an unwieldly archive of empirical oceanic data via determining longitude for faster sailing routes in the trade of enslaved people and commodities contributed to the development of accurate time measuring technologies. This includes John Harrison’s H4 sea clock that was perfected in 1760 and was successfully tested at Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1762 (Higman, 2020: 310–312). To this end, the constitution of abstract clock time does not tell a single story but rather participates in the ‘hodgepodge of different logics’ that are messy and the product of conflict (Bastian, 2017; Birth, 2012: 2).

Speaking to this hodgepodge, the heterochronic abstract temporality of modern time was further shaped by knowledge of sugar production itself and was acquired in part by knowledge from enslaved African peoples, that is to say, the appropriation of African concrete processual times. Sugar was present within precolonial West African coastal regions as a cultivated plant and likely arrived via the Sahara. Furthermore, in Madeira, the complex irrigation works, or levadas, were not constructed without the spatio-temporal knowledge of slaves taken from the Canary Islands (Greenfield, 1979: 100; Ortiz, 1995 [1940]). Also, in Santo Domingo, the early Spanish plantations imported required technical knowledge from the Canary Islands as well (Mintz, 1985: 47). Dislodging the typical Cartesian narrative that enslaved African people were simply passive labourers to be acted upon as opposed to active producers of knowledge, we can gesture towards the concrete durations of African socio-ecologies that were appropriated and reworked to meet the needs of the plantation system. At this point, it is important to note that the exact character of time sensibilities in West Africa before colonization is difficult to determine. Few if any clocks were present in pre-20th-century West Africa as their culture and economies had little need for equal and measurable sequences characteristic of clock time. Rather, West African time consciousness was qualitatively different than capitalist clock time and largely shaped by concrete tasks and natural orientations. Mark Smith (1997) argues in Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South,

West African peoples did not harbor, nor did they need, a sense or appreciation of clock time . . . [West] African time sensibilities not only fell necessarily within the general rhythm of natural phenomena and task orientation but also tended to compound all time, past and future especially, into what Kenyan scholar John Mbiti calls ‘No-time’. The net effect of this time orientation, argues Mbiti, is that the ‘linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, present and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking’. (Mbiti, 1971: 23; Smith, 1997: 131)

Here, one must be careful, as Smith and Mbiti’s notion of no-time articulates itself to what V. Y. Mudimbe (1998) calls the colonial library, whereby discursive frames that are grounded in colonial knowledge traditions provide essentialized explanations of ‘Africa’ and its people including their diverse and complex forms of time reckoning. Put differently, it would be inaccurate to reduce all African time orientations to a fixed essence of no-time as this fails to account for interwoven social and non-human times that unfold within an indefinite relationship between the past, present and future in addition to the feelings, attitudes and comportments people embody during their everyday lives (Mudimbe 1998; Murthy, 2015: 129).

For Mudimbe then, Mbiti is firmly situated in the Africanist tradition that aims to translate, represent and invent Africa as an object of knowledge. Significant here is rejecting the impulse to situate the task orientation and natural rhythms of West Africa within the fold of allochronism, that is, within temporal distancing techniques that refuses to see the Other as coeval to the subject-author of knowledge. Johannes Fabian (1983) argues, for instance, that the allochronic ‘denial of coevalness’ is the hierarchical temporal distancing arrangement that places the subject-author of knowledge in contemporary time while suppressing the simultaneity of the other by placing them in a lesser stage of development. Rather than conceptualizing no-time within the progressive vocation of allochronism, the point here is to index a qualitative difference in time consciousness, and that West African socio-ecological knowledge, practice and attendant concrete forms of time reckoning were not excised but rather appropriated by the colonial plantation complex.

Slave traders targeted West African peoples who held complex spatio-temporal knowledge of socio-ecologies. This extended to hydrological engineering that requires expertise of the durations for irrigation, drainage and tidal farming techniques as well as a sophisticated understanding of lowland climate, gradient and water flow cycles. Sugar cultivation requires an annual rainfall minimum of 1000–1500 mm, in addition to advanced temporal knowledge of shifting drainage, acidity and salinity absorption rates. Peoples inhabiting the coastline from below Dakar to Gabon determined that its dry season would span several months (November–March) in accordance with the more than 1000 mm of annual rainfall. Furthermore, on the sloping surfaces of the Lion Mountain region in Sierra Leone, peoples established the durations for the growing and dry seasons in relation to the well-drained soil and adequate annual rainfall for sugar cultivation (Gemery and Hogendorn, 1979: 434, 448). As opposed to mainland West Africa, with its dense tropical red earths that rapidly lost fertility, concrete cultivation phases in the coastal regions were adapted to the natural rhythms and were sequenced to the specific durations of cane cultivation and the dry seasons. The latter was crucial for developing soil drainage techniques often aided by volcanic deposits as well as the application of coral limestones and organic matter to reduce acidity and low-oxygen levels because moisture and nutrient absorption rates of cane stall from water-saturated soil and salinity (Gemery and Hogendorn, 1979: 440–441). Hence, West African peoples developed highly sophisticated and qualitatively different forms of time consciousness developed through the concrete tasks and natural tempos of sugar cultivation.

With this, Smith argues that even into the 19th century within the antebellum slave South, slave owners neither wanted nor were able to reject natural time rhythms,

Predicated on seasonal rhythms, plantation agriculture was necessarily dependent to no small degree on nature’s temporal parameters. Rather than engage in fruitless combat with nature, slave owners worked within its seasonal and daily constraints, insinuating mechanically defined time, where appropriate. (Smith, 1997: 134–135)

Crucially, in the context of the Caribbean sugar plantation, the determination of nature’s seasonal temporal parameters was itself directly shaped by African socio-ecological knowledge and practice. The latter, in other words, was transferred to the Caribbean context and put into service of the expanding sugar plantation complex through processes of formal subsumption (discussed further in the next section). And yet, due to enduring research bias against Africa and its people, which has been further shaped by centuries of slavery, these socio-ecologies have been overlooked, obscured and lost. Speaking to this, Judith Carney states, ‘Belief that Africans failed to domesticate crops, a step crucial for the emergence of civilization, and their presumed acquiescence to slavery, impeded the advance of scholarship that would illuminate a different vantage point’ (Carney, 2002: 32). Understood as geomorphological agents on a grand scale, a different vantage point illuminates that West African people developed highly productive agricultural systems and attendant socio-ecological rhythms that plantation economies relied upon and adopted (Carney, 2002: 89–98; 2000: 128–130; Gill, 2021).

In his classic work on transculturation, Fernando Ortiz (1995 [1940]) in Cuban Counterpoint: Sugar and Tobacco, argues in a similar register that Indigenous Taíno socio-ecologies were vital to the development of plantation agriculture including sugar. With knowledge of chemistry and precise timing for extraction, the Taíno manufactured toxic substances, and through metallurgy worked soft metals such as copper and gold in addition to guaní – like red gold, it was associated with its rich material and supernatural properties. The Taínos also had a vast array of efficient machines such as the cibucán, which served as a milling device at the centre of the complex yuca industry that produced casabes, xaos-xaos, alcohols, starch foods, poisons and catibías (Ortiz, 2014 [1940]: 469).

The timing of cultivation cycles according to the start of the rainy season was also entwined with non-secular forces of gods, ancestors and spirits called cemís. The latter corresponded to male and female powers of fruitfulness and embodied a balance between good and ill. Playing an active role in Taíno existence, the twin spirits of Maquetaurie Guayaba, Lord of the Dead, and Guabancex, Mistress of the Hurricane, would determine rainfall at the right time and quantity, but also could devastate agricultural lands with the wrong timing or excessive rainfall. In this regard, ‘The Taíno viewed their world in a delicate balance, and they attended to their spirits in order to maintain this balance’ (Keegan and Carlson, 2008: 6). As opposed to an inert resource for extraction, land was entwined with mutually sustaining relationships and responsibilities to cemís, water, animals, vegetative life and other people. Supporting life over generations, these processes were generative of reciprocal relationships between the material and spiritual life worlds of the Taíno (see also, Price, 2023).

Utilizing diverse techniques such as swidden agriculture, the Taíno also cut vegetation that was periodically burned to release nutrients to the soil, which was particularly susceptible to erosion during heavy rainfall. Subsequently, a wide variety of crops was planted with knowledge of their maturation rates to maintain continuous harvests, after which they were fallowed (Keegan and Carlson, 2008: 71–72). Key to sugar manufacture was the milling apparatus known as the cunyaya and like the cibucán was a pump-handle apparatus that produced grinding pressure by being lodged against the branch of a tree and would be pressed in rhythm to grind raw cane, extract its juice and obtain saccharose. As Ortiz argues, ‘it was with the Indian cunyaya that the first juice was squeezed out in America, from the cane planted in Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus’. As a result of the appropriated African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge of sugar production that larger commercial scale manufacture would develop by colonial settlers in Hispaniola via grinding mills powered by water or horsepower (Ortiz, 1995 [1940]: 49).

Crucially, it was not only the violent appropriation of African and Indigenous labour but also their concrete processual times into the matrices of the plantation system. Consequently, we can highlight how this knowledge was used for calibrating the strict durational cycle of sugarcane production into its crystalized form. This process, we are reminded by Sidney Mintz (1985), ‘cannot be done without solid technical mastery, particularly control of the heat. Just as factory and field are wedded in sugar making, brute field labor and skilled artisanal knowledge are both necessary’ (p. 47). Requiring exacting precision, sugarcane, once cut, will fail to crystallize unless it is ground, extracted and boiled into sugar within about 18 hours (Tomich et al., 2021: 87; see also Eichen, 2018). Conceptualizing the plantation as a synthesis between ship, factory and field, B.W. Higman (2020) further elucidates how it functions through a nefarious form of time consciousness that would come to underpin industrial capitalism:

More broadly, ‘modern’ time management regimes – those commonly seen in the assembly line systems of the factory since the Industrial Revolution – have long been associated with the organization of labour on plantations, particularly in both field and factory in sugar cultures. Plantation masters contributed to the development of time regulation, ringing bells and blowing conchies to mark the transitions, much like life on shipboard with its watches and daily rituals. (Higman, 2020: 313)

Similarly, Dale Tomich et al. (2021) suggests that due to market pressure to intensify output and productivity, planters deployed coercive techniques to maximize the surplus product within the material and social framework of the sugar complex (p. 62):

The physical characteristics of sugarcane imposed a distinctive spatial and temporal order on large-scale sugar production and made the sugar plantation a prototypical ‘factory in the field’. The execution of all the sequential phases of the manufacturing process – cutting, hauling, grinding, clarification, evaporation, and crystallization – had to be coordinated with one another within a limited period of time in order to secure the material and social integration of the process . . . The working activities of slaves were subject to strict industrial time discipline in order to ensure the integration of the overall process and maximum output. (pp. 89–90)

While E. P. Thompson reminds us that the rise of mechanically defined time over concrete natural processual times was an ongoing process that occurred in degrees as opposed to absolutes, the tyrannical internalization of heterochronic abstract time discipline and violent synchronization of labour to maximize output and productivity was perfected in the commodity frontier and brought back to Europe as a model for industrial labour regimes.

With regard to the temporalities of enslavement, it is important to note that slavery was not a labour-saving venture. This is because their labour force was seized through the appropriation of the person of the worker. While technical innovation could raise output, it did not reduce the size of the labour force or the cost of its reproduction. However, because slave labour was geographically mobile, they could be reconstituted on a larger scale, their division of labour reconstructed, and new technologies incorporated into the imperative to intensify work routines. Ultimately, these processes aimed to increase output per enslaved person (Tomich et al., 2021: 61–62). In effect, the reconstitution of the mobile character of enslaved labour vis-à-vis technology and scale of production instituted novel techniques of coercion to intensify time discipline and increase productivity as well as output.

With this, plantation owners instituted various sound signals, including the work bell, horn, cockcrow, whistle and notably the whip to enforce temporal obedience through violent coercion (Ortiz, 1995 [1940]: 24). Enslaved people’s compulsion to comply with the sound signals of the plantation was not then simply the result of the inherent tyrannical system of the work bell itself but rather a product of how slave masters instituted violent obedience to their sound signals:

if slaves’ harried, prompt, at times feverish responses to the clock defined plantation bell is reminiscent of time discipline, it should be remembered that their ‘respect’ for the clock was born more of fear and less of an internalized Protestant work ethic. (Smith, 1997: 142)

Time signals such as the work bell is often conceptualized as an inchoate abstract temporal formation to discipline labour and increase output through constant measurable intervals. However, despite not being typically accounted for by Marxist scholars such as Thompson, the reconstitution of enslaved labour within the plantation via the whip can be understood as underpinning modern ‘time orientation’. Accordingly, such accounts typically assume routinization and mediation short of analysing how this happens or the contingent effects such action produces (Bear, 2014: 20). This being the case, Richard Drayton rightly states that Caribbean sugar mills were ‘at the cutting edge of capitalist civilization’ on the basis of how it violently organized spaces of labour via time discipline, marshalled the development of productive forces and managed flows of people within the circuits of production for global market imperatives (Drayton, 2002: 102; Hobson, 2021: 217).

Finally, the plantation was a key driver in underwriting the economic development of Europe (see also, Anker, 2022). It did so by providing direct capital transfers to metropolitan financial institutions for reinvestment and for providing markets for metropolitan goods, including machinery, textiles, devices of torture for its enslaved workforce, and other industrial commodities. Between 1600 and 1800, sugar was ‘the single most important of the internationally traded commodities, dwarfing in value the trade in grain, meat, fish, tobacco, cattle, spices, cloth, or metals’ (Fogel, 1989: 21–22; Higman, 2000: 225). What is often overlooked, however, is that the sugar complex also helped underwrite the reproductive tempos of the metropole through its provisioning of low-cost food substitutes and calories for the labouring classes:

By positively affecting the worker’s energy output and productivity, such substitutes figured importantly in balancing the accounts of capitalism, particularly as it developed over time through the integration of the colonial sector . . . All over the world sugar has helped to fill the calorie gap for the laboring poor, and has become one of the first foods of the industrial work break. (Mintz, 1985: 148–149)

To this end, the sugar complex evolved and expanded through a complex array of temporal forms that shaped modern abstract labour time: first, the development of time saving navigational techniques and maritime colonial institutional capacities to provision plantation slavery in the Caribbean. Second, enslaved West African and Indigenous Taíno concrete processual times were used to develop the production techniques of sugar, including the 18-hour durational cycle of its production into its crystalized form. Third, the brutal intensification of time discipline and labour synchronization of enslaved people within the plantation shaped the temporal practices of industrial capitalism. Finally, sugar, as a cheap source of calories literally accelerated the labourer’s energy and temporal metrics of productivity in the core and, in effect, fueled the reproductive capacities of capitalism more broadly within it.

Various Marxist historians ultimately suggest that the global spread of clock time, which is amendable to capital accumulation, corresponds to the expansive logic of global capitalism and the subsumption of heterogeneous temporal formations that lay in its wake. However, rather than being simply effaced via processes of real subsumption, concrete processual forms of time were violently incorporated into and, in effect, shaped abstract modern time thereby opening spaces to examine heterochronicity and the unresolved experiences of human and cultural difference that remain from their contradictory social effects (Bear, 2014: 16). The next section speaks to the preservation of historical identities and cultural difference inhered within the matrices of the abstract time reckoning of capitalism.

Subsumption and the Postcolonial: Affirming the Persistence of Historical and Cultural Difference

As we have discussed thus far, abstract labour time, measured as a set of commensurate intervals for the determination of capitalist value, emerges through shifts in social-property relations corresponding to manufacture and industry, and cannot be delinked from the colonial sugar plantation. The central issue that emerges from these processes that I focus upon in this section relates to the different forms of social and non-human time that are generative of the ‘clash of diverse and antagonistic temporalities’ within colonial capitalist relations (Bear, 2014: 19; Negri, 2003: 68). As a starting point then, what are the effects generative of the encounter between the clash of different temporalities? For instance, does the colonial spread of capitalist time discipline within the sugar plantation result in a homogeneity of life forms and the elimination of African and Indigenous temporal cultural difference? Or, on the contrary, are there cultural residues contained within African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporalities that remain, and can be claimed, despite being unevenly incorporated into capitalist time? To answer these questions, I will examine two contrasting postcolonial readings of real subsumption and formal subsumption. In doing so, I argue that while colonial capitalism seeks to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process because there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of the logic of capital (Murthy, 2015). To this end, we can affirm the existence of multiple, non-linear and eternal forms of time that persist despite their incorporation into capitalist time; however, the extent to which these alternative temporalities destabilize colonial capitalism is uncertain. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, the discourse of timeless cultural difference can potentially be seized by reactionary projects that reproduce the temporal logic of colonial capitalism.

It is important to recall that Marx emphasized that the concept of formal subsumption constituted ‘the general form of every capitalist process of production’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 1019). Accordingly, formal subsumption refers to how labour performed in societies where cultural, political and religious practices are indistinguishable from the enactment of work are taken over or appropriated by capitalism. Put differently, formal subsumption seeks to incorporate the labour practices and processual concrete tempos – such as Indigenous and African socio-ecological times examined in the previous section – that are outside or antecedent to capitalism. Furthermore, it is also the case that the operation of formal subsumption is an ongoing process that continues in conjunction with the development of capitalism. The discussion of formal subsumption is crucial here for at least two reasons. The first is that because formal subsumption is an ongoing process, it is not bound by a Eurocentric spatio-temporal logic that limits the genesis of capital to the classic transition debates centred in England and, as a corollary, this comfortably orients our analysis towards world-historical processes such as the colonial plantation discussed above. Second, while formal subsumption seeks to efface the historical identities of concrete processual labour times in the process of incorporating them into capitalism, it is not always the case that this is a totalizing process. When attentive to these processes, formal subsumption leaves open the possibility that antecedent forms of labour and its corresponding concrete processual temporalities maintain their historical identities, despite being synchronized according to capitalist abstract time and placed in service of its processes of production (Harootunian, 2017: 29, 38; Negri, 1991). Accordingly, Harootunian (2017) argues that

What appeared important for Marx was the status of the contemporary coexistence of archaic and modern forms of economic production – their copresence – and the realization that the relocation of an archaic silhouette in the present redefined the surviving residue by stripping it of cultural and economic associations belonging to the mode of production in which it initially existed and originally functioned. (p. 9)

This reading of formal subsumption foregrounds the co-presence of multiple temporalities, including, for us, Indigenous and African socio-ecological temporalities, that retain historical and cultural difference.

Real subsumption, on the contrary, was largely a thought experiment for Marx, and it refers to the completion of the commodity relation through the realization of relative surplus value and the role played by the emergence of technology and the factory system. Consequently, for our purposes, real subsumption would ostensibly correspond to the completed elimination or enfolding of antecedent Indigenous and African labour forms and concrete processual times into plantation capitalism. The abstract time of capitalism, in this regard, is held to be a force that develops through antagonistic encounters with concrete experiences and social rhythms of time. While recognizing heterogeneous times resist incorporation, real subsumption assumes that they are ultimately neutralized, subsumed and then transformed into vehicles for the spread of modern time in the form of derivatives. Both recognizing and neutralizing difference, real subsumption is structured by the tendency to conceptualize modern abstract time as an independent force that ‘eventually cancels out or neutralizes the contingent differences between specific histories’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 48). That Marx would make this claim, however, is debatable. Rather, he argues that real subsumption is a concept that ostensibly presents capitalism as a completed totality so he could submit it to his critique in Capital (Harootunian, 2017: 8).

Submitting the totalizing logics of real subsumption to a form of postcolonial critique that retains fidelity to Jacques Derrida, Dipesh Chakrabarty offers one of the most persuasive arguments for the interruptive force of social and non-human time that correspond to historical difference. In other words, this reading affirms the persistence of historical identities and cultural difference contained within heterogeneous Taíno and West African concrete times through a post-structuralist reading of Marx and abstract labour time. As a result, he appeals to a notion of what he calls History 1 and History 2. On one hand, History 1 corresponds to our examination of globally dominant ‘modern time’; it is the history of both capital and Europe that we examined in the section ‘Abstract “Clock” Time and Early Capitalist Social-Property Relations’. History 2, on the other hand, corresponds to histories such as Indigenous and West African social and non-human times that History 1 cannot subsume within itself and remain heterogeneous to it.

By staging a deconstruction of abstract labour, the deeper point is that while History 1 seeks to limit the play of difference to present itself as unified and purely present, it fails to do so. This is not particular to History 1, as deconstruction is propelled by a critique of the metaphysics of presence whereby any claim to realizing unity and coherence by limiting or subsuming difference conceals an inherent instability, thereby inviting a reading to make it visible. This instability, in effect, is revealed by the co-contamination of historical difference expressed by History 2s; consequently, the latter does not index the dialectical Other necessary to the logic of History 1, but rather functions to interrupt its totalizing imperatives (Chakrabarty, 2000: 66). Chakrabarty (2000) states, ‘What interrupts and defers capitals self-realization are the various History 2s that always modify History 1 and thus act as our grounds for claiming historical difference’ (p. 71). With this, he leaves open the potential of cultural difference inhered within immiscible temporal formations that resist being subsumed into the logic of History 1. For us, ‘History 1’ of the sugar complex seeks to evacuate the multiple socio-ecological Indigenous and African temporalities or ‘History 2s’ but cannot totally succeed in doing so. Instead, ‘History 2s’ provides a ground for claiming historical difference by resisting total incorporation and results in an inherently unstable temporal form.

This conception of History 1 and History 2, however, relies upon a reading of the development of capitalism through the lens of real subsumption. In other words, it mischaracterizes capitalism’s general form of development as a totalizing and all-consuming commodity form that deterministically unfolds according to a singular process everywhere. ² For Harootunian (2017),

Chakrabarty’s arguments here rest on understating how Marx envisaged the conduct of formal subsumption: instead of seeing it as a form rather than a chronologically measured stage in the development of capitalism, he has proceeded to the more mature status of real subsumption, that is, the final achievement of the commodity relation. In this way, he has, I believe, recuperated the most extreme forms of ‘Western Marxism’ and its claim that capitalism has occupied every aspect of everyday life. (p. 231)

Appeals to deconstruction venture to illustrate how capitalism’s claim of realizing a totalizing coherence and completion by evacuating traces of precolonial and capitalist forms of life via real subsumption fail to conceal its inherent instability (Harootunian, 2017: 233). Doing so, however, fails to index processes of formal subsumption. The latter is an ongoing process that continues in conjunction with the development of capitalist modernity as opposed to a specific point or chronologically measured stage.

The implications of seeking to extract historical difference from the instability inscribed within a totalizing diagram of colonial capitalist modernity is not reducible to a problem of methodological taste; rather, it may reveal a more troubling adherence to the conservative strands of Martin Heidegger’s thought. The latter attempted to unearth Being’s primordial authenticity from the inauthentic registers of everyday ordinary time. With this, Heidegger foregrounded the finitude of Dasein, or our Being unto death, as grounding our existence in time, ‘Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility’ (Heidegger, 1962: 307). Springing forth from our awareness of the character of finitude upends every moment of existence including becoming wherein we are extended by our past and future. From this arises not only the meaning, significance and urgency of Being but also how inauthentic time bounds life by clock and calendar and even history itself. In effect, the conception of History 2 gestures towards Being’s temporal character, which for Heidegger, is prior to the production of history itself, and thereby risks permanent and stationary immobility (Adam, 1999: 119; Harootunian, 2017: 229–230).

This strategy, however, inscribes an emergent dialectics that runs the danger of valorizing the existence of primordial and authentic historical difference. Societies cast as ‘backwards’ often seek to break from progressive colonial capitalist world history only to reproduce it through a conservative politics that ground an ostensibly distinctive version of modernization in ‘timeless cultural residues’ (Harootunian, 2010: 369, 373). Contrasting with real subsumption, formal subsumption indexes the process whereby capital antagonistically merges, as opposed to totally evacuates, the processual concrete times that are outside or antecedent to it. Preserving their historical identities despite being organized by capitalist forms of abstract clock time, the process of formal subsumption, while violent and central to capitalist accumulation, can index the co-presence of multiple and alternative non-linear temporalities, including Indigenous and African socio-ecological forms of time (Harootunian, 2017: 29).

Similarly seeking to affirm the radical potential of non-linear forms of social time, Walter Benjamin rejects a view of history as progressive stages or a ‘chain of events’ within empty homogeneous time. Reversing this, Benjamin views history as radically fragmented and fashioned by the discordant arrangement of the past and present. One of the main concerns for him is that the fragments of the past, which ‘flits by’, must be seized before they are lost: ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (Benjamin, 1974 [1942]). As opposed to ‘progressively’ making the future, the redemptive and revolutionary commitment of historical materialism is realized by keeping faith with the past through making its fragments whole (Beiner, 1984: 424–428). To this end, Benjamin brings the past and present into a ‘messianic’ relation through what he calls ‘Jeztzeit’ or ‘now time’ wherein the past and present as well as the secular and non-secular comingle and entwine.

Alternative ‘History 2’ non-linear forms of time like Being unto death, Jeztzeit, or West African Indigenous Taíno socio-ecological rhythms that are generative of heterochronicity and its social effects within colonial capitalism, however, produces its own emergent dialectics. That is to say, alternative representations of time and other evocations of cyclical eternal temporal relations (see also Agamben, 1993; Badiou, 2003; Casarino, 2008) does not guarantee a radical oppositional politics that effectively eschews the potential of being absorbed back into the routinized social tempos of colonial mediation and capitalist production (Bear, 2014: 20; Negri, 2003). To this end, there are a wide range of possible relations between alternative temporal forms and colonial capitalism, including neutrality, opposition or even reproduction. Accordingly, we can suggest there are multiple alternative temporalities which (a) are indifferent to colonial capitalism, (b) threaten colonial capitalism or (c) help reproduce colonial capitalism (Murthy, 2015: 133).

For the remainder of this section, I briefly gesture towards future-oriented temporal relations that potentially threaten colonial capitalism from within by offering new aesthetic visions and forms of community living. With this, the recent turn to notions of speed, accelerationism and technology focus upon the destabilization of modern time that potentially extends itself, as it were, into new modern posthuman or techno-fantastical forms of worlding. This work includes but is not limited to the rise of an accelerated and globalized digital network time (e.g. Castells, 2010; Hassan, 2003, 2009; Hassan and Purser 2007; Martineau, 2017; Wajcman, 2015), resonance and acceleration (e.g. Rosa, 2015, 2020, 2021); futurisms as it relates to the urbanomic (e.g. Negarestani, 2018); temporality and nihilism (e.g. Stiegler, 2013, 2019); decolonial global south epistemologies (e.g. Abdel-Shehid and Noori, 2021; Agathangelou, 2021; De Landa, 1997; De Sousa Santos, 2014, 2018; Fanon, 2005 [1961]; Mignolo, 2011; Price, 2023; Seki Otu, 2018; Shilliam, 2015; Wynter, 2003); gendered time and reproductive futurism (e.g. Edelman, 2004; Friday, 2022; Pursley, 2019; Sheldon, 2016); Afrofuturism (e.g. Anderson and Jones, 2016; Dery, 1994; Gipson, 2019; Jackson and Moody-Freeman, 2011; Mahadeo, 2019; Womack, 2013); and non-secular temporal relations related to religious and ethical forms of life within discursive traditions (e.g. Asad, 1993, 2003, 2018, 2020; Iqtidar, 2017; Mudimbe, 1998), among others. Ultimately, while these diverse temporal formations seek to extend beyond or offer an alternative to colonial capitalist mediation, they can also be conscripted into reactionary political projects.

This section foregrounds the work of Marxist political thought vis-à-vis processes of subsumption while attending to the postcolonial concern for the persistence of historical identities and cultural difference that emerge from heterochronicity and their contingent casualties. These processes and concerns are profoundly implicated within debates around futurity and cannot be reduced to Eurocentric pronouncements that they fall into discourses of retrograde forms of nostalgia that current studies of temporality have effectively moved ‘beyond’.

Conclusion

This paper has examined the temporal relations that shape colonial capitalist modernity vis-à-vis the conflictual incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. In so doing, I have examined the social significance of time in relation to shifting social-property relations corresponding to sound signals, textile manufacture, industrialism and the colonial sugar complex. With this, I have analysed how some Marxist frameworks can obscure the world-historical character concerning the genesis of capitalism by offering a limited historical narrative of path dependence that is based on a universal model requiring replication. The advent of modern time, and by extension modernity, in this immanent logic, traces its origins to auto-generative and endogenous Western processes via manufacture and industry. In response, this study has drawn from the Black and Third World Marxist tradition to foreground the impact of the colonial plantation with regard to how enslaved people and non-human socio-ecological rhythms helped shape the itineraries of capitalist forms of time discipline and resulting heterochronicity that emerge in relation to them.

In the final section, we examined how a postcolonial reading of formal subsumption can help account for the retention of historical identities that are inhered within socio-ecological temporalities despite their uneven incorporation into colonial capitalist mediation. With this, we can index the existence of a multiplicity of alternative, non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and future potentialities. However, this may not promise an effective grounding for an oppositional politics that resists the force of colonial capitalist relations and can even potentially advance reactionary forms of conservative politics grounded, ontologically, in timeless cultural residues that retain fidelity to coloniality’s progressivist logics.

Today, in sociological and political studies of temporality, there has been a turn to futurity. The latter is held as a site of politics that shape the present as well as the formation of emergent political subjectivities and social groups. This line of inquiry poses questions concerning how the future is imagined to arrive, and how affective registers, including hope, uncertainty or dread, shape political practices. Within the contemporary moment, a nascent dialectics of futurity has structured global concerns over the environmental crisis vis-à-vis debates on the Anthropocene, migration flows, neoliberal forms of precarity and corollary rise in White supremacist populism, the geopolitics of multipolarity indexed by the rise of South-South relations and, crucially for this paper, anti-imperialist struggles that are world-historical in character. These issues of futurity are profoundly shaping political orientations, social divisions and the unequal burdens disempowered communities face (Gokmenoglu, 2022). This paper’s focus upon colonial capitalist modernity, heterochronicity and the affirmation of historical and cultural forms of difference are crucial to these emergent studies of futurity because its dialectics of emergence are not experienced and do not shape peoples, communities and their histories in the same way. With this, the concern over the temporal dynamics of difference and are not, I would emphasize, vestiges of ‘past’ debates from postcolonial studies that have in any way been overcome, transcended or resolved.