The terms of his analysis were quite important to Du Bois. They were a part of his beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American civilization—the naming of things. In the changing of the names of things, he sought to provide the basis for a new conceptualization of their relationship. In the first three chapters of his work, Du Bois established the rules of his analysis. The institution of American slave labor could not be effectively conceptualized as a thing in and of itself. Rather, it was a particular historical development for world capitalism that expropriated the labor of African workers as primitive accumulation. American slavery was a subsystem of world capitalism.

Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America. (p. 5)

In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had striven to enrich the critique of capitalism and bourgeois society that had merged into the dominant strains of Western radicalism. He had no choice if he was to comprehend the crises of war and depression that devastated the world system in his lifetime, and the rebellion and revolution in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the New World that were their concomitants. Du Bois came to believe that the preservation of the capitalist world system, its very expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had involved the absorption of new sources of labor power, not by their conversion into wage labor but by coercion. Characteristically, capitalist imperialism had magnified the capacity for capital accumulation by force variously disguised as state nationalism, benevolent colonialism, race destiny, or the civilizing mission. Except in scattered instances, the peasantries of the Third World had become neither urban nor rural proletariats but near-slaves. For most, their social development had been effectively arrested. The result, relative to their own recent pasts and the situation of European workers, was retardation. Indeed, whole populations had been eliminated either during “pacification” or through forced labor. The belief that capitalism would advance African and Asian and other peasantries had for the most part proved to be misplaced. Beyond western Europe, the capitalist world system had produced social and economic chaos. No theory of history that conceptualized capitalism as a progressive historical force, qualitatively increasing the mastery of human beings over the material bases of their existence, was adequate to the task of making the experiences of the modern world comprehensible. For Du Bois, America in the first half of the nineteenth century, a society in which manufacturing and industrial capitalism had been married to slave production, had been a microcosm of the world system. The advanced sectors of the world economy could expand just so long as they could dominate and rationalize by brute force the exploitation of essentially nonindustrial and agrarian labor. The expansion of American slavery in the nineteenth century was not an anachronism but a forewarning. But so too, he believed, was its defeat.