Dale Tomich (1946-2024)...in His Own Words (Part I)

methodology.Over the course of four decades, Tomich's books and essays have been seminal for "contextualizing and theorizing the history of the modern world economy, particularly the role of New World slavery (the plantation) in the construction of modern capitalism."(Crichlow and Giusti 2024: 249).Dale's close understanding of Caribbean and Brazilian history, which he merged into a study of Atlantic history, built bridges where few scholars have crossed.Always self-effacing, Dale did not often discuss his remarkable intellectual path; yet it is relevant to understanding the multiple layers of his work, its wider context, and its possibilities.An earlier series of interviews, done between November 2023 and February 2024, focused on his family background in 1950s/1960s industrial Milwaukee and a tradition of skilled labor that was being savaged by automation and runaway shops.These interviews were published in a dossier organized by Dale's former students in Cultural Dynamics (Crichlow and Giusti 2024; see Dal Lago 2025: 134).The interviews published here overlap with the earlier ones but focus more closely on Dale's collaborations in the journal Radical America between 1968 and 1970; the making of his dissertation; Dale's early years in the extraordinary academic environment that was Binghamton Sociology between the 1970s and the 1990s; the significance of Dale's relationship with Sidney Mintz; the making of Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar; and Dale's deepening reflections thereon.And not in strict chronology, more like "successive approximations."While we would have liked to cover Dale's prolific later years in greater detail through additional interviews, his untimely death left us wishing for much more.However, Dale's more recent trajectory is well-documented in his published and unpublished papers as well as in excellent interviews in Brazilian publications that also cover aspects of his intellectual formation (Tomich 2015b(Tomich , 2019a(Tomich , 2019b(Tomich , 2019c)).Moreover, the intellectual context and the questions that he would return to time and again largely took form in these early years.The interviews featured here were made in the last months of Dale's life, between February and June 2024.E. P. Thompson, who influenced Dale's early work decisively, often stressed the importance of context."Thompson always told me when I was his student: history is the discipline of context" (Tomich 2019b: 781; Thompson, 1971).And these interviews are, for sure, a source of context.The interviews underscore Dale's formative years and his heterodox methodology, which gains in simplicity and depth when looked at from the vantage point of those early years; from their "back door," as it were.Dale's introduction to E. P. Thompson, and to the importance of context, happened to be through such a "back-door" in 1966-67, when Dale was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.