Dale Tomich, 1946–2024
Dale W. Tomich ’68, MA’71, PhD’76, professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University, passed on August 17, 2024. Dale was 78 years old, full of projects and hope until the very end. He will be remembered as a warm, generous, and fun man, and as a pathbreaking scholar as well. He is survived by his wife, Luiza Moreira, and his daughter, Laura.
Dale was a loyal UW alumnus who vividly remembered Wisconsin in the 1960s and early 1970s. Dale went on from his undergraduate and PhD training in history at the UW to become one of the world’s leading scholars on the history of slavery, with a focus on the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalism.
Dale was born in west Milwaukee and attended the local public schools. He studied at the UW between 1964 and 1975. Dale’s younger brother Jim is also a Wisconsin alumnus, Class of ’73.
In his second year at the UW, Dale met Harvey Goldberg ’43, PhD’51, the legendary Wisconsin professor of history who taught thousands of undergraduates at jam-packed lectures in Agricultural Hall. Dale’s memories of his Madison years were often linked with Goldberg. “History the way Harvey taught it made me understand things, and I really got passionate about it.”
While in Madison, Dale was one of the editors of Radical America, the pathbreaking left-wing journal that started in the late 1960s. Dale also studied with Hans Gerth, the brilliant scholar who translated several of Max Weber’s works into English and who had been the mentor of C. Wright Mills PhD’41 at Wisconsin in the 1940s.
Dale obtained his PhD in history in 1976. Soon after receiving his PhD, Dale joined the Sociology Department at SUNY-Binghamton. Binghamton Sociology was just becoming a hub of world-systems studies and historical research along the lines of the Annales School. At Binghamton, Dale taught from 1976 until his retirement in 2020. Dale was one of the most innovative scholars in the Sociology Department and one of the students’ most beloved professors.
Dale’s scholarship meshed history and sociology in the study of slavery in the Americas from the perspective of the modern capitalist world system. His first major work was Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy (1830–1848) (Johns Hopkins, 1990; SUNY Press, 2016), which received an award from the American Sociological Association. In 2021, Dale published Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the 19th Century Atlantic World (North Carolina, 2021) in collaboration with an American-Brazilian-Cuban team of scholars. It received an American Library Association Prize in 2021. Dale was also the author of pathbreaking essays on historical method and Marxist theory, some of them collected in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Routledge, 2004; EDUSP, 2011).
In his essays and in the recent book on landscapes, Dale developed the concept of the “second slavery,” to explore the unprecedented expansion of industrial slavery in the Americas in the 19th century. In his final decades, Dale saw his work gain broader recognition beyond the United States, especially in South America and Europe, inspiring scholars of both slavery and the capitalist world economy. Dale’s innovative perspectives on slavery and capitalism activated an international research network, the Second Slavery Seminar, that began to realize his vision of a more democratic global framework for knowledge exchange and production.
