Racial Capitalism

This past week I attended an incredibly rich and stimulating panel at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. It was dedicated to Catherine Hall’s new book Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism. I heard after that the speakers will publish their commentary as a special issue of Small Axe, and I hope that is true!

The panel inspired me to read Hall’s work and I was richly rewarded for doing so. It is a deeply research and important account of one of the leading authors of the late eighteenth century. Edward Long’s History is a source I’ve read and cited. But Hall shows me that while I knew what Long was doing, I didn’t fully understand the text. His project was to use history to justify the ascent of an eighteenth century British slave empire. To that end, he legitimated systems of slave traffic, plantation productive, and Native dispossession that were (in his mind) both justified and just. Enslaved people haunt the pages of the history, Hall tells us. And so the work for us today is to unpick Long’s writings, and find the people who in fact were central to the empire—those enslaved on his plantation in Jamaica and many others elsewhere.

This is, of course, a very thin summary of a major book. I’ll have more to say in my writing. But It leaves me with a question: are scholars of slavery always in the the role of being disruptive? What does it mean to write from that position of interruption? And what do I do with this urge to hope for something more?

Big questions to sit with, and I will sit with them for some time to come.