[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you, everyone, for
coming out this evening
to tonight's event on "Slavery,
Capitalism, and the Making
of the Modern World."
My name is Zach Sell.
I'm a visiting research scholar
at the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice and
also a visiting faculty fellow
at the Center for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity in America.
And I'm really grateful
for the opportunity
to introduce and participate
in tonight's Sawyer Seminar
on "Slavery, Capitalism, and
the Making of the Modern World"
co-sponsored by the
Watson Institute,
the Initiative on
Race and Indigeneity,
the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies,
and the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice.
As a visitor at CSSJ, I can
say that events like this
are really essential to the
work that the center does
and its dedication to
investigating the history
of slavery and its legacy.
So tonight's seminar with
Jennifer Morgan, Seth Rockman,
Anthony Bogues,
and Walter Johnson,
I think features
scholars who have,
together, in different ways,
fundamentally transformed
the way that the relationship
between slavery and capitalism
is considered and understood,
moving our understanding away
from a debate about whether
and to what extent slavery is
a part of capitalism
and toward a demand
for understanding how racial
slavery structured capitalism.
I think this shift has
also enabled, really,
a deeper understanding
of the continuing
presence of slavery's imprint
upon post-slavery capitalism.
So I think to appreciate
just how firmly embedded
the idea of a debate about
slavery and capitalism
is, one could look at the long
shelves of books dedicated
to the subject that have
been published, really,
since the 19th century.
But I think rather than
drag everyone again
through the twists and turns
and contours of that debate,
I wanted to instead just
note one minor moment in 1955
that I think is a moment
that really also enables
greater appreciation of the
significance of seminars
like the one we're
having tonight.
So this moment is
preserved, actually,
in the papers of WEB Du
Bois In a short letter,
Du Bois wrote to Eugene Genovese
about the latter's master's
thesis, plantation slavery,
its unprofitability,
and its relationship
to capitalism.
Du Bois noted that
he hardly had time
to offer any criticism of
the work because he was busy.
But even as such, he
could see the absence
of any consideration of
the internal slave trade
centrality in US
capitalism and also noticed
that Genovese did not
engage in any serious way
with Marxist writing.
The implication of
the Du Bois' response
was that both historically
and conceptually,
Genovese's approach was
offering very little.
So if a person
didn't know better,
one might assume
Genovese ultimately
didn't receive the letter.
He would go on to become
perhaps the leading voice
in 20th century discussions over
the non-capitalist nature of US
slavery and really
disregarded this advice.
And I think, from
one perspective,
this is really perhaps
an unremarkable
moment in that so-called
"debate" about slavery
and capitalism.
But from another
perspective, I think
there's something in and
within that ignorance
that can able better
appreciation of events
like tonight's seminar.
While Genovese's work enabled
a long line of historians
to create and debate a
question, Du Bois' writing
demanded a different mode
of critiquing capitalism
through understanding of
slavery and its history
and black emancipation
in the US.
Particularly in
Black Reconstruction,
Du Bois demanded a rethinking
of concepts and history grounded
in the realities
of slavery which
forced also a critical
insight about the present.
And I think it's that latter
engagement rather than
the former that makes seminars
like tonight so important.
And I think in very different
ways, all of our panelists
are working in critical relation
to that latter tradition.
And so I'm going to just
very briefly introduce
all of the panelists
at once so we
can get right into both
presentations and conversation.
And basically, the structure of
tonight's events is, I think,
everyone will present
for about 15 minutes.
And then we'll have a
bit of a conversation
between the panelists
and then open up
the room to broader
conversation.
So Jennifer Morgan is
professor of history
in the Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis at New York
University where she
also serves as chair.
She's the author
of Laboring Women--
Gender and Reproduction in the
Making of New World Slavery,
and her most recent
published work
includes Accounting for "The
Most Excruciating Torment--"
Trans-Atlantic Passages.
She is currently at
work on a project that
considers colonial
numeracy, racism,
and the rise of the
transatlantic slave
trade in the 17th century
English Atlantic world.
Seth Rockman is associate
professor of history
here at Brown.
His 2009 book Scraping By--
Wage Labor, Slavery, and
Survival in Early Baltimore
received multiple prizes,
including the Philip Taft Labor
History Book Award.
He's most recently
published Negro Cloth--
Mastering the Market
for Slave Clothing
in Antebellum America, which
was in the edited volume,
American Capitalism.
And Seth and Sven Beckert
have recently also co-edited
Slavery's Capitalism--
A New History of American
Economic Development.
Tony Bogues.
Probably most people in the
room have taken his classes
and know him in some way.
But he's director of the
Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice.
He's author of
Caliban's Freedom--
The Early Political Thought
of CRL James, Black Heretics
and Black Prophets,
and he's also
the editor of several volumes
including After Man Towards
the Human--
Critical Essays
on Sylvia Wynter.
And right now, he is a
visiting research fellow
at the International Institute
of Social History in Amsterdam.
And last, Walter Johnson
is Winthrop Professor
of History at Harvard and
author of Soul by Soul--
Life Inside the
Antebellum Slave Market
and also A River
Of Dark Dreams--
Slavery and Empire in the
Mississippi Valley's Cotton
Kingdom.
He's currently writing A History
of the City of St. Louis--
From Lewis and Clark
to Michael Brown.
Johnson is also a founding
member of the Commonwealth
Project which joins academics
and activists in an effort
to create a
community-controlled art space
in the third ward of St. Louis.
And so I think with that,
we'll begin with Jennifer,
if I'm not mistaken.
Are you guys going
to use the podium?
I am, because I'm going
to put some images up.
Whatever you want.
I think I'm going to go
ahead and just stay seated,
if that's OK with everybody.
Is that all right?
OK.
So first of all, thank
you for the invitation
to be part of this conversation.
I'm going to just talk through
some ideas that I have.
And I really look forward
to unpacking them together
with my fellow panelists.
So at the risk of
oversimplifying,
I want to start by saying
that race and racism make
us lazy thinkers.
They stand in for careful
consideration of processes
and offer up simple explanations
for complex and foundational
historic phenomenon.
We live in a moment when
we simply cannot fathom
an encounter between an African
and European-descended person
unsaturated by racial
recognition or racial
hierarchy.
The longstanding
work of scholars
to explain or to understand the
development of transatlantic
slavery seems
forever constricted
by the terms of the discussion--
which, again, forgive me
for the oversimplification--
was the trade in slaves
economically rational,
or was it racist?
We fail to see the ways in
which both economic rationality
and racial hierarchy come into
sharp relief at the same time,
that the two processes
are interwoven,
and that as a result, the way
that the question has long
been framed leaves
crucial aspects not
just unanswered but unasked.
The afterlife of
slavery has saturated
not just our
imaginations but indeed
our disciplines and our
methodological stance
in relationship to the archive.
I'm thinking, for example,
of something I recently
encountered that straddles the
relationship between slavery,
political economy,
and culture in a way
that I found illuminating.
"When the Portuguese
first arrived
in Western Africa in the 15th
century both on Cape Verde
and then onto the coast,
their desire for trade
was facilitated by alliances
between them and local traders,
often alliances that were
cemented through marriage.
Such relationships and
the children born of them
have mostly been understood
by African historians
as evidence that stands in the
way of a European propensity
for racialist thinking.
And therefore, by extension,
it stands as evidence
that the Portuguese didn't
rush into their future
as slave traders.
We find it difficult--
or at least, I
find it difficult-- to see
the intimacy of marriage
between a European man and
an African woman on the coast
of West Africa as not--" I think
there are too many negatives
in this sentence--
"but as not functioning
as a bulwark against
the trade in slaves.
We fail to register
or to fully explore,
to work out, how to
articulate the ways in which
the economic dimensions
of what would become
hereditary racial slavery
produced ways of thinking
that make economies and polities
on the West African coast
difficult to
understand as such."
In other words, the
example of those marriages
gets put on the side of culture,
the production of culture
or the production
of ideas about race,
rather than seeing
those things as embedded
in these early
economic formations
and as evidence of
political economy at work
as well as polities at work.
Somehow, we also fail to
see how women on the coast,
whose vulnerability to
capture and transport
began to encroach on a previous
possibility of strategic
and possibly
affective alliances,
could be the route through
which we as scholars can
see a process unfolding as
they did, a way that we can see
the intimacies of race,
trade, and what would become
hereditary racial slavery.
Even when we emphasize the long
duration of the transatlantic
slave trade, the 400 years, we
end up inadvertently turning it
into a single episode in time.
The particulars of the
trade are flattened
even as we attempt to convey
the impact of its long duration.
This idea that this
is, again, an example
of the way that race, I
think, makes us lazy thinkers.
And it's related to the concern
that Vince Brown has expressed
regarding the notion of
"the condition of slavery,"
that the term "condition," the
"condition" of being enslaved,
the "condition" of slavery,
inadvertently produces stasis.
In its place, he offers us
the phrase the "predicament
of enslavement."
How do we understand the
predicament of enslavement?
My strong conviction is
that by breaking down
the period of Atlantic
slavery into clearly
understood and demarcated
periods of time,
we will be in a
much better position
to understand its predicaments.
And by doing so in the
early modern period,
as I am gesturing towards here--
oh, excuse me-- in a
very short-handed way--
That was a hell of a gesture.
That was quite a gesture--
gesturing towards here.
By doing so, the particularities
of those predicaments
will shed crucial light
on what has fundamentally
been a quite successful
project of naturalizing
both the connection
between slavery and race
and obfuscating the connection
between slavery and capitalism.
We have so fully inherited
the narratives of slavery
and the slave trade crafted
for us by 18th century
abolitionists that I think
that we sometimes don't always
understand the ways in which
slavery and the slave trade
were deeply embedded in the
emergence of late medieval
and early modern notions of
trade, a value of exchange,
of currency, and ultimately,
of the relationship
between population, the
accumulation of wealth,
and the nation state--
all of which comprise
early modern capitalism
and capitalist formations.
So I've been working in the
late 15th and 16th century
these days, trying to think
through the European and West
African turn to the Atlantic.
As vistas to the
east expanded, I
think a range of material
and ideological technologies
came into play for
rulers, for merchants,
for ideologues,
and for travelers
in both Europe and West Africa.
Numeracy, which is
my way of capturing
a whole range of ideas
about rationality,
about numbers, about trade,
about currency, about attention
to demography, all
of these were just
some of the new
modes of thinking
that accompanied the origins
of the modern Atlantic world.
In England and on the
West African coast,
traders and scholars
were reconsidering
their understanding
of wealth, of trade,
and the ways in which
states benefited
from an idea of population.
For English theorists, that
"notion" of counting population
is called political arithmetic.
And it becomes demography
and understanding
demographic strengths
and vulnerabilities.
On the African
coast, traders began
to see populations as marketable
in new and more fungible ways
as slavery came to mean
something entirely different.
And by this, I mean
African traders.
I don't mean European
traders who are on the coast.
And as slavery came to mean
something entirely different
and was premised
on an unspoken idea
that population was
somehow infinite,
simultaneously, the language
of race and racial hierarchy
shifted longstanding concepts
of who was different,
who was foreign, who was
an ally, who was an enemy,
and emerged to shape
the trade in slavery
and the goods produced
by slave labor
and in the settler
colonialism that
would come to comprise
the core means by which
wealth was transferred across
and around the Atlantic.
So both numeracy
and race thinking
shaped and were shaped by the
social and cultural processes
that attended their use.
Neither are fixed
or static tools.
But together, they
forged rationalized
meaning through the interplay
between the supposed
logic of calculus and the
alchemy of race making.
And this is all a
lot of shorthand,
which I'm happy to talk
about a little bit more.
Historians have long agreed that
the economic transformations
of the late 16th and
the early 17th century
were accompanied by new
symbolic meanings that
far exceeded the economy.
But somehow that understanding
stops inside of Europe
and doesn't include slavery.
Our most foundational
theorists of early histories
of capitalism--
I'm thinking about
Braudel, for example,
who, as he introduces the
concept of the labor market
says, in a kind of parentheses,
he says, that he, as Marx did,
quote, "will leave aside
the classic case of slavery,
which was however to be
prolonged and even renewed."
And this gesture of
saying like, yes, slavery,
but I'm not going to talk
about it because I'm talking
about Europe, is really
the groundwork on which
many revisionists stand.
So new ways of
thinking were the norm
in 17th century England, which
is where I'm working right now.
And contemporary
observers understood
that significant
shifts were underway
regarding the role of
merchants and traders
and producing the wealth
of monarchies and states.
They were careful and
deciduous in trying to explain
these new ways of thinking.
17th century English policy
around trade and commerce
reflected a crucial
moment in the development
of Atlantic markets.
And it was at this moment
that foundational commitments
to an empire rooted in
colonial commodities markets
and dependent on
slave labor took hold.
So we see that,
and we understand
that if we're reading the
history of political economy.
But what we don't ever
do, or what we rarely do,
is think about the experience
of those people who
are being transformed
into commodities
in this early period
not in the 18th century
and the 19th century but right
at the time when it's beginning
under the hands
of the Portuguese
and the Spanish and
then ultimately other
European nations.
And we don't turn that gaze
back to think about how they are
also producing, in
some ways, theories
of early commodification
and of early capitalism.
And so that effort to try
to read the archive back
on this process is at the
heart of what I'm involved in.
So how long have I been talking?
You have just a
few more minutes.
OK, I'm very close.
OK, so I think that we need
to ask questions about the way
that hereditary
racial slavery emerges
at a moment in which
all sorts of questions
about population, about
currency, and about trade
and about value are circulating.
They're circulating
out of Europe.
They're circulating on
the West African coast,
and they are being transformed.
The questions that
I'm asking are clearly
related to and in dialogue
with the newly invigorated
scholarship on
capitalism and slavery
that has followed Eric
Williams foundational work
and that is exemplified
by the crucial work
of my fellow panelists.
I think though that I'm asking
a slightly different set
of questions, as
I come to this not
from the perspective
of a scholar of capital
but rather as a scholar
of gendered power
and of racialized intimacy.
It's this location
that shapes my interest
less in the structural
relationship between slavery
and capitalism and more with
emergent cultural practices
in which the
fungibility of humans
and the growth of early
modern slave societies
is rendered logical.
Because it's in that logic--
it is that logic--
that hides the subjects
that I'm most interested
in understanding.
And therefore, as I grapple
with the archive that's
available to me,
it's the process
of rendering
questions unanswerable
that is most crucial to my work.
And so for me, what is
the most important thing
about the intersection
between slavery
and capitalism in the
early modern period
is the way that it
transforms certain subjects
into marginalia.
So the subjects that--
and by subjects,
I mean intellectual subjects,
but also the people-- so
that those women whose
bodies are producing
hereditary racial
slavery and whose bodies
are the sight of law and
theory and new power relations
are then erased from
our archive in ways
that everybody in this
room is intimately
familiar with but that are
ways that we still really need
to continue to focus on.
So I will stop there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to stand
because I'm going to show
a couple of images here.
So it might take a minute
to put down the screen.
While that's happening,
let me just say
there are a couple of chairs.
There's one here.
There's one here, if
people are looking.
Yes, all right, how about that?
All right, great,
there's some chairs here.
There's a chair here for
those who are standing
who'd like to sit down.
You're welcome to do so.
There are not a lot
of them, and I'm
sorry to my fellow panelists
for sticking you with this.
What a treat to be here.
Thank you all for
coming out tonight.
To be on a panel with some
of my favorite scholars
is really something
that's quite special.
One of the things that I like
so much about the conversation
that's emerged about the
relationship of slavery
and capitalism is
that it's taking place
on so many different scales.
It can be done on massive
macroeconomic terms,
looking at processes of
growth and development
over hundreds of years,
looking at data sets
that run centuries.
It can be done by looking at
very small technologies, things
like the account
book for instance.
It can be done by zooming
in on particular places,
connecting the
global and the local.
And the work that
I've been trying to do
is trying to take this, perhaps,
to some of the most quotidian
and small spaces possible.
And from a very, very precise
location, expand and imagine
outward the ways in which
slavery and capitalism are
connected to one
another in the decades
between the American
Revolution and the Civil War.
So the place that I want
to start is with a list.
So when Mary Rodman sat
down to sew frocks in 1840,
she consulted this
list of dimensions.
The first frock was for
someone who stood 4' 11"
and measured 38 inches
around the waist.
The next frock would
have to be longer,
about 56 inches
from collar to hem,
in order to fit a woman
5 foot, 6 inches tall.
As she worked down the list,
number four, number five,
and so forth, Rodman might have
contemplated the dollar she
earned for every six frocks.
She had to remember to attach
a tag with these dimensions
legibly ascribed to
each frock so they would
get to the intended recipient.
At 5' 11", number
three on her list
was very tall for the time.
Number 10 must have been
a child at only 4' 3".
The inhabitants of
these measured bodies
might not have warranted
a second thought
for Rodman, who soon turned
to another order involving
not just frocks but also
shifts, the cotton undergarments
worn closest to a woman's skin.
Likely wearing a near identical
garment under her own dress,
the 13-year-old
Rodman perhaps did not
pause to think about number
five, number six, or number
seven.
But this kind of
sewing was tedious.
And so why shouldn't
Rodman's mind
wander from South
Kingston, Rhode Island,
to the wearers of her
handiwork, someplace far away?
Now, New England girls like
Rodman and their mothers
had taken in sewing for
generations whether as parts
of networks of
neighborly exchange
that structured
rural communities
or thanks to more recent
practices of merchants,
storekeepers, and
manufacturers distributing
cut cloth to local
families to stitch
in exchange for store credits.
Outwork, as it was called, had
proven a particularly effective
means of mobilizing the
labor of wives and daughters
in the countryside, and it
contributed significantly
to Rhode Island's
industrial output.
The proprietors of
a local carding mill
would have furnished
Mary's grandmother
with wool roving to spin into
yarn under her own wheel.
And once spinning mills began
producing vast quantities
of yarn, Mary's
mother would have
accepted warp and filling
to weave on a family loom.
And now that weaving
had been mechanized,
Mary received pre-cut cloth to
assemble into garments at home.
Skeins of yarn, pieces of
cloth, stacks of trousers
were returned to the hands of
the merchant or manufacturer
who had furnished
the initial supplies.
And even at low
rates, this outwork
provided supplemental income
to families like the Rodmans,
who, particularly because
they were paid in store goods,
gained or maintained
access to the teapots,
the ribbons, and the
other consumer goods that
had defined middle class
respectability in the New
England countryside.
Take a step back.
The expansive trade networks
of the early modern world
had long embedded the
local experience of work
within global systems of
supply and distribution.
The 19th century
New England women
who turned Argentine wool into
textiles for Louisiana slaves
followed in the footsteps
of the Gujarat weavers,
the [? Guanzou ?]
porcelain decorators,
and the countless other
pre-industrial workers who
transformed raw materials
they themselves did not
produce into export commodities
they themselves did not use.
The entangled relationship of
remote producers and consumers
has been a defining
characteristic of modern world
history, as has the ease
and speed with which
these connections have
become routinized,
and by extension, invisible.
If a New Hampshire farm girl
in the '30s ever stopped
in the middle of weaving or
in the middle of braiding
Caribbean palm leaves into
hats for Mississippi boatmen
and thought to herself--
this is weird.
I'm in New Hampshire--
palm leaves from Cuba
to go on the heads
of men in Mississippi, right?
She left no record of such
musings, for posterity.
More likely, her own
experience as a consumer
of buttons and raisins and
other commonplace imports
had so naturalized
commercial interconnections
as to make them
unworthy of comment.
School texts, for
instance, the kind
of school books that
Mary Rodman might
have looked at,
like Emma Willard's
Geography for Beginners,
reinforced the point,
reminding her that
the entire world could
be found on the shelves
of the country store,
where she earned credits
for the shifts and frocks
that she sewed.
Now, lurking behind this
world of goods, then as now,
were relations of
power that structured
work, the questions of
who did it, on what terms,
and to whose benefit.
Equally in the shadows
were the ideological,
theological, and
ethical commitments
that made these patterns
of production and exchange
business as usual--
the unarticulated and
unquestioned assumptions
that said it was perfectly
appropriate for a 13-year-old
girl to sew frocks
for money, or that
might have prompted
that girl, Mary Rodman,
to think long and hard,
or to think not at all,
about the frocks
that she was sewing.
Various disruptions, of
course, the hurricane
that destroyed the
crop, the machine that
made the traditional
form of labor redundant,
the financial panic that
obliterated commercial credit--
all of these could
readily reconfigure
patterns of global integration.
And they do so into
locally experienced forms
of insecurity, to bring
people face to face
with truths long unstated.
Taxation and
military occupation,
for example, had
forced colonists
like Mary Rodman's
great-grandparents
to confront their affection
with tea and textiles
as well as to assess the
value of their relationship
to the British Empire.
Moral revolutions could
also call the questions
when Quaker communities at the
heart of transatlantic commerce
began to testify
against African slavery.
By the end of the
18th century, a number
of Anglo-American
merchants and manufacturers
had concluded that
trading in human beings
was illegitimate commerce and
that producing shackles was
an immoral use of a forge.
Their compatriots insisted that
consumers in England and North
America grapple with the remote
exploitation that sweetened
their tea and their cakes.
The agitation leading to the
abolition of the Atlantic slave
trade is emblematic of how
long standing relationships
of production and consumption
can suddenly become a problem.
And scholars have
lavished attention
on the reformulation of
capitalism in this changed
environment.
It was here, for instance,
that political economists,
moral reformers, and
businessmen alike
imagined a liberal
economy predicated
on the competitive
striving of the self-owned
and the self-made.
Several decades on the other
side of that reckoning,
Mary Rodman was born
into a Rhode Island
where slave-grown cotton
was a crucial ingredient
in the state's economy and
where numerous families spun,
wove, and sewed for
plantation markets.
This relationship
would not attain
the status of a problem for
most [? doing ?] lenders.
Commercial entanglements
occasionally
garnered a comment from
organized abolitionists
in the 1830s and 1840s
but rarely prompted
a call to close
the textile mills
on account of their complicity
in slavery several states away.
Nor could one hear public
defamations of girls
like Mary Rodman
whose sewing was
in the service of a Mississippi
plantation 1,500 miles away.
Although Rhode Island
outworkers often
assembled parcels of
clothing in assorted sizes,
Rodman was tasked with filling
a very specific order--
for James A. Ventress, a
European-educated cotton
planter who would soon
serve as a founding
trustee of the University
of Mississippi.
But her neighbors did likewise.
Harry Stedman's wife
produced 29 frocks
for the enslaved women owned
by the notorious slave trader
Isaac Franklin.
Sally Gardner stitched 52
frocks and shifts for the women
whom William Stamp
held in captive
in Fort Adams, Mississippi.
These Rhode Island
girls and women
manufactured within a
system whose larger workings
had once again retreated
into the background,
ostensibly requiring no
comment or second thought
as they bound producers
and consumers across space.
Nor did it matter to
Mary Rodman's work life
that the skills she brought
to her sewing, the pride
that she took in her work,
the social status or stigma
that such labor brought
to her, the subjectivity
that she developed as a
worker, that she made frocks
and shifts for enslaved
women as opposed
to some other item,
some other commodity,
some other connection
to New England's
industrial transformation.
At first glance,
the answer is no.
The basic contours were the
same as for the vast majority
of New England girls and women
who navigated industrialization
over the first decades
of the 19th century.
Outwork offered rural
families the opportunity
to deploy female
labor more directly
towards the acquisition
of a higher material
standard of living while
the concurrent rise
of mechanization
in factory wages
tempered those opportunities
by more explicitly transforming
labor into a commodity and
subjecting it to intensifying
regimes of discipline.
Mary Rodman saw this
firsthand, moving
from sewing at
home as a teenager
to toiling in a factory
within just a few years.
Whether brooms for
urban housekeepers,
butter for city grocers, straw
bonnets for fashionable ladies,
shoes for whalemen,
or shifts for slaves,
the story was largely the same.
And yet I think it
would be an error
to presume that laboring New
Englanders did not confront
the distinct moral and political
implications of their work
on behalf of the slave system.
By the 1830s, the
public discussion
of slavery and its abolition
were already loud enough
to require people to pick
sides, or to make excuses,
or to engage in
willful obliviousness.
At the same time, a
racist popular culture
provided a predictable
store of stereotypes
to white residents of the North
for denigrating the black men
and women who would
wear the clothing they
stitched or the hoes they
forged or the shoes they pegged.
In other words, Mary Rodman
did not sew in a vacuum,
but rather she did
so in the midst
of particular political
and cultural contests
over the boundaries of
slavery and freedom.
And in communities like
hers in South Kingston,
the legacies of slave holding,
of gradual emancipation,
of colonialism, further shaped
the contours of earning one's
living weaving Negro cloth
or pegging slave brogans.
If nothing else, it would
require the New England makers
of plantation goods,
as this collective body
of northern
manufacturers was called,
to undertake additional work--
social, spiritual, cultural--
to contend that their labor had
no further moral political
implications, that it bore
no reflection of their
own ethical standing,
or that their handiwork carried
no additional signification--
that sometimes a shovel
was just a shovel.
The risk was not
merely the opprobrium
of sanctimonious reformers.
It could also be
the ribbing that one
would get in the tavern for
making a living by making hoes
for slaves.
At the same time, what
were the possibilities
for a Rhode Island woman
like Dorcas Babcock,
sewing clothing for
Mississippi slaves,
perhaps envisioning
herself in the guise
of her biblical
namesake, toiling
with devotion to cover the naked
and to comfort the suffering?
So all in all,
these possibilities
raised questions of how
these economies are connected
to one another generally.
But more specifically--
and to take
a term that has been very
much in the conversation,
complicity-- to think about
how complicity is lived,
to create a project in which
not asking or searching
for the smoking gun to
prove that the North had
an interest in slavery, or
that Rhode Island women made
livelihoods for themselves
fashioning clothing for slaves.
To take this as a given,
but then to ask questions
about how it was lived,
how it was experienced
in the 19th century, and
to ask what difference this
would make to other
historical developments--
the entrepreneurial
culture, for instance, that
made New England the
Silicon Valley of the 1820s,
or the plantation politics in
which enslaved people contested
the authority of
their legal owners
and sought to mitigate the
worst aspects of their bondage
by arguing over such
things as these provisions.
So by following plantation goods
from the communities in which
they were made into those
in which they were used,
one sees not merely
complicity but contingency.
That is the unpredictable
ways in which
choices made in one place have
reverberations and shape what
choices are possible in another.
The unintended
consequences of the best
laid plans, the
entanglements of remote lives
that are bound together
by something so mundane
as a frock or a shift.
It is here I suggest
that historians find
the most surprises in the past.
And so what I've spoken
to you about tonight
is ultimately out of
a book that I'm now
finishing that is about
these relationships tying
remote producers and
consumers to one another
through these very mundane
artifacts like shoes
and hats and hoes and boots
and other textiles that
put Yankee ingenuity in
the service of the slave
plantation.
I study the New
England entrepreneurs
who mobilized this market.
I study laborers
like Mary Rodman
who produced these goods.
I consider the
middlemen and merchants
who organized the trade, the
slave holders who constructed
their own notions of
mastery on the distribution
of these goods, and of course,
the enslaved people who
incorporated these goods
into their work lives
and into their
strategies of survival.
These stories blur
some of the boundaries
of the geography of slavery.
And recovering
these relationships
is vital to rethinking
this geography
in the 18th and 19th century
when, what some scholars have
called the hinterlands
of the slave economies,
places far removed from the
plantation zones themselves,
nonetheless provided
crucial material support
to a violent system of
agricultural commodity
production.
And you can just
think about some
of the ways in which
these connections work.
And they're familiar to us
and a modern sensibility
where we're more
attuned to being
aware of these remote
connections between producers
and consumers across space.
So enslaved men and women on a
sugar plantation in [? San ?]
[? Domingo ?] may have been
purchased in West Africa with
linens woven in Silesia,
copper bars smelted in Wales,
or rum distilled
in Rhode Island.
They may have been sustained on
salt beef barreled in Ireland
or dressed in textiles
from the Lake District
in Northwest England.
They might have worked
at night by the light
of a spermaceti candles
rolled in Nantucket.
And to follow thee
pathways of these goods
is to raise questions
about the investments
of these remote
communities of interest
in the establishment and
perpetuation of Atlantic
slavery over several centuries.
These increasingly far
flung entanglements
across geographical space
and across distinct regimes
of labor become visible
across these global commodity
chains leading to the production
of any particular New England
good.
The kind of textiles that
Mary Rodman was sewing likely
contained wool that had come
from Argentina or from Smyrna,
meaning that the lives of a
Mediterranean sheep rancher
were somehow connected
through these goods
to the lives of a
Mississippi field hand.
We can play this out longer.
That wool might
have been cleaned
by institutionalized poppers
at the New York City alms house
before being dyed
red using cochineal
from Mexico, woven on looms
outfitted with reeds from South
Carolina, finished at a filling
mill using teasels imported
from France.
Where will you draw the line?
Asked one antebellum
critic of the slave system,
where does slavery stop?
And ultimately, this is where
I will leave you tonight
with this question,
looking at these goods,
and thinking about the ways
in which these commodity
chains tie people far
from the plantation
to the perpetuation
of the slave system.
We must ask ourselves about the
geographical categories that
have so long informed
our study, looking
at the boundaries between
a so-called free North
and a slave South, or a free
labor economy and a slave labor
economy, recognizing that
these boundaries hardly sustain
the kind of scrutiny
that scholars can bring
to these questions when they
look at something so simple
as a frock or a hat, a shift,
a pair of shoes, or a hoe.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Let's just wait till
the screen goes up.
I want to thank
everybody for coming out.
I particularly would like to
thank Walter Johnson, Jennifer
Morgan, and Seth
Rockman for making
this particular
conversation possible
and to Zach Sell for chairing.
Also, I'd like to just
send thanks of appreciation
to the Center for Latin American
Studies and their Sawyer
Seminar series when they invited
the center to participate.
And to thank the center staff,
both Maiyah Gamble-Rivers
and Shana Weinberg,
for organizing this.
In the time allocated
to me, I want
to make a series of remarks
drawn from a research
project and a book
that I'm now doing,
tentatively titled
Black Critique.
The book is a fairly
large book and began
as a study of freedom.
But I realized in writing
it that I actually could not
do a study of
freedom without doing
a study of the history
of capitalism itself.
And so I have about to
put aside the sections
of the text on freedom
and turn to a study
of the business of capitalism.
Since 1944, Eric Williams'
Capitalism and Slavery
with a thesis that, essentially,
colonial slavery was
the foundation for the
Industrial Revolution
and for industrial
capitalism, there
has been a serious debate about
capitalism and its relationship
to slavery.
I wanted to just put that
debate in parentheses
or put it in some
kind of bracket,
because I don't want to
start with that debate.
I actually want to start with
a much earlier book, which
is 1935 WEB Du Bois'
Black Reconstruction.
I would just want to submit
that that is actually
where the debate should begin.
And I'm not quite
sure why historians
are beginning in 1944, and one
has developed a whole thing
on the Williams'
thesis, when, in fact,
the real thing about
capitalism and slavery,
or one of the most remarkable
texts about capitalism
and slavery, emerges in 1935,
Du Bois' Black Reconstruction.
Think of the beginning of the
book of Black Reconstruction.
Think of the chapter "The Black
Worker," which essentially
changes immediately the
category of the enslaved
to that of labor.
And think of, therefore,
what that means theoretically
with the transformation of
the category of the enslaved
to that of worker
and how that troubles
a whole set of other ways in
which we think about slavery.
I would argue that Du
Bois' book essentially
repositioned slavery
as central to America's
economic development,
to capitalism.
Think again of the
epigraph in chapter one
where he makes it very
clear that the arrival
of the black man, he says--
and here I'm paraphrasing him--
to the United States
is that he has always
been a central part of the
economic life of America
and its democracy.
I think that what
Du Bois is trying
to point that he
is trying to make
is that capitalism as
a mode of production
was not separate
from racial slavery,
that there were not two
distinct racial systems, two
distinct social systems, but
that they were interconnected
and that American
slavery as could not
be called a mode of production,
of slave production,
separate from capitalism.
Now, the mode of
production argument
again appears in the 1970s
with world systems theory,
particularly in
places like Brazil
and in other parts
of Latin America.
There are a lot of
work around Brazil
as a slave mode of production,
particularly in the 1980s
looking at large
agricultural lands
as well as looking at the
mining processes in Brazil.
There is also a vast literature
in Latin America which
does not talk about
slave mode of production
but talks about the
colonial mode of production
in Latin America.
So in other words, there has
been a preoccupation not just
with the questions of
slavery and its relationship
to capitalism, but there
has been a preoccupation as,
how do you identify
slavery itself?
What can you call slavery?
How can you call slavery
as a labor process
and as an economic process,
not just as a social system?
What is the relationship
between colonialism and slavery?
What I want to suggest
that Du Bois did
was to shift the
gears from arguments
about mode of production or any
descriptive argument about what
capitalism is that is primarily
a system of wage worker en
masse within a factory
system but focuses on labor
in a different kind of way.
I would want to remind you
as well that when Du Bois was
doing Black Reconstruction
in 1935 that prior to that,
in 1933, that he
was given classes
at Atlanta University
on capital, which
means that he was
reading Marx and then
trying to through Marx and
his relationship to America.
My remarks, therefore,
begins with that Du Boisian
perspective of labor
and slave labor
and its relationship
to capitalism.
A great deal of historical
work over the past decade or so
has been done about
what is now called
the history of capitalism.
Good old Cambridge University
and Cambridge University Press
has published in 2014
a two-volume history.
There has been
remarkable scholarship
produced by members on
this panel, Seth, Walter,
and Jennifer.
There have been many
others who are not
in this room who
have really tried
to think about the relationship
between capitalism and history.
In this particular pattern
or trajectory of scholarship,
certain categories have emerged.
One category is what is
called war capitalism.
Another category that
was there long before,
in particular in the work of
Cedric Robinson from 1983,
is what has been called
racial capitalism.
In Europe, Marcel
van der Linden has
developed a notion of
plantation capitalism
as a way to begin to think
about a different global history
of labor.
In all of these
works, I would want
to suggest there are
some general features--
that of violence, the
question of accumulation,
the question of circulation,
the ways in which
economic institutions operate.
And also in many
of the works, there
has been a focus on
the 19th century.
And of course, in
all of the works,
there has been a focus on
racialized black bodies.
What is also, I think,
important in thinking
about this body of literature
is that in the discussions
of the histories of
capitalist capitalism,
there have been a
certain set of prefixes
so that there is primitive
accumulation, which then leads
to merchant capitalism, which
then merchant capitalism leads
to industrial
capitalism, which then
leads to financial capitalism.
And then which then leads
us to late capitalism today
and neoliberalism.
So that there is a way in
which a prefix is then used
as a designator to describe
what exactly capitalism is
or what is the periodization
of this particular system.
I want to trouble that a
bit, some of these prefixes
and periodization.
And I suggest that in
thinking about race, slavery,
and capitalism that we are in a
new economic, social formation
in which questions of
that of capitalism, that
of commodification,
exploitation, alienation,
and freedom itself now
need to be rethought.
One will not have time
here for the full argument,
but the argument I am making has
enormous political consequences
for struggles against
various forms of domination
as well as for
historical analysis.
Let me for a
moment, for example,
consider the conventional
prefix merchant capital,
which is sometimes--
which is not sometimes,
which is oftentimes--
subtracted from financial.
So merchant and then
financial capitalism,
of course, one can begin
this particular critique
by beginning to look at
the work of Rosa Luxembourg
and her major theoretical work,
The Accumulation of Capital--
A Contribution to the Economic
Explanation of Imperialism
published in Berlin
in 1913 in which
she began to talk about
enlarged position.
But one of the problems
of that particular work,
as well as in many other
works, is not just a question
of what some of us call a
commercialization thesis,
but really, as a way in which
capitalism is constructed
as an abstract pure form,
as a kind of ideal form
in which the laws of society and
the laws of motion of capital
actually operate.
My argument there, however,
is that there is really
no ideal form, even in any
abstract and then abstractions.
And that ideal forms and
theoretical abstractions
are, in fact, very brittle.
And so that what
I like to say is,
if one is going to
theorize a system,
then one needs to begin
to theorize that system
from a set of
historical experiences
and to do what I call
theory from history.
So therefore, let
us get a little bit
historical and concrete,
keeping in mind
the business of the categories
of merchant and finance.
Let me go immediately
to the Netherlands.
And to accompany this is
this firm called the VOC.
The VOC is formed in 1602.
The capital of the VOC
is 6.5 million guilders
at that particular
point in time.
It has 200 shareholders.
It has a board of directors.
It is a transnational company.
I'm talking 1602.
It is a transnational company.
Its central offices
in Amsterdam,
it employs 350 persons.
Its portfolio when
you look at its books
contains the following things--
slave trade,
plantation investments
both in the Caribbean
as well as in Indonesia,
investment in the
spinning wheel in India,
investments in South Africa.
The laws and the regulations
governing the VOC
is that it can conduct war.
It can conclude treaties.
It can take possession of land,
and it can build fortresses.
Now, to me, what
you're looking at,
therefore, is not now
just a trading company.
What you're looking at is both
a finance and a trading company.
And its sister company,
the West Indies Company,
is essentially constructed
very similarly.
But it has a lot more heavy side
to it with investment houses.
And these investment houses
are important because these
are the investment houses
that does two things.
One, they do engage
in the slave trade.
And secondly, they give
money to the planters,
in Suriname particularly,
in the Caribbean,
to set up their plantations.
And this is really very funny.
I mean, I was reading
some of their books
and some of their account books.
And what was
interesting was not only
do they give the money,
the credit, to the planters
to actually set up
the plantations,
but they actually buy
the source of food
for the slaves and the planters
and then sell it to them
at a profit.
So it is really a
total system, but it's
a system actually based on a
certain kind of investment.
So what you really have
are merchant bankers.
And these merchant bankers who
run these particular investment
houses, therefore, in my
view, complicate the idea
that somehow this is
really merchant capitalism,
mercantile capitalism, and
then financial capitalism
later on in the 19th century.
Well, what you really
have, in my view,
is actually
dominance of finance.
And how does one see this?
There are 2,000 plantations
in the small territory
of Suriname.
One of the very first
collapse of the stock
exchanges that we have
in economic history
is 1773 in Amsterdam.
What's the problem?
Why you have the
stock exchange crash?
You have this problem because
the people have given,
the investment
houses have given,
the planters in Suriname
money for their plantations.
The planters cannot pay it back.
So there is a debt crisis.
When one looks at the
numbers, it's not really
a serious debt crisis.
But there is a panic
that somehow this
will be larger than what
has been there before.
And then this leads
to a crash in 1773
in the Amsterdam stock exchange.
So what is important as I'm
saying to you is that here you
are one of the first stock
exchanges in the world,
but at the foundation
of that, which
is a financial instrument,
at the foundation of that
is actually plantation,
is racial slavery.
Or you can take another company,
if you want to leave the Dutch,
and you go to the English.
And take the English South
Sea Company of 1720 in which
Isaac Newton is an investor.
And what is interesting is how
that company again crashes.
But it doesn't
crash because people
think that the people
can't pay back debts
but because there is a
rumor that people would not
be able to pay back their debt.
And as Isaac Newton said,
I can understand astronomy.
I can understand the stars.
But I cannot understand, as he
says, the multitude's madness.
And so therefore,
what I would want
to suggest is that what
we have, therefore,
is that the colonial enterprise
is an enterprise of merchants
and of bankers.
And that of the
slavery enterprise
is the enterprise of merchants,
bankers, and plantations,
or of planters.
To think about this
a little bit deeper,
one might want to then
think about the plantation
itself, since we're
looking at racial slavery.
And a lot of the ideas that
we have of the plantation
is that it is
primarily agricultural.
And I would want to suggest
to you that that's not so,
that in fact, the way in which
a plantation was structured
was really agro-industry.
If you think of the Barbadian
plantations, for example,
and the production of sugar,
if we think of the Brazilian
plantations, if you think
of even the production
of Brazilian mines, mining
in Brazil in the 1800s before
the abolition of slavery, what
you see is not just that people
are doing sugar-- that
is, cutting cane--
that they are actually
sugar and that there
is a process of making sugar.
So there is an
industrial process.
And one of the fascinating
things about this
is that when you look at some
of the work of the planters,
they begin to call the
particular plantations what
they call a "perfect machine."
And the idea, the language,
of a perfect machine,
therefore, is about trying to
run a certain kind of industry.
So what I would want
to suggest, therefore,
is that we might
want to shift away
from talking about a
certain kind of capitalism
as war capitalism, because
in fact, colonial capitalism,
if you want to call it that,
it was about conquest and war.
This is part of the way in
which colonialism operates
is about conquest. is
about war, is about taking
territory, et cetera.
So that, therefore,
that's what it unleashes.
And that we might want to think
about what I'm tentatively
calling something called
"slave capitalism,"
that is, a way in which,
going back to prefixes,
a way in which we can think
through the question of labor,
where we can think through the
question of anti-black racism,
the way in which we
can think about what
I'm calling the double
commodification of labor.
In other words,
the ways in which
the slave is not enslaved,
is not just a person of labor
power that produces something,
but that is his or her body
is also property, and therefore,
that particular process
of double commodification.
And to then,
therefore, think, what
does that process of
double commodification
mean when we begin to
think about not now
those questions of exploitation
but questions of alienation
and questions of domination?
So that while we need prefixes
to try to help us analytically
to come to grips with
slavery and racial slavery,
one of the things I
would want to suggest
is that in this
business of trying
to think through how the
system actually works,
one of the things that
a very good theory said,
in an unpublished manuscript,
makes a point, Sylvia Wynter,
is that what you're looking
at is the reduction of man
to labor and the reduction
of nature to land,
and what Raynal called
in his 1770s book
on the history of the
Indies, "an odious commerce."
And so therefore, to think
about this particular reduction,
to think about this processes
of the double commodification,
of the enslaved,
means, in my view,
that you now really have to
think through a different
conception of freedom, that
no longer can you think about
human emancipation as only
circling around questions
of [? which ?] label, but now
you have to begin to think
about the questions of human
emancipation circling around
this business of [? former ?]
human domination.
And therefore, it
would just seem to me
that one of the important
questions of trying
to think about a new
history of capitalism
is really also to think about
a new history of what freedom
might mean.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
I want to offer my thanks to the
Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice, to Tony
Bogues, to Zach Sell,
and to Maiyah Rivers.
Sell said that people were going
to intervene in this question
in different sorts of scales.
And I thought that I was going
to be at the largest scale
until Tony said I'm
writing a project
on black critique,
which was going
to be a history of freedom.
But then I realized I
had to tackle the history
of capitalism first.
So this is going to seem
[? really ?] [? puissant ?]
in comparison.
That was inspiring.
I think something that
runs through all the papers
is the question of, where
do our categories come from?
And of trying to develop and
to think through, to recognize,
in the first
instance, the extent
to which the
categories that we have
used to understand the history
of slavery and capitalism
as two different things
are, in fact, products
of that history--
so to recognize the
extent to which they're
structured in dominance
and to try to clean up,
to decolonize, our
methodology in different ways.
And I think that is a project
that as Tony in particular
said is a project
of long standing
in what I would call the
black radical tradition.
And I'm going to start
my way into that,
which is through the
work of Cedric Robinson.
And then I'm also going to
talk a bit about Du Bois.
Black Marxism, for those of
you who have not read it,
it is a extremely complicated,
very dense, and absolutely
indispensable book.
And one of the things that
Robinson does in that book
is that he establishes
separate pathways.
He establishes a
pathway of history
to describe the long history
of bonded labor in Europe
and its empire and the
long history of xenophobia
in Europe and its empire.
And he's very, very
concerned to try
to treat those pathways as
different to begin with.
And what Robinson
tries to illustrate
through the course
of Black Marxism
or through the course of
the first 250 pages, say,
is that these are separate
strands of history that become
interwoven in the 15th century.
But they're never
identical to one another.
And so when Tony talks about
Du Bois' chapter "The Black
Worker," what
strikes me about that
that title is that
there's a tension there
that Du Bois is creating.
And I used to read it,
and I used to think,
oh, my god, Du Bois,
he's become too Marxist.
And he's overlaying
the history of slavery
with these Marxian
categories about class,
and he's making everybody
seem like a worker, right?
But that's not what he's doing.
And it's only recently
that I've understood
the title of that chapter
"The Black Worker"
as being a chapter which
has a dynamic tension in it.
It's things which cannot
be reduced to one another.
So you can't simply
argue that slavery
was a class relationship
because there's
a libidinal character to white
supremacy, to racial dominance,
right?
There's an excessive
aspect to white supremacy
and racial dominance that
can't simply be understood
through economic categories.
So the example-- I mean,
this is a different period,
but the thing that I'm
obsessed with currently
is the history of St. Louis.
And so in 1949, they opened
the largest open air swimming
pool in the world in
the city of St. Louis.
And on the opening day, three
black kids jump in there.
There's a riot in St. Louis.
They close the pool,
and they don't reopen it
for the whole summer.
Oh, my microphone.
That's excessive, right?
There's something
about that that
goes beyond some kind of notion
of racism and white supremacy
as a proxy for
class relationships.
But there are also-- and
this has been harder for me
to understand--
but there are also
aspects of the history
of racial capitalism that
are so general, so hegemonic,
that they are no longer in their
dominant usage strictly racial.
And it seems to me
that this is, in a way,
what Jennifer is talking about.
It's the way that a set of
technologies that emerge out
of white supremacy
and slavery become
the technologies through
which human beings as such
are measured, the
notion of population.
And that's what I
actually take away
from Sylvia Wynter's
notion of man,
of the sort of universalization
of a particular sort of person
who is a historical product,
the product of empire slavery
and white supremacy but then
becomes the way that people
generally understand themselves
now, so as a population
or as people who think
about their lives
probabilistically
or economically.
And Wynter is, again,
extremely difficult, somebody
who I've only just
started to read,
but who hails us to try to
find a different, deeper,
and I think more loving
notion of humanity.
So if you take these ideas
of these separate strands,
these separate strands of
commerce and xenophobia,
the idea that's in Robinson is
that these things are combined
in slavery and
settler colonialism
and that that marks a new moment
in the history of the world.
The place that I would
start with that in Du Bois
is in 1926 in the essay on
"The Souls of White Folk"
in Darkwater.
And what Du Bois argues
in that essay is he
argues that neither
xenophobia nor bondage were
new things in the 15th century.
"Ever have men striven to
conceive of their victims
as different from the
victors, endlessly different,
in soul and blood, strength
and cunning, race and lineage.
Likewise, the using of man
for the benefit of masters
is in no way a new
invention of modern Europe.
It is quite as
old as the world."
So what he's saying there
is that racial domination
and economic exploitation each
have very, very long histories.
And [? then-- ?] "but Europe
proposed to apply it on a scale
and with an elaborateness
of detail which
no former world ever dreamed.
The imperial width of the thing,
its heaven-defying audacity
makes its modern newness."
So what Du Bois
is saying there is
that there's something new in
world history about the slave
trade.
There's a new period
in world history.
And I would argue that
that is the period
of racial capitalism.
Now, what I want to
say about that is--
and it's going to be
very, very gentle--
but it's not static
or proleptic.
And I think by
proleptic, I mean I
want to try to speak to
something that I think Jennifer
talked about at the beginning.
Which is that it
would be a mistake
to take the idea of
racial capitalism
and imagine that
what that means is
that contemporary ideas of
race have always existed.
What the idea of
racial capitalism
seems to me to be about is
about the dynamic co-creation
and evolution, the
dialectic of the notions
of racial difference and
capitalist practices.
So it's a dynamic and
contingent relationship
that changes over time.
So why do I think that this is
a useful, important, crucial,
essential idea?
It seems to me
that, first of all,
the idea of racial capitalism
treats the history of slavery,
empire, and
industrial development
as simultaneous and integrated
aspects of one another.
It doesn't necessarily
reduce them to one another.
And so one of the
critiques is going
to be, well, if you say
what happens in Manchester
is capitalism and you say
what happens in Mississippi is
capitalism and you say what
happens in Mali is capitalism,
then how are we
going to sort out
the difference between
Manchester, Mississippi,
and Mali?
That seems to me to actually
be an infantile and fatuous
and intentionally
obstructionary reading.
I mean, really?
You know, honestly?
We're not going to be
able tell the difference
between Manchester
and Mississippi
if somebody calls
them both capitalist?
It's ridiculous.
OK, what I think this notion
does is that it moves beyond--
and this is really to resonate
with something that Tony said--
the notion of slavery as the
prehistory of capitalism,
as precapitalist.
The term precapitalist, which
has this enormous purchase
in social science
methodology, is actually
an intellectually and
historically incoherent term.
It's teleological in an
intellectually unsupportable
way.
And what it does then is
it helps us think through,
I think, the limitations of
Marx, the limitations of Smith,
the limitations of
Braudel, all of whom
treat slavery as a unfully--
thus, as Jennifer says--
pushed to the margins,
prehistory of the main
event, capitalism.
The other thing-- and I
want to insist on this,
and I think it's important, and
I think there's a conversation
to be had here, Tony, about
why one might want to insist
on the notion of
racial capitalism--
is it insists on the imperial
aspect of racial capitalism.
And in so doing,
it draws attention
in the history of
the United States
but also in the history of the
Western hemisphere in general,
to Indian removal and to
genocide as integral aspects
of the same process, right?
So we all, in one
way or another,
are working out of an
African-American intellectual
tradition.
But one of the things that I
find powerful in Du Bois where
there's an acknowledgment
although not a, I think,
substantial engagement
with this question,
is the idea of these
things as imperial.
And that imperial history, thus,
then forcing us to think about,
inviting us to think about,
requiring that we think about,
Native American dispossession
as an aspect to this.
That is, removal and
genocide as well as
labor exploitation and
social reproduction
generally are always
already processes
of sexual and reproductive
domination, right?
And this is, I think,
again, to gesture, really,
at Jennifer's first book.
And so one of the
things that I think
the notion of racial capitalism
then calls upon us to do
is to think about the
relationship of sexuality,
reproduction, [INAUDIBLE]
[? futurity ?]
to empire and slavery.
And how, then, when I try
to talk about it, when
I was talking earlier
about thinking about
racial capitalism
as dynamic, one
would want to
think about the way
that Andrew Jackson is
genocidal in relationship
to Native Americans.
He is absolutely uninterested
in Native American reproduction.
So his genocidal policy is a
particularly misogynistic form
of racial violence, right?
Andrew Jackson as
a slave holder is
interested in
African-American reproduction.
That's not to say
that it's easier
to be enslaved than
it is to be Cherokee.
It is, however, to
say that when we
think about racial capitalism
in this different way,
we need to think about its
reproductive and sexual aspect,
because that reproduction
reproductive and sexual aspect
is part of how these
things are actually
constitutive,
dynamically constitutive,
of racial identity
rather than reflecting
some sort of prior
formation, racial formation.
So why, finally, do I
think this is important?
I think it's important
because it's empirically true.
And I think that
this is something
that Tony illustrated with the
story of the Amsterdam stock
exchange or the VOC, that
basic, at root, when you talk
about the history of capital
in the Atlantic world,
the capital that you
are talking about
is in many instances
human beings.
So it doesn't actually make--
and so the way that I
think about this is,
how does the cotton trade work?
Well, the cotton trade,
which is the exemplar,
the unquestioned exemplar,
of industrial capitalist
modernity, works
on an advance basis
where, every year, cotton
merchants in Great Britain
make advances to American
merchant bankers who
make advances to planters.
Well, one thing about cotton
merchants and merchant bankers
is that they're greedy,
and they're not stupid.
Which is to say, they do not
make unsecured advances, right?
Those advances are
made against security.
That security comes
in two forms--
enslaved human beings or
expropriated Indian land.
So that is to say
the capital that
is at the bottom of the
Atlantic commercial economy
that leads to, that supports,
the industrial capitalism
of Liverpool, that capital is
either stolen land or stolen
people.
So it doesn't then
make sense to try to--
and this is, again,
to come back to a way
that Tony talked about it.
It doesn't make sense to try to
set up some kind of archetype,
a social sciencey
definition of capital
and say, well, this
is what we see.
And capitalism has
these seven forms,
and we don't see
that in Mississippi.
The actually existing
capitalism of the 19th century
in that, a lot of that capital
was human or stolen land.
Pragmatically
speaking, it's just
a pleasure to be
at a place called
the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice,
because it's that normative
ethical turn that I
think our world too
infrequently allows.
And basically, the
reason that I think it's
important to try to think
about the history of slavery,
the history of the
Atlantic world,
the history of
the United States,
and really, the
history of the world
as a history of
racial capitalism
is because it forwards to
us then a specific kind
of historical subject.
If one imagines that the
history of capitalism
is the history of
Manchester, one then
concludes that the
universal subject of history
is a white wage worker
from Manchester.
If one insists upon capitalism
as always already racial,
one imagines a different
sort of historical subject
as the central subject of
our studies, our history,
and the lessons that we
can draw from history.
And so that's why I would want
to try to insist upon this.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
The plan is to have a
conversation between the panel
first and then move
out to any questions.
I'll jump in.
One of the things that I've
been working through recently
is how early enslaved people
stand in for currency.
The earliest bill--
oh, there goes a chair.
The earliest example
that I've seen
is in 1504 or 1505 in
which a Spaniard describes
a ship returning from Hispaniola
loaded with gold when, in fact,
it's loaded with slaves.
But he uses the word.
And they're Africans who have
been rerouted back into Iberia.
But he uses the words
interchangeably.
And they're very early
instances of Africans
being elided with gold or
with other forms of currency
and being used to pay debts.
And I think that that, as you
were talking about the capital
at the bottom of the Atlantic
commercial economy, what
is really crucial to me is to
think through what is the same
and what is different about
those 15th century moments.
And which I think scholars are
really interested in the way
that categories of
wealth and commerce
are still embedded in religion.
They're embedded in much
earlier forms of thinking.
But the leg, the
forward motion, it
seems to me to be
in that connection,
in that elision that starts
out as just some people who
are enslavable and turns into
this entire category of people
who are enslavable,
but nonetheless,
is wedded to the emergence
of this long distance trade
and exchange of
goods and moneys.
I did have a question
that I think runs
across several of the papers
which starts, in a way,
with Jennifer's point about
race thinking as standing in
for sometimes the deeper
historical scholarship
that is necessary
to differentiate
between different periods--
a question about
racial capitalism
in its broadest,
expansive, and explanatory
sense to move away from
an account of capitalism
abstracted from that, or
an idea of slave capitalism
that can articulate the
specificities of a form
emerging from slavery.
Because I think those are
three different approaches
to a shared set of problems,
but I think another way
that when you posed
your question, Jennifer,
I flipped it in one sense
where I was thinking too.
Sometimes, actually,
there is a way
in which thinking
about slavery removes
deeper consideration
of racialization
and its significance as well.
I think that there is a
way in which we could think
differently about Marx's
work as not having a problem
in considering slavery
as part of capitalism,
even though there's huge
limitations to that,
but actually to understand
the deep significance of race
and racism [? as ?] [? well. ?]
Can I answer two things?
One in response to Jennifer's
really very good question--
as you were speaking,
Jennifer, one of the things
I was thinking about was that--
I don't know of
an earlier period.
But what I was
thinking of immediately
was the silver mining
in Peru and the forms
of indentured servitude of
the Indigenous population
in the large mines
that the Spanish had.
And then really saying
that what we have perhaps
in the 15th century
running concurrently
are forms of indenture and
unfree labor and slavery
and that all of these
things run simultaneously.
And what then is important
for me is to think, therefore,
that capitalism is not
one regime of labor
but that the unfree labor,
indentured labor, and so on,
are all part.
Different regimes
of labor actually
part of the electoral system
reinforced each other,
are connected to each
other, and therefore,
opens up a different
political space
to begin to think
about what struggles
may actually look like.
I think that's right.
So that's what your question
made me begin to think.
I mean, I can't think
of an earlier period.
I don't know the specific
answer to say, it maybe '14, '15
or whatever.
But I just think
that you're looking
at a certain kind
of transformation
both in the discussion of people
but also in the discussion
of labor and forms
of labor that are
occurring at a specific
historical moment.
In response to
Zach's question, let
me say that I go between
racial capitalism, Walter,
and slave capitalism.
Some days I say
racial capitalism.
Some days I say
slave capitalism.
And part of the reason for
talking about slave capitalism
is not to elide
race but really is
to think through this labor
question in a complicated way
as one can and to try and think
through this question of all
of forms of
domination that emerge
in what I'm calling in quotation
marks "slave capitalism."
Because what I
would want to argue
is that the actual
construction of slavery
and the transformation of
the double commodification
process that occurs
at that moment
through racial difference
and so on and so forth
and racial white supremacy
and all of those things
then also means that there
is a way in which the agenda
operates, in the way
in which I would like
to call other forms of
relations of domination
are then opened up.
And so that's what
I'm thinking of.
So there's a debate, for
example, in 1774 in Jamaica
and in Antigua between
planters about women.
Because women are, when
you look at the numbers,
there are more women
in the field than men.
All right, and so they're
trying to work through.
Some people are saying, what
is it that you are doing?
You shouldn't be treating
people like that.
And some people are saying, no,
no, they work better than that.
I mean, there's a
whole set of arguments.
And it is only a
certain point when
I think that the business of
the reproduction of gender
and the necessity,
they begin to say,
OK, we need to think about
how to reproduce slaves more--
that they begin to think
about, OK, let's treat,
as one planter [? says, ?]
[? Madison. ?] We are perhaps
treating these women to--
what he says, we are giving
them too much hard labor.
We need to rethink
those questions.
And so that, again, to
me, is this business of,
what do you do with enslaved?
And how do you
treat the enslaved?
How do you treat
those that you who
have constructed
as less than human
and the arguments around that?
But I think that that's a really
good example of this thing
that I sort of glossed over,
that we were inheriting
these categories that come
to us from 18th century
abolitionists.
Because that's precisely
a moment in which gender
is functioning in a
particular way to say,
oh, there are women
in the fields.
When, in fact, what
we know, sort of,
but it's hard because
of the evidence,
is that women are
between 40% and 50%
of captives in the first 150
years of the slave trade.
But the evidence for that
is hard to come by, right?
The Slave Trade Database only
gives us these glimpses of it.
A lot of it is in
Spanish and Portuguese.
And so the data isn't as--
and so what I think I know
then is that for 200 years,
women have been in the fields.
And slave owners have been--
it's not even a subject
of conversation.
But then it becomes a subject
of conversation for many reasons
at the end of the 18th century.
And then that woman stands in in
the same way that Walter talked
about, Sylvia Wynter's--
that universal woman who is not
African, who's not enslaved,
but who then gets applied to
this woman of African descent
in the fields.
It's confusing, right?
So then it means that
we need a new way
to talk about how gender is
operating in the first 100
years of enslavement.
But I think that it's
a really good point.
Yeah, I agree.
It's usually schematic.
But as far as trying to imagine
the history of the changing
categories, I think it is
probably fair to say that,
by and large, the categories
of the Atlantic slave trade
are categories of nationality.
Yes.
Coromantee, Igbo-- and
that the categories
of the era of slavery that
happens after the Atlantic
slave trade are increasingly
racial categories--
the Negro, Garifuna, mulatto.
And that then has
a sexual aspect,
a sexual regulatory,
racial aspect.
And so I think that
one of the things I'd
want to do then with the
notion of racial capitalism
is to try to actually
track that argument out
so one could make it in writing
rather than just saying it
and to say that the invention.
So Robinson dates the
invention of the Negro
to the moment of
the slave trade.
And the invention of the
Negro is the notion of someone
who is evacuated from history
and is thus infinitely
comparable to other Negros.
I don't actually think
that's empirically
what happens with
the slave trade,
because I think there
is all of this reckoning
through national stereotypes
and that the invention
of the Negro, in
Robinson's sense,
is the invention of a
more familiarly racialist
discourse of
anti-blackness, say,
that is focused on
direct biological lineage
and a certain kind of
notion of sexual regulation.
That does seem to me, at
least in the smaller knowledge
that I have about the
United States, that
does happen with the
closing of the slave trade
and then the beginning of a
set of commercial comparisons
around these different
kinds of imagined aspects
of racial difference.
I had a question for
Seth, if I could.
Because I was
thinking about the way
you ended, the loom with
parts from South Carolina
and France and the wool.
And I guess, like how
far back do you want to--
because I think that what
both Walter and Tony have
asked us to frame this
history of capitalism--
I don't know.
And again, if you
remember, I said
I wasn't a scholar
of capitalism.
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
So how would you frame?
Because the moment that
you're talking about
feels very connected to what
I understand as industrial,
right?
It's about the
production of goods
and then connecting that
through understanding
that it's being deeply embedded
in the history of slavery.
How much earlier do
you want to think
about the history of things
that are moving around
and that are produced
by slave labor?
Well, I think one would study
the flows of commodities
into West African slaving
ports in the 16th century
and basically tracing them
back to Gujarat or to Wales
or to Amsterdam or
wherever it might be.
And I think that process of
early modern global integration
runs through the
slave trade, runs
through the development
of new incentives
to produce goods that will
find buyers in West Africa
fundamentally.
And I see an increasingly
growing population.
This helps us
rethink, for instance,
the Industrial Revolution.
Why are European households
in the 17th century engaging
in what one economic historian
calls "a mode of self
exploitation," working
themselves harder,
devoting more of
their familial labor
to producing things
for the market?
What are the incentives?
Well, the incentives
are, of course, things
that enslaved people have grown
in the Americas like sugar.
And the incentives
are to produce
things that can be then
vended in West Africa.
And so I think some of the
largest transformations that
precede the Industrial
Revolution as part
of early modern global history
very much run through the slave
trade.
And I would put
that at the center.
That's terrific.
I would say I absolutely agree.
And point to France, and
point to [? Nod, ?] the city
of [? Nod, ?] and the
[? Lower ?] Valley
and the river that those boats
came up in the 1600s before
they went to Africa and then
to [? San Der Mar, ?] and that
a stone's throw, a
literal stone's throw,
from where those boats came in
was a factory of nearly 4,000
workers making textiles that
were then that were taken from
India and were redone because
of the market in West Africa.
And so you have to think
about those workers
just a stone's throw
away from the ships
so that the things can
be carried to the ships
and how it comes from
India to them first.
They remake it in a
certain style, which
the West Africans [INAUDIBLE].
From the perspective of
global economic history,
then all of a sudden, we
need Asia in this story.
We need China as
the sun around which
the early modern
global economy orbits.
So how is it that most
New World silver ends up
in Chinese coffers?
That has to be part of--
slavery has to be
part of that story,
and that story has to be
part of the story of slavery.
Absolutely.
So I think it gets
very big very quickly.
Can we open up the
floor for conversation?
If people have questions, I
think we have about a half
an hour for continued
conversation.
Have a go.
Thank you for this conversation.
I have a question for Jennifer.
I'm really interested about what
you were saying about 1504 is
the first moment in which
you see people [? acting ?]
[INAUDIBLE] [? or ?] whatever.
So I see this as a moment where
you have a category of people
are under you, so to say.
And I'm just wondering
to what extent you see
or if you're tracing the
ways in which this knowledge
about folks as
subjects transferred
to the English colonies
100 years later?
Do you trace that?
How do you see that happening?
It's happening in
1504 versus what's
happening in 17th century
Virginia and the laws?
To me, I've always relied
a lot on the circulation
of travel accounts and the way
that stories are both published
and are told by and
translated into English
and then circulate in England.
I've been reading a lot of 1620
pamphlet literature about--
it's so thrilling.
That's serious.
About currency and
about what happens
when English coin leaves
the land, and the people,
the men, who are associated with
this kind of early theorizing
about the economy are
deeply concerned about what
the Spanish have done
in the past 100 years.
And so there's an enormous--
there's a lot of
attention that's
being paid to the
Spanish in the Americas
as well as on the African coast.
Can i just follow
up really quickly?
Yeah.
Do you find that connected
to the race in which
the Virginians were
denying the bonded
African from their humanness
in the legal laws that came by?
And do you find that
in a discussion of how
to justify denying you know
African-descended free people
from testifying
or what have you,
is that connected
to this discussion?
That discussion, I
actually don't know.
I've written about both things.
But my focus on the history of
the law in colonial Virginia
is really through more
formal legal history
rather than this kind of
swirling space of overlap.
So I'm just going to say I'm
going to think about that.
I think it's a
really good question.
[INAUDIBLE] question.
Comment to Jennifer-- and
thank you for the presentation.
When you mentioned
interchangeable
between gold and
slave, it's worth
mentioning that the Taino
were exterminated in the trade
industry from Europe
to Hispaniola.
And the reason why
that happened was
because they fought
to the T for what
they thought belonged
to them and nothing but.
There were 25,000
[? river ?] in Hispaniola
that were destroyed completely,
tried to explore the gold.
So when they were
going to Hispaniola,
they were taking gold.
And in exchange, they were
bringing [? nonsense. ?]
And then when they realized
that the island was
so agriculturally productive,
because they already
have the tobacco and
the yucca, they decided
to bring and export the
slave, or the Negro,
who, in Hispaniola,
was not a despicable
term at the beginning.
It was a way because
the Taino were
Negro, black color, dark color.
And they wanted to embrace that.
So when the African came,
in terms of slavery,
they didn't know it was slavery.
It was bringing people
to cultivate the land.
And then they
realized that there
were people, the owner
coming in, to take over.
So that's how it happens
that they were bringing gold.
And the reason why
Hispaniola got attacked
by different corner, if
you look at the south west,
they were England's, who created
the mulatto image change,
and then you look at the
west saddled with the north,
it's the white, or
say, from Spain.
So there was an
interchange of trade
where, if you look
at the history,
Hispaniola was the land
of trade to America
since Christopher Columbus.
Thank you for that.
I would just say that by the
time Columbus, by the time
the first enslaved Africans
are transported to Hispaniola,
enslaved people have been
sold in Portugal and Spain
for over 50 years.
So there was a there
was a depth of grappling
with who was enslavable and
where they could be enslaved
from and where
they could be sold
to that had already
been going on for half
a century at that point.
So I think that part of
what I'm interested in
is unpacking that.
So thank you.
There's a question over there.
Oh, sure.
Hi, I had a question for Walter.
I was thinking
about-- well, actually
it's kind of a
question for Dr. Bogues
as well-- thinking about the way
of putting these long questions
together.
So you referenced three or
four or five different forms
of capitalist reproduction.
But how do we ask questions,
particularly long questions
such as issues pertaining
to settler colonization?
How do we ask [? long dura ?]
questions or tell long
[? dura ?] stories when we
have different temporal periods
where different
things are occurring?
Those two things seem very
difficult to reconcile.
Do you have a little
bit of advice on that?
Because I am working
through that right now.
It's a terrific question.
And I think the point is
to recognize and to embrace
exactly what you said, which
is that it's a complex rather
than a simple relationship.
And it's also complex because
the different sorts of
struggles that emerge out of
these historical experiences
are different, right?
The opposition to
settler colonialism
is a focus on sovereignty.
And so that's a different
kind of political mobilization
than opposition to slavery.
And so there's an
enormous complexity to it,
just as there are also a
tremendous and complicated
overlap, most obvious in the
case of the dispossession
of the southeastern tribes and
the emergence of the cotton
kingdom, right?
But more complicated,
so for instance,
in relationship to the
history of St. Louis
that I'm interested in.
St. Louis, among
other things, was
the administrative and
technical, practical center
of the Indian wars.
St. Louis is also
the place from which
we get the first black soldiers
in the United States Army
in 1861, who then
become the bedrock
of the 9th and 10th Cavalry,
the Buffalo Soldiers.
And so there's a bend
through the Buffalo Soldiers,
and I think this is something
that Du Bois embraces
and thinks about.
There's a offering
of a certain kind
of martial freedom to
African-American men
after the Civil War that is
embedded in US imperialism.
It's enormously complicated and
not always synchronous stories.
In a way, your question is--
I think that that's like a
footnote to your question
just simply to say the question
is actually the answer.
You got to just embrace it.
Yeah, I agree with Walter.
I think the [? long dura ?]
is to think about questions
of colonialism and slavery.
One of the difficulties we have
in US history is, in my view,
that we don't think
about other [INAUDIBLE]..
We tend to think about slavery
and so on and the revolution.
But the actual
thing that actually
was part of British
America for many years
was, I think, really
very important.
You can't think about
that colonial project
in the Americas without
thinking of all forms of slavery
or unfree labor.
You just can't.
So if you think about if you're
moving from the United States
to, say, Latin America,
you have to think
about both questions of
slavery and indentured
for the Indigenous population.
In the same way, you have to
think about that question.
In the Caribbean, you have
to think about, again,
forms of genocide,
[? religious ?] forms
of [? colonialism ?] and then
enslaved and plantation labor.
So to me, it's in thinking about
the [INAUDIBLE] [? isn't ?]
thinking colonialism and
slavery and that relationship
and how that
relationships actually
shapes each other but also,
quite frankly, [INAUDIBLE]..
And what I think people
have [INAUDIBLE] and so on,
this is that.
In other words, it is not just
I think this is slavery exactly.
This is the actual centrality
of the colonial project
to European history.
And Marx himself, I
think, misses it as well.
He writes some things on
colonialism and so on.
But the actual centrality
of colonialism to the world
and to the shaping of the making
of the world is something that
was not really thought
through, I think,
[? to ?] [? answer ?]
your question.
That's what I see.
I think it's a great question.
And unfortunately, [? we ?]
[? want ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
Can I ask a question and try
to answer a question that may
be in the back of the question?
Which is that I do think that
for projects such as the one
you just gave a
thumbnail of, there
was a couple of very powerful,
emergent bodies of thought
that you're going to
have to navigate around.
And I think it's
extremely important
to navigate around them.
One is an idea that racial
derogation in the United
States of America is
fundamentally and really solely
anti-blackness, and the
Native Americans have always
been honorary whites.
And the other is that African
Americans are, in fact,
settler imperialist adjuncts.
The reason that I [? rebel ?]
in relationship to those two
bodies of thought,
think, insist upon,
racial capitalism,
just because I
think that one wants
to work through all
of the complexity and the ways
that people have unquestionably
been pitted against one another
to try to really develop
a critique of white supremacy
out of that complexity
rather than what
seemed to me to be
kind of an emergent
invidious politics
in different sectors of thought.
Thank you.
I really like the
work that you've all
been doing problematizing
categories.
And I might riff for a moment
off something Jennifer said.
I think the concepts of
freedom and democracy
also make people lazy.
If you have those, you
don't have to think anymore.
And I wondered whether
some or all of you
might like to speak to how the
tools and perspectives we gain
from problematizing
and entangling
slavery and capitalism
also give us
ways to think about social
and economic justice today.
For example, a giant
multinational company
that pays no tax might
feel that, well, they're
providing jobs.
And without them, millions
of people would fade away.
But on the other
hand, what does it
mean to actually recognize
a person as a person?
Because one of the differences
between slavery and freedom
is this recognition
of personhood.
But if your wage structure is
such that a person effectively
has just enough calories
to work and then
they then can't
do anything else,
isn't that treating a
person like a toaster?
You put them in a cupboard
with the light off
and no electricity when
they're not working.
But I wonder whether there are
other concepts that then become
problematized like dominoes
from slavery capitalism
to freedom and democracy.
My secret title for a whole
bunch of my intellectual work
is Against Freedom.
And so I think that, in a way,
what Jennifer's talking about
and what Tony's talking about
is the historical foreshortening
of actual human
emancipation into something
that is basically a
liberal notion of freedom.
And so I think it's an
absolutely integrable part
of the project.
And I think that in the United
States, you can see it happen.
The history of
Reconstruction is a history
of the foreshortening
of a radical possibility
of human emancipation into what
comes to be known as freedom.
It seems to me.
Yeah.
And I think that there's
all of the categories
that we are working.
The challenge is that
sometimes in your effort
to come up with a way of
historicizing the category
you get, you drown in language.
And I think that that's
why, for example,
reading Cedric Robinson
is so challenging,
or reading Sylvia Wynter is.
Because they didn't
drown in language,
but they are exemplifying
how difficult
it is to unpack
the damage that's
done to our
conceptual capacities
by the afterlife of slavery,
that our categories are
foreshortened, that
we imagine that there
are these antitheses
of slavery and freedom,
for example, to name
just one, or that there
are places that are culture
versus economy versus--
I don't know.
It's very hard to write that
clearly and smartly, I find.
Yeah.
So I had a
methodological question.
It's something I'm wrestling
with personally as I'm
writing my book manuscript.
So the sort of
neo-Marxian model is
you have base superstructure.
As Professor Johnson,
you just said,
if racism and
economic exploitation
are usually constituting,
that's obviously not
a base superstructure model.
So how do you work
in this intersection
between cultural and
political economy?
I guess.
I'm [? not ?] [? sure. ?]
Are you trying to say that
I'm a cultural Marxist?
[LAUGHTER]
I would never.
I would never do such a thing.
But the practical
nuts and bolts,
how do you work in the
intersection of these two
different approaches, as
you all do in your work?
That's why I want to insist
on racial capitalism.
I mean, and so if you
look at, for instance,
this fantastic debate between
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cedric
Johnson, where Cedric Johnson
writes this fantastically
sharp critique of Coates.
And he says, well, everything
for Coates is about race.
And that's true.
Coates is a nationalist.
He's an intellectual
nationalist.
And so he must see everything
as white supremacy--
his superstructure, in the
terms that you outlined.
Robinson comes back.
He says, no, no,
everything is about class.
Everything's about base, right?
And in fact, what we have
is a set of ideologies
that are masking
material exploitation
that is fundamentally
class exploitation.
I think here you have
two brilliant people who
are talking past one another.
And the missing term is Du Bois.
The missing term is
racial capitalism.
I think Du Bois
does it brilliantly.
And so I try not to get too--
and maybe this is just
because I haven't quite
got there intellectually to be
able to really directly answer
your question.
I try not to get
too into priors.
I just don't see.
Ideas have a material
history, right?
Every encounter
with the material
is always already a cultural
encounter with materials.
I try not to.
I try to use metaphors
that are about simultaneity
and hybridity or saturation.
And it's possible that that's
just me not having figured out
an answer to your question.
But I just think that those
priors that we've been given
are not super helpful.
They're not realistic.
When do we ever in
our own lives actually
separate ideation
from the [INAUDIBLE]??
I just don't see it happen.
So for me then, I guess I'm
coming around to an answer.
And the answer, as do
so many other things,
is along with Du Bois,
[? Ramon ?] [? Williams. ?]
Marxism in literature is, for
me, a real touchstone in that.
I think that part
of the difficulty
has been a certain capital
reading of Marx's [INAUDIBLE]
The German Ideology,
which then sets up
this superstructure argument.
And part of that is class, race.
So race is ideology.
Class is foundational
because it is
rooted in economic
and productive things.
Where I like to think about
it is that we, quite frankly,
are moving from Williams through
[? Stewart ?] through Sylvia
Wynter is that we might
want to think about,
rather than thinking about modes
of production, which then gets
you back into trying to think
whether the base is there,
superstructure is there,
what's the relationship,
is it dialectical--
what comes first, the
chicken or the egg--
and so on and so forth?
You might want to
think about something
called production of the humor.
And go back to something
that actually Marx
says in Capital, which is
that economic relations are
relations between people.
It is something that we use.
And if economic relationship
are essential relations
between people, then
what is important
is this set of relationships
between human beings
that are formed in material--
provision, and living,
and so on and so forth.
And therefore, what
might be important
is the certain
production of what we are
and who we are at
specific moments.
I mean, that's how
I try to sidestep
that particular question, which
means that one is not working
as a kind of cultural
[? ferries ?]
or a political economy is
over there and I'm so on.
But actually, one is trying to
think through simultaneously.
In other words, as we produce
certain material things,
[? provisional, ?]
you can engage
in material things
for provisioning
and so on and so forth,
that simultaneously, we
are actually producing
narratives about ourselves
as we do this.
So it's not one comes first.
It is almost a certain
simultaneity, right?
And then trying to think, OK,
how then do you as a scholar
work within that and become?
So the word, operational word,
for methodology is complexity.
And I'm not trying to
find one master key.
It's like, aha, now I
have it, and I can then
open the door to knowledge.
I don't think so.
I think it is really
trying to understand
those simultaneous things to
understand that societies are
an assemblage rather than a
kind of structure, hard set
of social structure.
And therefore, if you
understand it that way,
then you understand
relationality and then try
to work through those things.
i don't [INAUDIBLE].
But that's [? all I ?]
[? have. ?]
Yeah, I really wanted to ask.
How does Du Bois seem to
think about having to live
without slavery in the future?
The answer might be
very easy to you.
I don't know.
But for me, it's very hard
when grappling with it,
at least because I
read one of the books.
I think it's an amazing
work, but different from work
that I'm used to.
That is, it's called
Suicide of the West.
It's written by Jonah Goldberg.
If you [? don't ?] [? do ?]
The National Review,
so you could tell.
But he tries to downplay
the role that slavery plays
in the history of capital.
And that is something
that I think
is intellectually concerning.
So I just wanted to pose
that question to you.
Yeah, it's actually--
I've gotten around.
I've made a career out of
saying outrageous things.
But the one that actually really
seems to drive people crazy
is that if you say that there's
no capitalism without slavery.
And when you say there's no
capitalism without slavery,
economists start
coming to your talks.
And then they're crazy.
It drives them crazy.
And I think that is
empirically the case.
I just don't see how you
could argue otherwise.
I just don't see
how you could do it.
So then the question
that leads me to is,
well, let's do some intellectual
history of the effort
to separate those things.
And I think that's an
intellectual issue that
goes well beyond the reaction
to the Williams thesis.
I think that's an intellectual
history that would take you
to the very foundation of the
notion of economic history,
right?
So why is it the case?
Why is it an
interesting question?
Why is it interesting to
say, well, I don't know.
Only 25% of the industrial
capacity of Great Britain
is focused on at a
particular moment in time
is focused on producing
cotton, and there's another 25%
focused on producing linen.
And linen is not
an imperial crop.
And so what we can
do is we can see
that this might have happened.
Industrialisation
and development
might have happened
on the basis of linen
and other sorts of
domestic non-imperial,
non-slave produced
crops if we can just
get rid of this 25% that
has to do with slavery?
What kind of question is that?
That's a ridiculous
way to think.
It's a bizarre way to think.
And it seems like a
regular way to think
because we've all become inured
to social science reasoning.
So the question
then is, well, where
does this form of
reasoning come from?
And what does it have
to do with derogating
the role of African,
African-American,
and other imperialized people
in the production of modernity,
right?
So now, that's a huge
intellectual project
that I don't have the
chops to do myself.
But I actually think
that that's there.
I would love to
see that history.
But and Walter, can I just say?
I think that that's--
this book project that
I'm very, very close
to being finished with
started with suddenly
seeing the notion.
The people who originate the
idea of political arithmetic,
demography, and the scholarship
on political economy
that's organized around 17th
century England, the men who
are writing this are
invested in the slave trade.
And yet, historians and
political economists
and political
theorists treat them
as completely distinct
historiographical phenomena.
So you have an enormous
amount of scholarship
on the economy of
the slave trade
and on slavery in
the 17th century
and then an enormous
amount of scholarship
on the history of
political economy.
And they're completely separate.
They literally do not.
I mean, you can have a work on--
and this is terrible,
because this is a straw man.
But Mary Poovey's History
of the Modern Fact,
which is about the emergence
of double entry bookkeeping
and accounting
practices that happens
at the moment, and
slavery doesn't even
appear in the
index of that work.
And it's as if the question--
how could that be?
And so for me, I don't know
how to answer that question.
Because again, as I
keep on wanting to say,
I'm not a historian
of capitalism.
I'm a historian of slavery.
And so I only ever ask
questions from the perspective
of the history of
slavery or enslavement.
But I don't find your statement
at all provocative, Walter.
Well, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
We've been in the
[? same world. ?]
We're on the same team.
And with that, we
do have to end.
Sorry, Walter.
If we could give one
last of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE]
