Gendering Property, Racing Capital
This essay started life as a lecture at the conference convened in 2014 to consider the directions in ‘History after Hobsbawm’. What are the resonances of Hobsbawm’s work in the present and what are the new directions that have been marked out in history-writing in the last decades? The essay, drawing on the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London, argues that gender and race are both critical to capital formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Classical Marxist accounts of the development of industrial capitalism need to be rethought.