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The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades.
Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.
Foreword, by Angela P. Harris
Introduction: The Old History of Capitalism, by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy
1. Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: The Example of Foreclosure, by K-Sue Park
2. Gendering Racial Capitalism and the Black Heretical Tradition, by Shauna J. Sweeney
3. The Indebted Among the “Free”: Producing Indian Labor through the Layers of Racial Capitalism, by Mishal Khan
4. Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement, by Allan E. S. Lumba
5. The Counterrevolution of Property Along the 32nd Parallel, by Manu Karuka
6. Racial Capitalism and Black Philosophies of History, by Justin Leroy
7. Ghosts of the Past: Debt, the New South, and the Propaganda of History, by Destin Jenkins
8. Dead Labor: On Racial Capital and Fossil Capital, by Ryan Cecil Jobson
9. “They Speak Our Language . . . Business”: Latinx Businesspeople and the Pursuit of Wealth in New York City, by Pedro A. Regalado
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index
Description
The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades.
Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.
