[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]
