Racial Capitalism: What’s in a Name?
Open Access
- 16 September 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in History Workshop Journal
- Vol. 94, 5-21
- https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac022
Abstract
Racial capitalism is a way of talking about the intersections of racisms and capitalisms: but how does it operate in practice? This essay explores the derivation of the term and focuses on one concrete example from the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Hereditary racial slavery and mercantile capitalism were articulated together: the expropriation of African lives and labour enabled the production of wealth for slave-owners and merchants. Both the metropolitan state and the Jamaican colonial state were critical in providing economic, legal, political and military frameworks legitimating White power and Black subjection.Keywords
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