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Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism
Histories of Racial Capitalism
The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism--since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades.
Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today's scholars and activists.
Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today's scholars and activists.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 9, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 4, 2022
When was the last time you read an edited volume of essays on economic history and felt bummed out whenever you had to put it down to attend to other matters? Yeah, I don’t remember either.
Make no mistake: “Histories of Racial Capitalism” is still an academic volume, dense with jargon and theoretical abstractions, and quite obviously not shy on buzz words like “black Marxism” and “US planter-feudalism” that might put some readers off from the very beginning … But really, those are the kinds of readers who wouldn’t touch a book like this with a ten-foot-pole anyways, so we can safely take them out of consideration.
However, while clearly activist-academic in tone and scope, “Histories of Racial Capitalism” is (for the most part) astoundingly well-written and convincing, is by turns elegant, shocking, challenging, and sure-footed in always keeping touch with contemporary political reality. The nine essays in this collection all explore intersections of racism and capitalism primarily, but not exclusively, in US-American history: K-Sue Park describes how strategically debt and foreclosure laws were tailored to expropriate Native Americans and lower-class settlers in the early stages of colonization; Shauna J. Sweeney posits black women as proponents of spiritual traditions that provided respite not only from the atrocities of slavery, but from disenfranchisement and violent suppression up until the present day. Mishal Khan again focuses on the deliberate creation and escalation of debt, this time, however, in recruiting and indenturing Indian labor after the official abolition of slavery. Allan E. S. Lumba shifts focus to the Philippines, a former US-American colony, and traces how its population was funneled into the states as cheap agricultural labor throughout the 19th and early 20th century while occupying a precarious position between not-quite-citizen and not-quite-foreigner-and-thus-object-of-xenophobic-propaganda, while Manu Karuka sketches the numerous developmental relations between American waterways, railroads, military campaigns, and mining industries. Justin Leroy, then, presents a more theoretical argument against the Hegelian perception of history always progressing towards justice, and thus tacit assumptions such as the one that, just because slavery is a thing of the past, the current situation must inevitably be better and preferable. Destin Jenkins narrows down the scope again, focusing very specifically on the Louisianna port of Mobile, unraveling the various forms of racial storytelling that were employed in order to improve the town’s reputation with creditors and thus allowing it to finance much desired infrastructure developments. Ryan Cecil Jobson argues that slavery functioned as the basis for an abstract contemporary construction of labor as potentially productive capital investment, and that we see this very construction underlying our rhetoric on fossil fuels, while Pedro A. Regalado presents an overview of the LatinX banking system in New York City throughout the 1970s and 80s, where the financing of small businesses was touted as a pillar of LatinX American identity, as well as used to justify the simultaneous widespread slashing of finances for social safety and education.
A handful of these essays, I found, could have made their argument more effectively––Regalado’s, for example, makes quite a few startling implications but rarely spells them out, instead arriving at what could also be read as the fairly conventional story of a few improbably successful individuals, and faceless, anonymous masses that don’t share their success and are thus not worthy being brought into the spotlight––but even those opened up unforeseen potential in dialogue with the essays before and after it. Global theories and meticulous, time- and place-specific research, historical elucidations and connections to painfully contemporary issues such as police brutality and climate change, national and international awareness, and, quite generally, a style of writing that demonstrates that dazzling amounts of background information and readability don’t have to be mutually exclusive, feed off each other and arrive at a collection that demonstrates more than most I’ve ever read what academic research can, and, in fact, should do.
Make no mistake: “Histories of Racial Capitalism” is still an academic volume, dense with jargon and theoretical abstractions, and quite obviously not shy on buzz words like “black Marxism” and “US planter-feudalism” that might put some readers off from the very beginning … But really, those are the kinds of readers who wouldn’t touch a book like this with a ten-foot-pole anyways, so we can safely take them out of consideration.
However, while clearly activist-academic in tone and scope, “Histories of Racial Capitalism” is (for the most part) astoundingly well-written and convincing, is by turns elegant, shocking, challenging, and sure-footed in always keeping touch with contemporary political reality. The nine essays in this collection all explore intersections of racism and capitalism primarily, but not exclusively, in US-American history: K-Sue Park describes how strategically debt and foreclosure laws were tailored to expropriate Native Americans and lower-class settlers in the early stages of colonization; Shauna J. Sweeney posits black women as proponents of spiritual traditions that provided respite not only from the atrocities of slavery, but from disenfranchisement and violent suppression up until the present day. Mishal Khan again focuses on the deliberate creation and escalation of debt, this time, however, in recruiting and indenturing Indian labor after the official abolition of slavery. Allan E. S. Lumba shifts focus to the Philippines, a former US-American colony, and traces how its population was funneled into the states as cheap agricultural labor throughout the 19th and early 20th century while occupying a precarious position between not-quite-citizen and not-quite-foreigner-and-thus-object-of-xenophobic-propaganda, while Manu Karuka sketches the numerous developmental relations between American waterways, railroads, military campaigns, and mining industries. Justin Leroy, then, presents a more theoretical argument against the Hegelian perception of history always progressing towards justice, and thus tacit assumptions such as the one that, just because slavery is a thing of the past, the current situation must inevitably be better and preferable. Destin Jenkins narrows down the scope again, focusing very specifically on the Louisianna port of Mobile, unraveling the various forms of racial storytelling that were employed in order to improve the town’s reputation with creditors and thus allowing it to finance much desired infrastructure developments. Ryan Cecil Jobson argues that slavery functioned as the basis for an abstract contemporary construction of labor as potentially productive capital investment, and that we see this very construction underlying our rhetoric on fossil fuels, while Pedro A. Regalado presents an overview of the LatinX banking system in New York City throughout the 1970s and 80s, where the financing of small businesses was touted as a pillar of LatinX American identity, as well as used to justify the simultaneous widespread slashing of finances for social safety and education.
A handful of these essays, I found, could have made their argument more effectively––Regalado’s, for example, makes quite a few startling implications but rarely spells them out, instead arriving at what could also be read as the fairly conventional story of a few improbably successful individuals, and faceless, anonymous masses that don’t share their success and are thus not worthy being brought into the spotlight––but even those opened up unforeseen potential in dialogue with the essays before and after it. Global theories and meticulous, time- and place-specific research, historical elucidations and connections to painfully contemporary issues such as police brutality and climate change, national and international awareness, and, quite generally, a style of writing that demonstrates that dazzling amounts of background information and readability don’t have to be mutually exclusive, feed off each other and arrive at a collection that demonstrates more than most I’ve ever read what academic research can, and, in fact, should do.
February 1, 2021
What should you do if you need to climb the Academic ladder and you are unable to write a book? Well, take an essay and gang up with other essay writers to pump up the "published works" section of your resume. And voila! Soon you will get a bigger cut of the student loans.
December 24, 2025
shauna and justin leroy's essays... oh we're all on notice!!!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews