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Conversation
The long shadow of Edward Long
Catherine Hall*†
,
c.hall@ucl.ac.uk
Elizabeth Edwards‡
Abstract
In this interview, Professor Catherine Hall considers the impact and legacy of Edward Long’s three-volume History of Jamaica, published in 1774. Long—slave-owner, planter and supporter of a racial-based slave economy—drew on a range of contemporary thinking in politics, economics and natural sciences, and on his own detailed experience of Jamaica, to make a case for the ‘naturalness’ of African enslavement and of what is now termed ‘racial capitalism’. Professor Hall considers the uncomfortable contexts and longevity of this seminal 18th-century book and its influence on racial thinking that still resonates today.
Keywords
slaveryEdward LongraceJamaicahistoryWhy did you choose to write about Edward Long?
I suppose I have been reading bits of him for years. Anybody who works on the Caribbean, and not just on Jamaica, mines Edward Long because it is such a rich collection of material that he has in the three volumes that he published in 1774. His account of the island, its history, governance, topography and plantation economy was designed to legitimate slavery on the grounds of the wealth it produced for Britain. I have always known it was a text that mattered.
I started working on Jamaica because of the personal connections, but when I began in the late 1980s, to work seriously on Jamaica, one of the key figures, inevitably, was Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle draws on Edward Long. It is not that he says he is doing it, but he does. I knew that Edward Long was the starting point or generative text for racists.
Then when we worked on the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/) project, the particular work that I did was on the writings of the slaveowners and their descendants, and the ways in which they reconfigured racial hierarchies for new times. Again, that took me to the importance of history, with which I was preoccupied, because I was working on Macaulay. I was interested in him because of the importance of historical narratives in relation to race and empire.
Edward Long is a historian, a very good writer, and an extremely influential and endlessly cited figure, but there is no major text on him. Everybody uses him, but nobody had actually gone for him, so I have gone for him.
To what extent can we say that Edward Long effectively set the late-18th- and early-19th-century debate on race and slavery?
No, I do not think you can say that. He is important in articulating a particular view and providing a huge amount of support for endless reworkings of positions on slavery and race, but what set the debates is the politics and the beginnings of the antislavery movement in the 1760s, followed by the critical judgment made by Lord Mansfield in the Somerset case in 1772, which stated that an enslaved person in England who had escaped could not be kidnapped in order to be re-enslaved.1 That made the planters and slaveowners understand very well that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ownership of ‘their’ human property, so he was faced with needing to justify slavery in new ways.
Long was always building on other people, and traditions of writing. He stands out as a beacon, but with all these figures, there are many people who have said similar things or thought similar things around and behind and in front.
Would you characterise his arguments as legal, moral, or even theological? Presumably, from what you have just said, he is drawing on these strands in his arguments about race?
The problem he faces after the Somerset judgment, and what completely enrages the slaveowners, is that they cannot any longer rely on the law when they are in the ‘mother country’. They can in the colonies, where they have whole systems of legal codes, but there is no positive law justifying slavery in Britain, and there is no appetite for making such a law. It is a complete failure when that is tried, so Long is having to think through what other justifications there are.
He was very influenced by natural history. He had read many of the 18th-century natural historians. He is an Enlightenment man, and he is in those Enlightenment debates about the nature of the human, of which there is a huge number. The big shift that had occurred was that natural historians recognised that human beings are part of the natural world. Humans are not something completely separate. The discussions begin about what the distinction is between the animal and the human, and how we are to think about that. That has been going on for a while, but it becomes extremely pertinent for Caribbean planters in the wake of the Somerset judgment.
Long’s answer was that it is bodily difference, and that there is an essential difference between black people and white. That is his theoretical argument. It is full of contradictions, but nevertheless has tremendous power because, you could say, of the power of the visual of what people see. There are black people, brown people and white people. They are all different, but black people are distinctively different with a distinctive hair, smell, and all the things that are focused on in the 18th century and from then on.
His focus on bodily difference and on essential difference is critical to his argument The notion of ‘essential’ is that the world is a place where inequality is natural. It is not man-made. It is natural and ordained by God, but he had little interest in the theological arguments. Providence stands there at the end of long chapters that have no reference to it as, ‘Okay, so this is what confirms it.’ What actually confirms it is a combination of an argument about this essential bodily difference, which is a matter of body and mind, combined with sets of laws, political ordinances and economic forms of organisation, all of which demonstrate a necessarily unequal society.
To what extent can one see that frame of argument as effectively instrumental in terms of economic power in the Caribbean?
It is instrumental but has implications beyond the 18th century of the Caribbean, because racism gets reconfigured after slavery, and then gets reconfigured and reconfigured and reconfigured. It is not the same in the 21st century as it was in the 18th century or the 19th century, but there are obvious points of connection. There are continuities and discontinuities through all those ways of imagining racial difference.
Obviously, Long did not know that that was going to happen. What he is concerned to do is to stop the slave trade being abolished. That is the particular problem that he faces at that moment, as well as to reassert the central importance of inequality to the organisation of society. In that sense it is a wider argument, because it is also about the inequality of women, and about inequalities among white people; there are those who are not fit for responsibility and those who are.
Inequality is at the heart of a graded hierarchy of how he understands that society must be organised, and he continued to emphasise this in the period after he finished the three volumes of The History of Jamaica. He finished the three volumes when he was living in Chichester in England. He got involved politically in the struggles to defend the slave trade. Then, what happened was, first of all, the revolution in Saint-Domingue—now Haiti (1791), and then the French Revolution, all of which horrified him.
In fact, his last published piece is about France and the horrors of the idea of the rights of man, and how in societies, where you have the rights of man, we would become brutes; we would grow tails. It is animalised and racialised, but it is the French that he is actually writing about at that time.
One thing that interests me is the readership. You have pointed out how extraordinarily influential he is. In some of your work, you show how William Pitt is using him as evidence, but do we have any sense of his readership? Presumably, these were expensive books.
They were very expensive. Obviously, it was only a highly educated readership. We know that the political class were reading it. It is very striking. They are not always agreeing with him. Because he is so contradictory himself, they can use his evidence against the slave trade as well as in favour of it, in the House of Commons. It must have enraged him, because he was listening to it all. What we know is that he becomes the authoritative voice on Jamaica. Even though the volumes are published anonymously, people know very quickly that it is him. They call on him, and they call him ‘the historian’ in that recognising kind of way.
I am interested in the long reach of his ideas. Is it simplistic to suggest, for instance, that his racialist ideas were resonating through the polygenic and monogenic debates of the mid-19th century, with the rise of biological racism and scientific racism in the mid-19th century?
It would be a slightly different version of it. The most explicit connection to be made is with Carlyle, many of whose sentences in his infamous essay on Niagara are just redolent of Long’s writing. There are other people before him that I can track. It would be another book to write about how his influence was worked through.
What I can say clearly is that what he explicates is what you might call the two registers of racism: the physical, biological one and the cultural one. Of course, it is still the case that there are those two discourses, one of which is tied to the body and the other of which is environment and culture. They are having that argument in the 18th century. We are still having that argument now, even though, genetically, race has been demonstrated to have absolutely no specificity at all. As we all know, that has not changed the fact that racism continues, in all its many forms across the world.
I am fairly certain he was being read by some of the polygenic anthropologists of the 1850s and 1860s.
That is very likely.
I am certain because the values that they are reproducing against Darwinism resonate entirely with what he is saying. There is a very interesting political alignment around about the 1860s around the emergence of a biological racial science, which is actually spearheaded by some of the most liberal men—and they are all men—of the period. That is the paradox of it.
Yes. I cannot imagine that Dickens ever read him, but many of the things that Dickens says about race could easily come from Long. Those ideas become embedded in the culture. Of course, that does not mean everybody agrees with them; far from it. As you know very well, there is always an argument going on about it, but nevertheless it is very present.
Were there ever cheap editions produced of The History of Jamaica?
No, there was never a cheap edition. We think he was planning to do a second edition because there is a whole collection of materials in the British Library, including his revisions, but he never did it.
That all leads to the interesting question of why he did not. I think he wrote the book as an intervention. That is why all books are written. People have a reason for writing them at that time. It is not just, ‘I will write a history of Jamaica.’ It is, ‘We need this.’ He was engaged in a political struggle. I think that when he was no longer in Jamaica, he could not possibly have the same kind of authority as he had when he was returning from eleven years running a plantation, and so other people could carry the arguments on in different ways.
What do his revisions in the British Library papers look like? Which way was he going?
He was trying to produce a universal system of racial difference. It is fascinating because there are some diagrams, for example. He uses new methods to try to think this through over at least a decade. He is trying to reinforce his own views. He is not challenging them, but he is arguing with more and more people because there is more and more debate going on, and there are more Africans writing about their own views of these matters, which of course produces a big conflict for him. They are not supposed to be able to do that.
What kind of dissemination did those African viewpoints have at the time?
Somebody like Equiano had immense popularity.2 It is not just about the sale of the books; it is about the lectures that he does all over the country and the kind of public support he has. That is the text that circulated the most, but the antislavery movement is powerful and extremely popular, and there are two whole phases of it, both over the slave trade and then over abolition and emancipation. There are quantities and quantities of pamphlets, newspapers and so on, all of which would publish extracts from these different kinds of texts.
Regarding Long, we know that, very soon after the books were published, pieces were reproduced in the US press. Jefferson read him; he read Jefferson. That is an interesting connection there, the ideas circulate.
That is really interesting. It is another book! One of the points you make is that Long defined a system that we would now call racial capitalism. Could you expand on this term, because it is a hugely important one that still resonates?
It has only just started resonating, one could say. Of course, he does not use it. He would never have dreamt of such a category. The term emerges in South Africa in the context of debates over apartheid and whether it would be possible to get rid of apartheid without changing the capitalist system. That is the origin of it. Then it has been taken up in different ways. The person that gets cited most often now is Cedric Robinson,3 who uses the term. It is not central to his texts at all, but I think it has become central to the ways in which people are now trying to think and understand the relation between capitalism and racisms. That subject is something that has been discussed for decades, but this terminology of racial capitalism is increasingly significant because people are trying to understand what the articulations are between one thing and the other. It is not a seamless system, and it is not trans-historical or universal or any of those things.
I only came to my argument in the book a long way into doing the work. I realised that these three volumes tell you so much. When I started on the work, I just assumed that my object was his arguments about racial difference. But the more I read on how the economy works, how the relationship with the metropolitan state works, how the slave trade operates, how the mercantile system in London operates, what the demographic patterns are, what the geography is, what the spatial organisation of the island is and so on. It was so exciting, when I realised what he was doing.
He was describing a system, how a system works and how a slave society was created. That is exactly what he is doing. I thought, ‘Wow, this is what is meant by the organisation of racial capitalism in the very particular time and space that is the Atlantic in the mid-18th century.’ I am not making any claims for it beyond that. I am just saying that people are throwing around this term and using it very loosely, and what we need is some conceptual clarity. The only way you can get to any conceptual clarity about it is by looking at how it works in particular instances.
Here is a case study that you can look at that has Long trying to explain to us how the merchants provide the capital, what their role is, how that operates across the Atlantic with the slave traders and into Jamaica with the factors, and then to the planters and to the whole system of labour on the plantation and so on. He tells it all. That is what is so amazing. It took me back to having to think quite centrally about economic organisation, which had not been in the forefront of my mind for a long time, being mainly a cultural, social and political historian.
There was another thing that was very exciting for me about it. He does not spell this out in the book, but what I understood in thinking through the gendering of this system is how relevant it is, and not just to the organisation of the plantation, which of course is gendered. There is the whole question of sexual abuse, rape and miscegenation which was critical to the control of enslaved women and their reproductive bodies. This we know about, but it is also about how the organisation of his own family and of capitalist families plays a central part in the accumulation of capital. This made me very happy too, because it took me back to the very first project that I worked on with Leonore Davidoff, which was published in 1987, Family Fortunes, which is about the early organisation of industrial capitalism and its relation to the organisation of the family. I realised how questions of inheritance and marriage are essential to how these families accumulate. That turned into an important part of work that I was doing.
What you say about archival demonstration of some of these rather loose terms that are banded around, is really important. What you have described is this extraordinary, rich meshwork of connections, influences, pulls and pushes that all define racial capitalism, but also, as you have shown, what Edward Long describes too. It really is a ‘wow’ moment.
When I first started properly working on him, I was just so taken by the fact that half of the second volume is about the topography of Jamaica. He takes you around the island, describing it all. I have been on those journeys. I have been to those places, and I found it so evocative reading it.
On the one hand, every parish is described in terms of its economic value and use. That is absolutely crucial. How many enslaved people are there? He calls them ‘Negroes’. How many sugar plantations? How many hogsheads of sugar? That is how you judge the parish. Is it moving up economically or is it stagnating? But then there are all the literary aspects of what he is writing about, and his love of the island. He is a very complicated man, as most people who write very complicated works are.
His favourite author was undoubtedly the poet James Thomson.4 Interestingly, when Leonore and I were working on Family Fortunes, which is about middle-class families in the late 18th and early 19th century in Birmingham and East Anglia, James Thomson was their favourite poet. He is Edward Long’s favourite poet, and he quotes him all the time, but he also quotes Virgil, and he quotes Shakespeare a great deal. He is a literary man, as well as everything else.
He could bring tourists to Jamaica to see that Vision from the planter’s place above. That is the perspective on the island that is so beloved of 18th-century thinkers and Enlightenment men, particularly. He is the master of all he surveys.
Yes, I was very struck by this aesthetic topography that runs through in such a strong vein. Of course, that is something else that goes off in all sorts of different directions. You see it being played out in early representations of the Pacific, because at the same date one is getting the first sustained European contact with the Pacific. That particular geography and population is racialised in a completely different way, but it is also part of this discourse. There is this tension between these quite different discourses of race in the late 18th century, but actually, they are all muddled up together as well.
They are, but what would now be called antiblackness is so central to all these different discourses. What that means is, of course, specific to each context.
I do not know how you feel about this, but I feel one of the things that is very difficult, and maybe will bring us to a discussion of reparative history, is the conflation of these histories in ways that are not necessarily helpful. What do you think it means to write reparative history?
It is a big issue. It is what I hope to write about now, so I am very preoccupied with it. I do not know how articulate I can be about it. My starting point with Long is that he needs to be called to account. Those books need to be called to account. It is not enough that lots of people who use him will make reference to his racism. Actually, we need to take very seriously what his extremely significant intellectual contribution has been to the construction of a racist discourse that has such longevity, albeit always in reconfigured ways.
He is so explicit about whiteness and blackness. There are people who think that the category ‘White’ has only been thought about for the last twenty years; that is not so. Long uses ‘White’ with a capital W for himself and for people like him, and it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between white and black.
I wanted to grasp him. I wanted to understand him, but I also wanted to understand what it means to think about how racism works in a person and in an individual who then writes. He is both giving us an account of how it is organised institutionally across a whole range of institutions, the whole of the slavery business, the political and legal system and so on, but also how it operates in his head, which seems to me a very relevant question for now, just as it was for then. How do people live with it and themselves?
Obviously, he is classic. He has the complete paradox. He treats African people as essentially different and less human. He bestialises them. He animalises them, but he knows perfectly well they are human, and he relies on all their human characteristics to do what he needs them to do on the plantation. He relies on their skills of so many different kinds, all of which he disavows, seeing himself as the progenitor of everything that happens.
For me, understanding disavowal as crucial to the organisation and the whole working of racist discourse has been very important. It is about trying to grasp the inner workings of a racist mind insofar as one conceivably can. Again, lots of people use the term disavowal, but it is about trying to connect it to a particular person at a particular time with a particular life, which is a life of a happy family man who deeply loves his children, his grandchildren, his wife, etc, and yet can treat hundreds and hundreds of people on his plantation in totally inhuman ways. Okay, these are problems to think about. It is a work of repair to try to grasp that, and to try to grasp the power relations that are integral to this whole system.
That is one bit of it, and then another bit is, of course, what we started. I have been doing it in different ways for many years by now, but in particular, in the Legacies of British Slavery project, what we aimed to do was to offer an alternative, and to tell a different story from the orthodox story in orthodox British historical narratives about the generosity of Britain and how we freed Black people. Anybody who knows anything about it has known for a long time that that is not true. Eric Williams said it years ago,5 but it was denied and denied and denied. What we aimed to do by providing all the empirical data, which would demonstrate how many Britons benefited directly and financially from being the owners of enslaved people, was to undo an orthodox narrative. I think that we have succeeded in that.
Now there is wide, common-sense recognition that abolition was not just a straightforward, ‘good for us Britons’ moment. By now, more than three million people have been to our website and discovered details about the compensation payments. We have all the institutions that are investigating their slave pasts, using our database.
You can make changes, though there is still loads more to change, but I would say that challenging the national narratives is a reparative project. Of course, it does not result in reparations being delivered. In no way does it do that, but I think that it is widely recognised that acknowledgement and recognition are critical to any work of reparation. In this culture in Britain, the public needs to grasp that there was a wrong done that has not been put right. Of course, history writing is only one of the ways in which that is being addressed, but it is what I do. It is what I can do as a historian.
In your piece for the British Academy, you talk about the importance of rebalancing historical narratives. Dislodging the narratives means recognising, as I said before, that wrongs have been done and they go on. It is not only that they have not been put right, but they persist and carry on. Windrush is the classic example of that. It is so interesting watching what has happened in relation to the Post Office scandal and in relation to Windrush, and how so many people are dying waiting for their compensation payments. There is endless paperwork that is impossible to deal with without real help from people who know how to fill in complicated forms and so on. The scandal just continues and continues and continues. The wrong is increased all the time.
How do you feel these debates that you have been putting forward so eloquently work in the culture wars? History is central to the culture wars, but it seems to me profoundly reductionist history, which belies all the nuances that you have been talking about. How do we deal with that?
Only through the gradual building up, as is happening, of more and more ways of talking and thinking about these efforts to repair and trying to provide some forms of redress. It is not just historians. It is true that history is at the centre of the culture wars, because what we have done is challenge the national narrative. That is what drives all the historians on the right wild. They want us to do a balancing.
A checklist of good and bad, which seldom works in the historical domain.
Exactly, which we are refusing to do.
Partly because we are saying that it is infinitely more complicated than you are ever saying. Talking about good and bad is just totally inadequate to the structural problems that we are dealing with and that need thinking about.
We are not going to get rid of the culture wars. The warriors are very vocal. There is a small group of historians and people who write to The Telegraph and The Times. They are undoubtedly impacting the actions of government, intervening in the appointment of trustees and so on.
They have considerable power, but the social attitude surveys continue to show that the British public is far more tolerant and far more willing to live with difference than the culture warriors would have us believe. That must give us some hope. That relates to people’s everyday experience, working alongside all kinds of other people and their children are marrying all kinds of other people. The society is so incredibly mixed. It is such a cosmopolitan world that many of us are living in today.
At the same time, of course, control over what gets taught in the schools and what news gets distributed is very important, so there are power struggles to be had. What can we do except keep on doing our work and believing in the importance of the work? That might be writing histories, making films, doing television programmes, curating photographic exhibitions, writing dramas, or all the things that are happening on such a scale. There is a lot going on.
Abolition and emancipation have become forms of redemptive narrative. Do you think we will ever reach the situation when what you have described coheres into a different form of redemptive narrative?
Obviously, I would like to think that the answer is yes, but what we know as historians is that it is often two steps forward, one step back, or even one and a half steps back. The political times do not look very redemptive at the moment. We would have to say that across the world they look absolutely and utterly terrible, so who knows? I suppose what we can say is that some changes have taken place. They really have.
One of the interesting effects of the Legacies of British Slavery project is the way it has been taken into other parts of the world. It then has to be thought about a bit differently. One of the things we discovered was that originally we thought about ninety people who got compensation took their human and material forms of capital to Australia. Now there are three projects in Australia that have been developing this whole strand, finding out the extent to which there were far more people and money involved. It is just fascinating that you begin to see the networks and threads, whether it is across, New Zealand, Canada or South Africa.
I am very impressed by the ways in which the history of empire has been transformed in the last twenty years, and is being transformed in all these different places with all these different versions and varieties of what empire means and what racism means in these different places. We have to have some optimism about that.
At a micro-level, I am very interested in the histories coming out of Australia and the Pacific on new thinking on indentured labour. You will correct me, I am sure, but I expect that some of that compensation money went into funding economic projects in Australia that then brought in indentured labour.
They mainly used convict labour and Aboriginal labour there, but in Trinidad and Guyana, of course, they used indentured labour. It varies in different places, but the development of indenture is a major response to the question of why emancipation did not lead to freedom. New forms of unfree labour were being elaborated, and indeed becoming increasingly legitimate, across the empire, and they go well into the 20th century.
I was thinking of the Pacific Islander labour being brought down to the Australian plantations in the 19th century.
It is fascinating that three of Edward Long’s great-nephews went to Queensland to set up sugar plantations, one of which was successful, although the others were not; one of them died at sea. Emma Christopher, who is a historian in Queensland, has been tracking the connections. This is in the 1860s. It is the connections with the Caribbean. They are bringing labour from the Caribbean. These are people who had been enslaved and, of course, now were not. They are bringing them into Queensland because they know how to grow cane. One can imagine that that was being replicated in all kinds of ways in different places.
It is that long arm again.
Indeed, the long arm of Edward Long.
There was one thing I wanted to ask you, given my interest in heritage debates and given what we have just been discussing. Do you find the term ‘difficult or challenging history’ that is used in the heritage industry helpful as a category, or does it just work against the intention to integrate and make visible the narratives that we have been talking about within general populist histories?
It would probably depend so much on context. Sometimes that language could be used in ways that are actually challenging, and sometimes it could be used in ways that manage not to be challenging and to smooth over surfaces. I suppose I would pick up on some other words. I think the word ‘diversity’ has not been a helpful word at all, because introducing more diversity into institutions does not challenge structures of power. All it does is put more people of colour in particular places, which might or might not have any impact on actual power structures. The way in which diversity and inclusion have evacuated questions of equality and social justice is really troubling.
I agree, and I think it lets institutions off the representational hook. It does nothing to challenge the basic epistemic structure of institutions. I spent many years in museums, and there is endless funding for projects around diversity. The truth is that there is seldom even scar tissue left to show that it ever happened, which is disgraceful. This is why I personally find the ideas of difficult or challenging histories unhelpful. At one level, all history is challenging and difficult, whatever it is.
All history is always about argument. That is what it is. It is a debate over the past and about the past in the present.
Yes, exactly. To what extent do we still see the long arm of the slaveowners at work in Britain today?
We have no interest in going for individuals. One of the criticisms that black radicals made of the Legacies of British Slavery project was that, in dealing with individuals, it took the attention away from the state. And they are right, it is the state that underpinned it all. However, it is also individuals who individually and familially benefited from it. We were not interested in naming and shaming, so all the popular press stuff about David Cameron’s relationship to it or whatever was not helpful.
Now, there is this group in Britain who call themselves heirs of slavery, who have decided that they want to acknowledge and make some reparation for their family’s histories. I have very mixed feelings about it, because I think white guilt is really unhelpful. We are dealing with systemic problems of power. It is not that there is something bad about whoever it might be saying, ‘I am terribly sorry about what my ancestors did’, but what salience does it really have? What is the impact of it apart from, hopefully for them, making them feel better about their guilt? I would rather they put some work into something. It is fine as long as the money is put to good effect, but of course one of the worries is, in terms of questions about redress, where is the money going? Is the money ever going to who it should go to, or is it going off in other directions that are not necessarily going to the project of social justice?
Insofar as the elite of British society, I cannot remember quite what the figures were—if it is 10 per cent or whatever it is, but we reckon that in the 19th century, a substantial part of the elite had connections with slave ownership and the plantation system in one way or another. Of course, they have gone on being wealthy. Some of them may have lost their money, but many of them have not. In that sense, the elite who have been going to Harrow, Eton, Cambridge and what have you have benefited from it ever since, but I do not think it is particularly helpful to tie it particularly to that group of slaveowners.
That is interesting, because in the popular domain this so often happens, unhelpfully. I just want to finish by asking this. You have written very eloquently for many years about reinscribing slave ownership into modern British history. It is what we have been talking about. Where do you think the history of slavery is going? And what are your hopes for a more visible and integrated history of slavery?
I do not know where it is going. It is going in so many different directions. Obviously, there has been such a wonderful, incredibly fruitful expansion of particularly black feminist scholarship in this area. The exploration of the lives of the enslaved, whether men or women, has just expanded so much in the last twenty or thirty years. That is one very important area, as is black history, and other such interesting developments.
I am a white English person, and my job is to try to understand Whiteness, the power and entitlement that has gone with that, what its roots are, how it has persisted, how it lives on in the present, and how we might think about the possibilities of change. All these different strands will go on.
There has been such marvellous work in relation to visual culture, which you will know about very well. I think you noticed that my book cover has been done by Joy Gregory. The reason for that is that Joy did a really beautiful embroidery project for the Exeter Museum. It is called ‘The Sweetest Thing’, and it built on our Legacies database and the work that a whole group of historians in Devon and Cornwall had gone on to do about the slaveowners in that area. I saw this piece, which I thought was wonderful, but then Joy said to me that she would like to make something for me, because it was LBS that had enabled her to do that particular piece of work. (https://www.devonmuseums.net/Joy-Gregory:-The-Sweetest-Thing/Exhibitions/Museum-)
She has been doing work on slavery in Jamaica. She actually comes from the same parish as Edward Long. Her family comes from Clarendon. Anyway, we worked together and she did the cover, which I just think is completely wonderful. I am absolutely thrilled with it. That kind of collaboration between an artist and a historian seems to me a very happy collaboration. Hopefully there will be many, many more things like that. I am sure there will be.
As the great historian of the Pacific, Greg Dening, once said, ‘It is in the theatre that we know the truth.’ I think it is such a wonderful encouragement for historians. Thank you.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is from the Library of Congress (Digital file no. cph 3a39887).
References
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RabinD.Y. (2011), ‘“In a country of liberty?”: slavery, villeinage and the making of whiteness in the Somerset case’, History Workshop Journal, 72: 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbq050
RobinsonC.J. (1983), Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, Zed Books).
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Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a08
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 285
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Hall, C. with Edwards, E. (2024), ‘The long shadow of Edward Long’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a08 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a08Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
The history of movement David Olusoga, Ritula Shah
Emerging from the British Academy’s Summer Showcase of 2024, this Conversation between two distinguished commentators explores the history of movement, of immigration and of emigration. It addresses the matrix of assumptions around race, identity, public policy, immigration, imagination and myth-making which feed into the understandings, and misunderstandings, of the history of Britain and of Empire. A particular focus is on the ways in which both immigration and emigration were subject to the differential and shifting application of values, hierarchies, rights and historical myopia in a complex of racial identity, politics and legal definition. While these processes can be historically defined, in Windrush, in Enoch Powell and in Second World War commemorations for instance, their challenging presence still resonates in contemporary Britain. This article arises from an ‘In Conversation’ event which occurred on 12 July 2024, as part of the British Academy’s annual Summer Showcase.
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‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.
12 June 2025
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