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Coming to Terms With
Coming to terms with racial capitalism
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Abstract
‘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.
Keywords
Black MarxismcapitalismcolonialismindigenousIrelandJamaicaLatin AmericaracismComing to terms with racial capitalism: Introduction
Gurminder K. Bhambra FBA
Racial capitalism, as Catherine Hall states, has become ‘a way of talking about the interconnected systems of racialised and capitalist formations’ (2022: 5) and, in recent years, there have been intense discussions about the emergence, development, and usefulness of the term. It is commonplace now to associate the popularisation of the term with the work of Robinson (2020), while also acknowledging its location in South African debates in the 1970s (Wacquant 2023). Robinson’s focus was the longer tradition of Black Marxism, as embodied in the work of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James, and his attention to the general historical development of capitalism and race (Hall 2022; Singh 2022). Its articulation as a distinct conceptual understanding is now more usually associated with the activism and scholarship of those involved in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and particularly with the work of Neville Alexander and Bernard Magubane (Levenson & Paret 2023; Magubane 2023). These discussions have also extended to include arguments for the need to engage, more systematically, with colonialism and colonial histories (Bhambra & Holmwood 2023; Jenkins & Leroy 2021; Koshy et al. 2022).
This section on ‘Coming to Terms with Racial Capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology. Catherine Hall opens the section by offering a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism—the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Drawing on research for her book, Lucky Valley. Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024), Hall opens up the question as to the different forms of racial capitalism (for example, in white settler colonies, 19th-century India, and contemporary Britain) and the different concepts that might be appropriate to better understand them. In particular, she asks whether we have enough case studies to begin to think comparatively with and through this concept.
In her contribution, Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. Further, she considers the implications of the concept of racial capitalism for the discipline of Geography. Radcliffe suggests that, for geographers, it has the potential to offer insights into globe-spanning processes as well as localised harms. As such, she asks how we can work with its situated theorisation in the debates of Black Marxism, within the United States and South Africa, and work to extend its range in other geographical contexts. Specifically, Radcliffe considers how the concept of racial capitalism might aid understanding of spatially and economically variegated labour activity by grounding these questions in her work alongside Indigenous peoples in Latin America.
The final contribution, by Gurminder K. Bhambra, takes issue with the concept of racial capitalism itself. She states that most sociological accounts of racial capitalism elide colonialism by suggesting that capitalism has its own intrinsic logic associated with the capital–labour relation. In contrast, she argues that the central logic of political economy should be understood as colonial and sets out her argument in relation to the Adventure for Irish land that took place in the 17th century. In the process, she argues for a political economy of colonialism within which the structures and processes that are otherwise attributed to capitalism are located and re-conceptualised.
These three contributions, in their different ways, open up consideration of the concept as well as discussing its limitations.
Racial capitalism across the 18th-century Atlantic: a case study
Catherine Hall FBA
Thinking about the relation between race and capitalism has a long genealogy. It was the critics of capitalism who opened up the questions. Marx set the terms in Capital, citing the connection between ‘primitive accumulation’, the ‘rosy dawn’ of capitalism, and ‘the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population … the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins’ (Marx 1961: 751). W.E.B. Du Bois explored European colonial expansion, discovered ‘personal whiteness’ and ‘the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good’ (Du Bois 2007: 15, 20). C.L.R James mapped the relation between French colonialism and Black resistance, famously argued that ‘to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it foundational’ (James 1963: 283). Eric Williams developed James’ thinking on the relations between the revolutions in France and Haiti to Britain and the Caribbean, exploring the significance of economic change to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Critiquing the long-established historical orthodoxy in Britain that white humanitarians were critical to the abolition of slavery, he insisted on the importance of Black rebellions and pointed to the new class of manufacturers and industrial capitalists who were keen to abandon the mercantilist system (which protected the planters and kept the price of colonial sugar high) and move to free trade. ‘Free’ labour, wage labour, they insisted, was more efficient than slave labour. Slavery was an economic phenomenon and racism, in his mind, was a consequence, not the cause, of slavery (Williams 1944).
The two publicly funded research projects in the History department at UCL on the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) followed in the footsteps of Williams. We were keen to undermine the assumption that Britons had nothing to do with slavery and used the compensation payments, the £20 million paid to slave-owners for the loss of ‘their’ human property as a lens. All those who received compensation were documented and biographical work done on the 4000+ Britons, exploring their economic, cultural, political, and physical legacies (Draper 2010; Hall et al. 2014). It was clear that slave-owners and their descendants were critical to the development of racial thinking from the late 18th century. This propelled me into working on Edward Long (Hall 2024). Long’s History is well known to all Caribbean scholars and to those who write on the history of race (Long 1774). Born in England into a family of Jamaican slaveholders, his father’s untimely death left him with only a meagre inheritance. Encouraged by his uncle, a substantial West Indian merchant, he sailed for Jamaica, a likely place for a young colonist of good family to make a fortune. Arriving on the island in 1758, family support and a propitious marriage enabled him to acquire Lucky Valley, a sugar plantation in the parish of Clarendon, originally purchased by his great-grandfather Samuel, a founding father of the colony. He stayed on the island for eleven years, managing the estate he gradually accumulated, and playing an important part in colonial politics. Returning to England in 1769, he discovered that attitudes to slavery had changed. Once understood as a practice unproblematically contributing to the nation’s wealth and power it was now being publicly criticised as immoral. He was already writing a history of Jamaica, but now saw his task as to legitimate African enslavement on the grounds of natural inequalities and demonstrate the wealth slavery brought to England.
My initial expectation was that my focus would be on Long’s theorisation of racial difference as natural and essential and the ways in which he explicated the practices of racialisation across the economy, society, and culture. It gradually became clear to me that he was describing the entire system of the slavery business, its financial organisation from the slave trade to the plantation, its dependence on the state, its management of reproduction, how processes of enslavement, colonisation, and capitalism intertwined. Long explicated the everyday workings of race and capitalism from the perspective of a slave-owner, offering 21st-century critics a valuable case study. (For alternative accounts, see Johnson, Johnson 2013, 2020.) Analyses of the relation between the two systems had continued to develop from the 1970s (Hall 2021, Hall et al. 1978) By the 2020s the language of ‘racial capitalism’ was increasingly in use. (See, for example, Conroy 2024; Go 2024; Robinson 2020; Singh 2022; Hall 2022). The term provided me with a helpful provocation, a way of capturing the complexity of the articulations between racism and capitalism. My book, Lucky Valley (Hall 2024), became a temporally and spatially specific case study of the working, both materially and discursively, of racial capitalism in the 18th-century Atlantic.
The key structures of this particular form of racial capitalism were the state (both metropolitan and colonial), the merchant house, the plantation, and the system of reproduction of both the enslaved and the colonisers. Each structure was articulated with practices of racialisation. It was Cromwell who initiated an expansion of colonial ambitions from Ireland to the Caribbean, making Jamaica the first state-sponsored American colony. Charles II and his brother James were equally enthusiastic, utilising Irish capital to finance the Royal African Company with its monopoly of the African slave trade, aiming to make Jamaica a rich source of royal revenue (Brown 2022; Swingen 2015). The slave trade was legitimated by the state. Our statute law, as Long put it, ‘declared Negroes to be a commodity, and the absolute property of the purchaser’ (Long 1772). Imperial policies were dominated by mercantilism: colonies were there to increase the wealth of the ‘mother country’ through their exports; their interests would always be subordinate; they would be tied to the use of British shipping and the Navigation Laws, thus strengthening naval power. Wealth, based on land, was understood as finite: importing colonial products, such as tobacco and sugar, cheaply and selling them in the European markets could strengthen Britain’s position in relation to its rivals, while the slave trade also encouraged British manufacture. Monopoly was seen as an essential tool against competitors: foreign policy articulated to economic as well as political interests.
White colonists for their part struggled to secure their rights, as ‘freeborn Englishmen’, over their property, both land and people, and their representative assembly. The right to trade freely in Africans had been established as a right of freeborn Englishmen; colonists insisted on their right to hold Black people as property. They systematised slave codes, bolstering the individual authority of the slave-owner with the powers of the colonial state. The population was stratified in new ways, distinctions made between propertied man, servant, and slave. ‘Negroes’, as the law described them, were identified in explicitly racialised ways. Captive Africans must be made kinless, rootless, and subject to the absolute power and physical authority of their masters. The colonial state was there to represent their collective interests. The ‘mother-country’ defended white Jamaica with naval and military power, dealing with their enemies, both internal and external. The settlement between metropole and colony was always unstable, but survived in the interests of both.
Drake and Long, the Long family’s mercantile branch, was one of the oldest West Indian houses in London and Edward Long’s familiarity with the it was one of the reasons why he could write so effectively about the whole slavery business. The merchant houses sat at the centre of this capitalist system, providing the capital which enabled the exploitation of enslaved Africans who produced sugar for the domestic market, and profit for merchants, traders, planters, and the crown. A complex and hybrid set of practices meant goods were exchanged for people, cane transformed into sugar and rum. The circuit in its original triangular form operated from England to West Africa, the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and back to Britain, utilising different regimes of exploitation. Captives were violently seized in West Africa with no payment and sold on the coast by African traders to Europeans. Men, women, and children were priced and became human property. White sailors working for wages manned the ships. Once in Jamaica, factors renamed Africans as ‘slaves’ and ‘Negroes’ and sold them to the planters at a new price. They were human capital, animate capital, the most valuable asset of the plantation where they lived and died. The sugar and rum they produced were shipped back to the metropole. White men manned the docks, the warehouses, the counting houses, and the refineries where the molasses were processed. This hybrid system of exploitation, of enslaved and waged labour, depended on imperial protection and the circuit of credit in the form of bills of exchange. Promissory notes criss-crossed the Atlantic and allowed credit to flow, debts to mushroom, capital to accumulate, particularly in the hands of the merchants.
Capital from the merchants was critical to the whole plantation enterprise: it enabled planters to establish estates, buy and clear land, buy enslaved labour, and build works. Plantations were ‘factories in the field’ since cane, once cut, had to be milled immediately in order to retain the juice. There were then a series of necessary stages—boiling, fermenting, distilling—that partially processed the cane and produced muscovado, which could be transported to Britain for further refining. Those final stages were monopolised by the ‘mother country’ in order to defend manufacturers at home. The plantation was the site for the creation of new subjects: the planter and the enslaved. Long’s description focused on the work of the planter, the head of the enterprise. It was He who made it all happen, He who created the value, oiled the wheels of ‘the commercial machine’, He who improved. The agency of the enslaved men, women, and children who did the work on the ground, was disavowed. Those who holed, weeded, cut and carried, boiled, and distilled were ‘the sinews’ through whose bodies the labour process flowed. They were represented as choses, chattels, to be bought and sold. The planter was the absolute authority, the mind and master of the enterprise. Close supervision was essential and Long organised skilled and unskilled labour with a clear division of labour rooted in classed, racialised, and gendered practices and relying on effective management of time. White men were in command, Black men and women were commanded.
Black women were critical to field labour on the plantation, but they were also vital to the reproduction of the labour force. In the mid-18th century the birth rate on the plantations was below the death rate, so slave-owners had to buy new enslaved people every year in order to sustain their labour force. When Long’s great-grandfather Samuel had died he had left his widow and daughter enslaved women, and, as he put it in his will, ‘their increase’. Enslaved women did not own the fruit of their own wombs: their infants belonged to their owners, potentially enhancing their supply of labour and human capital. This was not enshrined in law in Jamaica, but it was customary. Long worried about the high mortality rates and feared that the slave trade might be abolished. He recommended planters to think more carefully about reproduction, a new term with which he was familiar thanks to his enthusiastic reading of the natural historians. He provided himself on being an Enlightenment man. Pregnant women, he advised, should be given some relief from heavy work and arrangements made for very young children to be cared for by ‘superannuated’ women, those no longer fit to work in the fields. He abhorred the scale of miscegenation on the island, and what he regarded as the shameful promiscuity of the colonists, resulting in the pollution of the ‘pure white breed’. He hoped for an improvement in the family lives of the colonists, proper legal marriages and legitimate children, fit to lead the next generations. The marriage and inheritance practices of his own family were honed to secure capital accumulation and dynastic survival.
Long’s account of the state, the trade, and the plantation all depended on assumptions about African difference. He attempted to theorise this difference, putting together the fruits of his experience in Jamaica, his certainty that cane, and the wealth that flowed from it, could only be produced by enslaved Africans, with selected arguments from the Enlightenment debates on the human. The work of natural historians had made a very significant break with conventional Biblical thinking, in classifying men as part of the animal kingdom. As a planter he claimed to have observed the limited capacities of the enslaved, disavowing his knowledge of their multiple skills on which Lucky Valley depended. What then were the differences between men and animals? And what were the differences between different varieties of men? What caused blackness? And what did it signify? When and why had ‘degeneration’, as it was described, from the white norm, begun? Some argued that climate was the key, as did Montesquieu. Others disputed this insisting that the causes were internal rather than external. Explanations based on the surface of the skin were associated with climate and environment: anatomists, on the other hand, claimed their explanations were rooted in the blood and bile of the black body. Blackness was located on the inside rather than the outside. The answer for Long was ‘One genus, different species’. It was well known that animals were of many kinds, with subordinate species. ‘The White and the Negroe had not one common origin’, he wrote, ‘… there are extremely potent reasons for believing, that the White and the Negroe are two distinct species’. It was this which explained the ‘diversities of feature, skin, and intellect’ amongst mankind. And it was this which legitimated slavery.
Natural difference secured Africans in their enslavement, a subordination fixed by the state, enabled by mercantile credit, enacted in the slave trade and on the plantation, facilitating the accumulation of wealth. This was a system of racial capitalism, specific to its time and place. Other terms—extraction, expropriation, expulsion, and elimination—are needed for the analysis of other forms of capitalism, and their articulation with other forms of racialisation. There is no transhistorical system operating across time and space, but without detailed case studies it is difficult to develop a conceptual framework for effective comparison.
Indigenous peoples and racial colonial capitalism: notes from geography
Sarah A. Radcliffe FBA
This short piece examines racial capitalism by focusing on Indigenous peoples’ incorporation into Spanish and North American systems of labour and accumulation. Cedric Robinson’s (2020) account of racial capitalism draws attention to the co-emergence of racialisation with global capitalism (on Anglophone discussions of racial capitalism, see Bhambra, and Hall, this issue; Hall 2022). A different account of racial hierarchy, capitalism, and power emerges from Latin American scholarship, which centres Indigenous, Black, and others’ racialisation within economic–political–social drivers of global capitalism in what is termed coloniality or colonial modernity (Quijano 2000, 2007). Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000) argues that coloniality emerged simultaneously in the Americas through racialised domination. Quijano and the Modernity, Coloniality, Decoloniality (MCD) group posit the coloniality of racialised power ushered in global capitalism (Jenss 2024; Walsh et al. 2024) and forged ‘an articulation of all historically known previous structures of control of labour, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market’ (Quijano 2000: 534; cf. Robinson 2020). Coloniality comprises a matrix of power with enduring and global-reaching structures of domination, including racial hierarchies, economic exploitation, and the suppression of subaltern knowledges and cultures. Alongside this Marxist decolonial account, the framework of racial colonial capitalism has highlighted racial–political economic orders in relation to intersectional social hierarchies, issues of land and property, and Anthropocene orders (Koshy et al. 2022; Lugones 2007). North American Indigenous theory, for instance, approaches capitalism as a colonial relation, even as it begins from the dyad of Indigenous lands and human bodies in matrices of power (Coulthard 2014).
Binding together the racial and the colonial dimensions of modern capitalism, the concept of racial colonial capitalism—or coloniality—prompts questions about the relative primacy/scheduling of racialisation, capitalism, and colonialism. Nasar Meer asks ‘Did a category of race facilitate colonialism, or was colonialism instructive in cultivating a concept of race?’ (Meer 2018: 1167). Against Quijano and MCD writers who posit that ‘race’ emerged with Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean, Meer argues that colonial race was ‘underwritten and made possible by pre-modern characteristics’ (2018: 1169) such that its significance must not be subsumed under postcolonialism. Indeed, scholarly accounts of Blackness and whiteness require increasingly nuanced disaggregated analysis of racialisations as the disparate configurations of regional 21st-century capitalisms forge unprecedented—and increasingly non-Atlantic—racialised neocolonialism and economies (Gilmore 2022; Koshy et al. 2022).
To examine the material significance of racialisation under colonial capitalism, I draw on Indigenous experiences. Whereas the Black theorisation of racial capitalism foregrounds Black experiences, this piece focuses on Indigenous peoples in the (Spanish and North) Americas in interconnected systems of racialised and capitalist formations. I outline early modern racialisation of Spanish Caribbean and Latin American populations, before focusing on processes of Indigenous enslavement and forced labour. The key question is how Indigenous peoples were racialised and how that bound them into colonial capitalist economic processes. Native populations—erroneously labelled Indians by Columbus—and Black Africans were equally, albeit differentially, subject to colonial regimes of labour, property, and wealth creation that rested upon their distinction from white and creole (American-born European) populations (Gotkowitz 2012).
From 1492, the unevenly paced and spaced appropriations of Indigenous labour power kickstarted colonial capitalism, as well as dispossessed Indigenous lands. Despite unprecedented population declines over the first century of colonialism, Indigenous groups survived the slow violence of disease, warfare, and harsh labour (Newson 1985) to shape the imperial land–labour–resource nexus. Circulating alongside the religious and wealth-seeking imperatives of Iberian expansionism were important questions around what ‘type’ and ‘status’ of beings the native populations were. In the Spanish court and its colonial administration, Indigenous populations were a ‘test case’ for emerging ideas of ‘race’ in the early 16th century, yet these debates were informed by preexisting social distinctions coupled with economic roles. Prior to Spanish American colonisation, differentiating social categories were significant during the ‘Re-Conquest’ of Iberia from North African Islamic (‘Moorish’) regimes which was informed by notions of ‘blood’ [cf. Cedric Robinson’s account of racialised slavery in the pre-Columbus Mediterranean (Torino 2023)]. Subject to persecution and expulsion, converts from Islam and Judaism were restricted from participating in trans-Atlantic expeditions and, in the Americas, from holding lands and quasi-feudal rights over Indian labour (Cook 2016).
A key turning point in colonial modern notions of race came at the Valladolid debate, convened by the monarch, over whether Indians had souls and hence were essentially human (1550–1). One debater, a former colonial estate-holder-turned Dominican bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas, had documented from first-hand experience and travel the extent of Spanish violence and Indigenous labour exploitation. The encomienda system, which granted individual conquistadores Indians in return for evangelisation and protection, in practice became forced labour. That and a later repartimiento labour tribute lay at the heart of de la Casas’ argument that Indians had souls and should be protected. Indeed, de las Casas proposed Indians were unsuited to chattel slavery which justified African enslavement (a view he later retracted) (De las Casas 1992, Lantigua 2020). Spanish interests in the Americas, as de las Casas’ writings illustrate, considered Black and Indigenous (alongside Moors and conversos) in relational yet racially and economically differentiated terms. Black Africans had been trafficked as slaves by Spanish and later Portuguese traders as early as 1502 via Spain, and after 1518 directly from Africa.
Having sketched out the significance of materially based racialised understandings of Indigenous populations for Spain’s economic imperialism, I turn to consider how racialisation and capitalist economies came together ‘on the ground’. Such an account is necessarily partial and place-specific due to the ‘kaleidoscopic forms racial capitalism takes’ (Ogborn 2023: 90, Bledsoe et al. 2022), as well as Indigenous diversity (currently Latin America has over 500 different groups).
Indigenous peoples and Iberian colonial capitalism: what is at stake?
Scholars remain divided on the size of pre-conquest Indigenous populations in the Americas, with estimates ranging from 6.8 to 49 million, populations who were markedly transformed by coloniality. However, the speed, extent, and socioeconomic consequences of demographic collapse are also under constant revision, with increasing attention paid to spatial (and ethnic) variations in demographic outcomes because ‘the nature, profitability, and distribution of resources stimulat[ed] different demands on Indian lands and labour’ (Newson 1985: 65–6). Although certain populations experienced devastating disease, starvation labour, and warfare, revised accounts point to the uneven distribution of these impacts. The Guaraní in today’s Paraguay grew in number after Spanish arrival, whereas Caribbean and Peruvian coastal native groups were largely eliminated. In the densely populated pre-Columbian empires of Aztec (current-day Mexico) and Inka (centred on current-day Peru), losses were much lower, which paved the way for conquerors’ early and systematic establishment of Iberian labour and tribute systems (Mahoney 2010). The relative ease of locating, concentrating, and subordinating native groups in these large and densely populated regions placed Indian labour front and centre in the racialised capitalism that succeeded encomienda and repartimiento. Highland Andean and central American Indians worked under mita, a harsh labour draft in mines, farms, textile mills, and public works (Stavenhagen 2002). Such historical, political, and spatial factors in turn influenced the distribution of enslaved Black Africans who were shipped to plantations on Caribbean islands, and Caribbean and Pacific coastal plains.
While archaeological work has revealed densely networked pre-Columbian urban settlements in the Amazon basin, Portuguese colonial presence and control was sparse and often short-lived in Amazonia. Under laws permitting Indian slavery, colonial merchants raided native settlements from the early 17th century, but the number of enslaved Black people rose from the mid-18th century as settlement expanded the agricultural frontier (Chambouleyron & Ibáñez-Bonilla 2019). Spanish Amazonia combined mission-led settlement and forced extractive labour for forest products organised under debt peonage, coercion, and direct violence from the 19th to the early 20th centuries (Newson 1993; Taussig 1986). In mid-20th-century Amazonia, debt peonage was organised by self-identified ‘white’ bosses who aspired to control Indigenous labour, not territory (Espinosa et al. 2021). The picture that emerges from historical, archaeological, and geographical accounts provides evidence of racialised colonial capitalism as outlined by Aníbal Quijano and others. Mahoney’s (2010) distinction between early mercantilist and later liberal capitalism, between colonial centres, semi-peripheries, and peripheries, nuances historical geographies of racialised capitalism in Spanish America.
Dominant actors, institutions, and discourses through this period attributed intrinsic qualities to ‘native’ populations in ways that legitimised or condoned their enslavement on distinctive bases to trafficked Blackness. In an extensive account, Jorati (2024) details the strands of imperial thinking which laid the basis for Indigenous enslavement across Spanish colonies. From Iberian colonial slave markets through to late-19th-century appropriations that deliberately targeted native groups, we see diverse forms of indigeneity’s entanglement with racial capitalism. In the 16th–17th centuries, both Black and Indigenous peoples were trafficked in Charcas (now central Bolivia) along ‘oceanic and fluvial, as well as intra-continental terrestrial—both legal and illegal—entry routes’ (Revilla Orian 2021: 2). These native groups included captured lowland Chiriguano, most of whom were forced into domestic service. Indigenes cost less than enslaved Black Africans, while native yanaconas worked relatively autonomously in urban trades or agriculture (Revilla Orian 2021).
Yet what did racialisation mean in these economies? How was racial difference related to divisions of labour? Indigeneity, which refers to the qualities of being Indigenous (Radcliffe 2017), was associated with labouring bodies and not the cultural distinctions around clothing, language, and belief, which gained ground from the early decades of the 20th century among urban intellectuals (Gotkowitz 2012). Over previous centuries, the rape of Indigenous women, intermarriage, and ‘passing’ had effectively multiplied social categories of racial difference, yet blackness and indigeneity have continued to define the opposite of desirable ‘white’ racial status to the present day (Gotkowitz 2012; Gott 2007). Although racial lines were less violently and systematically policed in comparison with North America (Wade 2004), Latin America’s Black and Indigenous populations have been consistently ranked lower in employment and social status. Despite 20th-century nationalist discourses of racial democracy and mestizaje (‘mixing’), labour markets remain deeply segregated by intersectional race–ethnicity (Patrinos et al. 2007; Radcliffe 2020).
Spanish American Indigenous peoples in this sense illustrate the co-production of colonial economies and materially and corporeally significant racialised difference. Indigenous groups in Abya Yala (a Kuna name for the region) have directly experienced duress. According to Ann Laura Stoler (2016: 7), duress refers to ‘hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their … protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements’. Given the patchy and inadequate protections offered by today’s Indigenous reserves and biodiversity conservation, racialised capitalism continues to produce Indigenous precarity on all sides deriving from illegal state and non-state encroachments on lands and resources and super-exploitation due to lack of options (Espinosa et al. 2021). Indigenous peoples remain confined within Latin America’s capitalism yet endure over five centuries, thereby countering Anglophone settler colonial expectations of their programmed demise (Wolfe 2006; cf. Byrd 2011). These dynamics illustrate indigeneity’s contradictory position in the heart of racial colonial capitalism’s reproduction and expansion.
Indigenous peoples in relation to Black chattel slavery in North America
Thinking with indigeneity in periods and places associated strongly with Black chattel enslavement further expands an understanding of precisely how, where, and by which means the ‘non-Black’ subordinating racialisation of Indigenous peoples has forged our contemporary world. For North America and the Caribbean, scholarship on the 16th and 17th centuries has begun to unpack the consequences of the slavery of Indigenous peoples in systems usually associated solely with Black enslavement. In a powerful overview, Reséndez (2016) documents a widespread and normalised pattern of Indigenous enslavement across the Americas. Delving into Algonquian sources, Rushforth (2012) details the complex relations between colonists and diverse Indigenous groups in 17–18th-century French North America. The turbulent interface between ‘Atlantic’ and native systems of trade produced flows of (primarily non-Algonquian) slaves to the French Caribbean. ‘Colonizers traded between two and four million Indian slaves from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, most of whom were initially enslaved by other Native peoples’ (Rushforth 2012: 9). By the 18th century, Indians were increasingly racialised yet deemed less suitable for slavery, because they were seen to be fundamentally different to Africans.
In later centuries, despite the increasingly binary framework of white owners–enslaved Black people, North America evidences the relational importance of Indigenous and Black categories in racial colonial capitalism. Shifts in racial capitalism shaped the regulation of labour and worker–employer agreements. To understand capital accumulation, Shona Jackson (2024) tracks the racialisation of unproductive and productive labour as it interconnects Indigenous and Black experiences. Harris (2022) argues that indebtedness plays a key role in both cementing Indigenous labour in (landless) debt peonage and feeds into post-slavery contracts for Blacks in the United States. These accounts point to dominant relational economic calculations about labour across and between racial categories. This rapid overview of recent scholarship highlights how a fundamental axis of racialisation across diverse groups co-constitutes new structures of control of labour, resources, and products.
Final thoughts
In light of debates around racial capitalism and coloniality, this piece has sought to highlight the material economic consequences of racialisation under colonial capitalism. Taking as primary focus the Americas’ Indigenous peoples, long considered through ethno-culturalist lenses, I have argued that a relational account of interconnected economic and racialising processes reveals the significance of Indigenous racialisation to the colonial modernity inaugurated in 1492. Furthermore, the piece suggests that space-making and spatial differentiation have played an important role in moulding racial colonial capitalism, as the presence or absence of racialised groups has set the parameters for specific configurations of labour, resources, and power. Similarly at a larger scale, European conquest of Abya Yala set in train the reconfiguration of racial–economic–spatial orders as, over time, the expanse of the continent’s resources, terrain, and humanity became known through prior understandings of labour coercion, difference, and control. Writing this piece revealed the paucity of critical social science and humanities scholarship on Indigenous peoples’ contemporary labour and social reproductive relations in racial colonial capitalism. Although Indigenous resistance to rampant extractivism in their territories is widely studied, as are Latinx migrants’ incorporation into North American urban and rural economies, few in-depth accounts exist on how Indigenous people are entrained under dynamic, 21st-century racial colonial capitalism, despite the urgent need for such analyses.
Commerce, conquest, and colonialism: rethinking racial capitalism from Ireland
Gurminder K. Bhambra FBA
The term ‘racial capitalism’ has become increasingly popular in recent years in both academic and public discourse. It is often seen as a convenient shorthand bringing together historical lineages and conceptual understandings of race and capitalism. While many scholars argue for the necessary conjunction of the two—for example, Cedric Robinson (2020) in his classic text, Black Marxism—others, such as Loïc Wacquant (2023), have disagreed with such a presentation. Nonetheless, both agree that the emergence of capitalism is to be located in the transition from feudalism in Europe and that its underlying logic derives from the movement to free labour.
For Robinson, however, the European trade in human beings occurred at the same time as this transition and, for him, it points to the necessary racialisation of the development of capitalism. Wacquant disagrees and suggests that this relationship is contingent and not necessary to understand the development of capitalism, which is best theorised separately to race. The difference between them, then, is in terms of the importance afforded to race in the development of capitalism and whether or not it is a necessary condition.1 The problem as I see it, however, is not whether race should be understood as significant to the development of capitalism, but whether capitalism itself has been adequately conceptualised.
Modern capitalism tends to be regarded as a distinct and self-contained economic formation within modernity. The conceptual structure for its analysis is provided by Marx’s account of its emergence and, within mainstream sociology, this later comes to be re-interpreted through Weber. In contrast, as I have argued together with John Holmwood, we need to understand capitalism differently: that is, in terms of a political economy of colonialism (Bhambra & Holmwood 2023). Further, we suggest that colonialism should not be considered a companion condition of the emergence of capitalism—that would simply replace ‘racial’ with ‘colonial’ without addressing the deeper problems identified. Instead, we propose that capitalism is best understood as a system produced by colonialism.
In what follows, I set out the ways in which a more adequate consideration of colonial histories enables us to rethink the structures and processes that are otherwise attributed to capitalism and thereby rethink the conceptual construction of what we understand to be capitalism itself. I do this through an examination of the Adventure for Irish land in the mid-17th century, which contributed to the colonisation of Ireland and its political and economic incorporation into the English and then British colonial system.
Commerce and conquest
Dominant approaches to understanding the emergence and development of capitalism tend to point either to the significance of expanding trade and markets or to the changing nature of the social relations of production. Across both approaches, the transition is understood in terms of a movement away from a preceding stage of commercial or mercantilist society through an immanent logic—an impulsion ‘outwards’, whether of markets or production—that is independent of other processes. This period of mercantilism tends to be presented as occurring from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It is a period, as Nancy Fraser sets out, when absolutist rulers regulated commerce within the boundaries of their territories, ‘even as they profited from external plunder and long-distance trade’ (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018: 73; see Bhambra 2021 for further discussion).
The reference to an area within which commerce was regulated ‘internally’ suggests the boundaries of a nation state just at the point at which the boundaries of rule were being dramatically extended through colonial conquest. There is also an implicit recognition—through the use of the word ‘plunder’—of the illegitimacy of actions towards others. Yet, the historiography of capitalism rarely acknowledges the systematic contribution of colonial conquest to the development of economic practices that otherwise come to be called capitalism. Within the standard historiography, for example, capitalism tends to be associated with the move from the commercial activities of merchants to that of production and, specifically, industrialisation. This, however, misses the ways in which colonial activities were significant in configuring the economy.
While the typical idea of capitalism rests on a distinction between commerce and conquest, there is very little commerce without conquest in the period associated with its emergence (or in subsequent periods). This distinction relies on an assumption of developments within the economic sphere separate from other considerations. Or, to the extent that politics is admitted into the analysis—in understandings of political economy, for example—the politics refers to the interventions of the state in facilitating what are understood to be market-based economic practices. There is little consideration, however, of actions undertaken in the name of economic practices that have little to do with how the economy is typically defined, such as the expulsion of peoples from land. The dispossession of land from existing inhabitants, for example, is central to the possibility of converting land into capital and, thereby, into private property (Nichols 2018). It is only by acknowledging the significance of colonialism that we can come to a better understanding of the development of the modern economy.
The Adventure in Irish land
The English merchant elite in the early modern period were understood to be members of major trading companies and to have established their wealth through trade and commercial investments. However, as David Brown (2020) argues, they were also involved in the financing of early, explicitly colonial projects and making a return on these investments. The relatively successful 1641 Irish rebellion against English rule and the colonisation of land by Protestant settlers, for example, provided the basis for the Adventure for Irish land the following year. According to Brown, this was ‘a shared ownership speculation in the conquest of Ireland’ (2020: 2); that is, it was a private finance initiative that saw investors put up one million pounds to pay for a private army that would put down the Irish rebellion.
The financial arrangements, according to Karl Bottigheimer, ‘resembled those of a joint stock company’ and ‘initiated a financial debt which could only conveniently be satisfied with Irish land’ (1971: 44, 53). The confiscation of land was proposed in terms of also including ‘the complete removal of Irish Catholics from Ireland’ followed by a ‘total conquest’ based upon the establishment of plantations by English settlers (Brown 2020: 64). While it had been common practice, across preceding decades, ‘for English victors to seize the land of Irish rebels,’ they did not, in the process, seek to displace the Irish people (2020: 65). This venture differed from earlier ones in that private enterprise was now being mobilised to conquer, confiscate, and exploit the country with the removal of the Irish population central to this.
The return to investment in this Adventure was anticipated to be in the form of confiscated land; that is, those investing would be repaid with the landed estates of defeated rebels. The practice of awarding tracts of land, irrespective of whether the crown had any legitimate claim to these territories, was, as Brown (2022) argues, commonplace in the period. The negotiations also included the capture of one of the key mechanisms of state finance, the excise, by the merchants involved. This went on to transform the history of the state itself as ‘business connections transformed into potent political alliances’, and the acquisition of landed estates offered possibilities for social and political mobility domestically (Brown 2020: 36).
As this campaign did not emanate from parliament, nor was it funded by raising taxes, it has not been seen as an explicitly political act. However, it was authorised by the king and parliament. Indeed, as Brown notes, it was to be their last joint act until the restoration of the monarchy, after the civil war, in 1660. The colonisation of Ireland, through this process, integrated it into the functions and practices of the British state and enabled the latter’s further expansion across the subsequent centuries. In the process, one quarter of Ireland was mortgaged to English merchants and a land tax instituted that enabled ‘much of the royal household’s day to day expenses to be met by taxing Ireland, rather than the king’s subjects in England’ (Brown 2022: 21). While it could be suggested that the legitimacy of such actions was covered by the idea of the ‘spoils of war’, what is less well-established is the association with advances in banking practices consequent to such events.
As Brown sets out, ‘once Irish land had been acquired for a low value, it could be mortgaged at its real, higher value freeing up large amounts of capital for the new landowner’ (2022: 23) and, in the process, turning land into a commodity. The colonial sequestration of Irish resources—specifically, land and taxes—was fundamental to the capital available to English investors for other enterprises. As Brown argues, the conquest of Ireland—England’s first great colonial project—was based on ‘a vast transfer of wealth from two major groups of the population’—English taxpayers and Irish landowners—‘to a small number of well-connected investors and speculators’ (2022: 23). It seems that corporate welfare and leveraged finance—what in our period are associated with the latest phase of capitalism, that of ‘financialisation’—have a very long history. This history is colonial.
Similar processes were also in place in the fledgling US where, as K-Sue Park (2016) has argued, Indigenous lands were appropriated and turned into settler wealth through mortgages which released extensive capital for emerging enterprises. Park (2021) further points to the practice of colonial foreclosure whereby Native peoples were first coerced into indebtedness by settlers and then their lands were confiscated when they did not pay back the debt. The practice of foreclosure, as Park argues, was not sanctioned between whites until the late 17th century.
It would be peculiar to understand the Irish Adventure in land as a purely commercial endeavour, in that commerce is more typically understood in terms of barter and exchange not with the removal of populations. As such, it is more appropriately understood as a colonial act funded by private wealth with significant political consequences for the configuration of the state and the economy. Many commercial enterprises in this period were funded through the appropriation of the resources to which others had established and legitimate claims; claims that were overturned in the process of colonisation. In other words, mercantile capitalism was not possible without colonisation constituting the ground of its activities. The Adventure for Irish land can be seen as emblematic of the broader transformation of the extent and scope of international trade in the mid-17th century.
Conclusion
The standard history that is presented of commerce leading to capitalism relies on an assumption of developments within the economic sphere separate from other considerations. Or, to the extent that politics is admitted into the analysis—in understandings of political economy, for example—the politics refers to the interventions of the state in facilitating what are understood to be economic practices. There is little consideration, however, of actions undertaken in the name of economic practices that have little to do with how the economy is typically defined, such as the expulsion of peoples from land. It is only by acknowledging the significance of colonialism that we can come to a better understanding of both the economy and political developments. At least within sociology, the turn to racial capitalism makes this more difficult. It locates racialisation as the conjunction of racial ideologies and capitalism, rather than understanding it as a justification of colonialism and capitalism as the product of colonialism.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article depicts coffee plantation workers in El Salvador waiting in line for their wages in food. Photo by Eduard Paulig (1927), licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International license, from Wikimedia Commons.
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1
These arguments have been set out more fully in earlier pieces (see Bhambra 2024; Bhambra & Holmwood 2023).
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a22
Published on: 12 June 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
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Bhambra, G.K., Hall, C. & Radcliffe, S.A. (2025), ‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a22 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a22Crossref
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From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories Gurminder K. Bhambra, Elizabeth Edwards, Margot Finn, Fiona Williams
The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.
22 May 2024
Changing places and writing the postcolonial novel Abdulrazak Gurnah, Andrew Hadfield
In this conversation Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2021), discusses the nature of his fiction and how he became a writer. He outlines the factors that made him become a writer; the themes that he explores in his writing; the nature of his writing style; his literary allusions; the importance of family and the secrets that families keep; and his conception of his reader. The conversation highlights the significance of exile in his work, the ways in which people belong in communities, how frightening isolation can be for individuals, and how people cope in adverse circumstances.
9 December 2024
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