Cedric Robinson’s version of the “racial capitalism thesis” seems to involve three principle claims:
That processes of racialisation predate the onset of anything that can credibly be described as “capitalism”.
That processes of racialisation are an essential part of how capitalism developed and how it now works (i.e. that the extraction of surplus value proceeds by marking some groups out as exploitable and expropriatable on pseudo-biological, “racial” grounds).
That capitalism has not surpressed racialisation through some grand process of homogenisation (as a crude Marxist might have predicted). But rather that differentiation along racial lines has become more widespread as capitalism has developed.
With regards to the first claim, Robinson clearly shows that there were forms of “racialisation” (roughly speaking: attempt to demarcate groups on the basis of heritable biological traits) in medieval Europe and earlier. But he uses various terms to refer to this (ethnicity, race, language) and doesn’t clearly show that these were the same as the kinds of racialisation which emerged around slavery. He does not address the novelty of scientific racism, the way it presented an all-encompassing hierarchy of human worth (rather than binary insider-outsider). Is racial difference therefore the same as ethnicity (à la Wacquant)?
The second claim is harder to assess because it raises a quantitative empirical question - how much do and did processes of racialisation contribute to capitalist development and accumulation? - but is normally treated in purely theoretical terms. Indeed while Robinson claims that capitalism emerged within an already racialised social order, he doesn’t demonstrate that this racialisation was an integral part of its emergence - in fact he seems to take the latter for granted. The argument normally involves gesturing to processes of racialisation which enable higher profits and saying “look! we live under racial capitalism” (e.g. David Roediger). But what we really need is an account of how much those processes matter compared to all the other ways that capitalism extracts surplus value (the wage relationship; ownership of means of production; rents; monopolies; state violence; urbanisation; gender etc).
It is clear that colonialism and slavery played a crucial role in the development of capitalism (see Eric Williams for the West Indies and the Patnaiks for India - N.B. this does not mean that internal, endogenous processes were not equally crucial!). But the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ requires that racisms/racialisms were essential pre-requisites to colonisation and slavery, rather than post hoc justifications. I’m not sure there is a clear consensus here (Williams for example seems to suggest the latter in his account of West Indian slavery). The classic Marxist accounts of imperialism (a later stage of expansion/plunder beginning in the 19th century) also make a fairly convincing argument that a system of competing colonial metropoles was the result of purely economic pressures: underconsumption, domestic monopoly, and inequality drove capitalists towards foreign investments, which drove states to invest in military capacities to defend/enable those investments. All of this seems possible without racialisation.
At times, Robinson himself also seems to concede that capitalism could have developed in non-racialising ways if it had first emerged somewhere other than 15th-18th century Europe. Does he mean by this that racialism was unique to European history? (See Subrahmanyam below.)
In the modern world, it’s hard to tie any of the main centres of capitalist development directly to processes of racialisation (please note use of “main” centres there - obviously all kinds of egregious racism is involved in modern economy, but I’m trying to figure out how much of the modern economy depends on that racism). I often hear this argument made in reference to wage inequalities, but within-country wage inequalities are insignificant compared to between-country differences. And there I think that historic legacies of colonial extraction are far more significant than any ongoing processes of racialisation. Which takes us back to the debate above…
None of these putative counter-arguments to the second claim are conclusive, but I’m also not confident that advocates of the “racial capitalism” thesis have shown that racialisation is (a) quantitatively significant in the global extraction of surplus value and (b) not just a post hoc justification for something that would have happened anyway.
The third claim ('“The tendency of European civilisation through capitalism was thus not to homogenise but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial ones.’”) is very hard to test because we have no way of quantifying the extent of differentiation along racial lines (can you count the number of identities?). But the claim nevertheless necessarily involves a claim about quantities. I think a more useful question would be to think about the ways that capitalism simultaneously suppresses and produces novel forms of indentification (including racial identities). But that’s a way of dodging the question rather than actually testing Robinson’s third hypothesis…
Charles Post has argued that, although capitalism did not depend on racialisation for its development, it of necessity produces a proliferation of racialising processes: (i) Capitalism produces fundamental differentiations between workers and capitalists, but also a heterogeneity of profit rates, labour-processes and wage rates (because inefficient firms with fixed investments do not disappear) - so capitalism necessarily produces differentiated social classes; (ii) Capitalism also produces two deep contradictions in lived experience (wage relation appears as exchange between equals, but is felt as unequal; capitalism’s geographic expansion appears as universalising the benefits of civilisation, but is felt as coercive imposition of new social order); (iii) These contradictions and differentiations must be naturalised, and race is the way that naturalisation is achieved. Thus “Only if some people are viewed as and treated as less than ‘fully human’ can either capitalists or groups of competing workers make sense of a society where all appear to be equal, but there is real inequality between and within classes… Racist ideology, with its notion of inherent and unchangeable relations of inequality provides a potent mental road map for both capitalists and workers of the contradictory lived experience of the creation and reproduction of capitalist social-property relations.” But must they be naturalised? Must race be the vocabulary in which they are naturalised (why not meritocratic class ideology)?
In 2023, Loïc Wacquant published a fairly spicy article in which he argues that racial capitalism is nothing more than a “conceptual speculative bubble”. In particular, he breaks racial capitalism down into three claims: (i) racial inequality preceded and facilitated the emergence of capitalism, (ii) modern capitalism depends on leveraging and creating racial distinctions, (iii) race naturalises inequalities produced by capitalism. In response, he suggests that all three claims are ahistorical and universalising (“Atlantic-centred” in his words). He also raises some important questions: How much does racialisation matter compared to gender, the state, urbanisation? If all capitalism is racial capitalism, then is it also gendered capitalism, state capitalism, urban capitalism? And does joining two terms together help us to understand the myriad ways in which they are actually articulated in practice?
More interestingly, Wacquant argues that the racial capitalism thesis overlooks the varied forms of capitalism across the world and throughout history, the variety of ethno-racial systems, and the variation in how the two interact. This call to “decouple capitalism and race analytically so that their historical conjunction may be studied empirically” is something I’m broadly sympathetic to. But I’m less sympathetic to Wacquant’s tone and his far-too-quick dismissal of the first claim. (Wacquant is right to point out that Robinson only shows that racialisation predates capitalism, rather than that the former facilitated the emergence of the latter. But Wacquant skips over the literature which does address that question , particularly the debates around slavery, colonialism and the industrial revolution - see above.)
In response, Bhambra and Holmwood chastise Wacquant for making a Weberian analytic distinction between race and capital (the social and the economic) stand in for a properly historic analysis. But their solution is not “racial capitalism” but rather to replace capitalism altogether as an analytic category. In its place they propose “a political economy of colonialism within which the structures and processes that are otherwise attributed to capitalism are located and re-conceptualised”. They trace four stages of colonialism: “Colonialism through commercial corporations [stage 1] is succeeded by ‘colonialism as a national project [stage 2]’… which facilitated the development of what is otherwise seen as global industrial capitalism emanating from activities in the metropole”. The post-war boom [stage 3] is then re-conceived as “the patrimony of colonialism”, while neoliberalism marks a return to the “earliest form of modern colonialism [stage 4] through private property where the extractive practices of large corporations are able to dominate nation states”.
This is one aspect of Bhambra and Holmwood’s larger critique of modern political economy for neglecting the importance of colonialism to the development of the modern state, of welfare and social security systems and of capitalism itself. Focussing on the latter, they criticise prior studies for focussing on expanding trade and markets (Wallerstein) or social relations of production (Brenner/Wood) without acknowledging the colonial dimensions of both processes. They argue that the first phase of capitalism (mercantile capitalism) should be understood as “colonialism through private property” where growth occurs through primitive accumulation in the Americas and south Asia. The state was always a player in this process but it became increasingly central in the second stage of “state managed colonialism”, where imperial states systematically drained capital from their colonies. (Rather than a nation which happened to have an empire, we need to think of Britain as an imperial state.) Eventually this set the stage for social democracy, which was funded through further expropriation and extraction from colonised countries. (Bhambra makes the case with regards to Britain’s dependence on the “colonial drain” from India, but how did Greece, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, United States pay for their post-1945 welfare states?) They then explain the transition to neoliberalism as the result of decolonisation: without the colonies, Western countries could no longer afford their welfare states.
Subrahmanyam gives a more positive response to Wacquant which summarises various attempts to analyse the historical emergence of “race” as a category. He focusses on two debates: (a) the antiquity of ideas of race in the western or Euro-Atlantic world, and (b) the continuities and discontinuities between western concepts of race and ideas from outside the western world. He then concludes that there are “significant temporal and spatial variations” in the way that capitalism and race are intertwined.
(a) European ideas of race: “the intellectual historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub has proposed the existence of roughly five positions in the recent literature”: (1) race emerged in classical antiquity with Greeks and Romans and then persisted; (2) race born during the Crusades; (3) race emerged in the Iberian expulsion of Jews and Muslims and the construction of the Iberian empires in the 15th and 16th centuries; (4) race emerged with European Enlightenment and its projects of human classification; (5) race and racism only emerged from the 19th century, with Social Darwinism, “scientific racism”, and allied projects. Subrahmanyam shows each account to have some merits, but that each history throws up different relations between race and economic development.
(b) Outside of Europe: Subrahmanyam finds multiple, evolving forms of “ethnic differentiation based on religion (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), language, phenotypic characteristics, occupation, as well as freedom and unfreedom”. In the case of South Asia, there is jati and varna. In China, the Confucian four-fold scheme (shi-nong-gong-shang) was then embelished through contact with non-Han populations as result of imperial expansion and then further developed in 19th century with European colonial expansion. Again, the connection to the economic system varies across each of these cases.
Subrahmanyam also accuses Cedric Robinson of making a culturally essentialist argument in which “European civilization” works as “an essentialized construct that seems for him to exist outside history” and is always already racialised. (Subrahmanyam is also scathing about the citations that Robinson relies on for his argument.)
Michael Billeaux-Martinez and David Calnitsky in Historical Materialism propose the following taxonomy of different race-class relations. (Methodological note: Despite claims to be following a deductive analytic-philosophical procedure, the taxonomy seems to be a inductive summary of existing literature.)
Race as a form of class relation: two categories collapse into one e.g. racial slavery in USA, or pre-capitalist 'blue blooded' aristocracy (Robinson).
Race relations and class relations reciprocally affect one another:
Race affects class either because racism affects the patterns of inter/intra class alliances and thus the struggle (indirect - differential exploitation [Reich] or split labour markets [Bonacich] or internal colonialism [Davies]), or because racial inequality can generate whole new class positions (direct).
Class affects race either because class affects the patterns of various inter/intra racial coalitions (indirect) or because class structures set the broad parameters of racial inequality/salience (direct).
Race as sorting mechanism into class locations, through discrimination (ordinary and statistical) plus social network effects.
Race as a mediating linkage to class location i.e. race shapes kindship networks which shape potential rather than actual class locations (E.O. Wright calls these ‘shadow classes’, probable future class locations).
Race as a causal interaction with class in determining outcomes (intersectionality as interaction effect, non-intersectional world is one with only additive effects). (Adolph Reed's suggestoin that a race – class interaction term may imply a racially integrated ruling class and a racially divided working class.)
They then attempt to integrate these various relationships in a way that preserves the primacy of class (“class asymmetrically explains race”). They do this in a functionalist manner (the effects of the thing explain the thing itself, through some selection mechanism).
“Exploitative relations in capitalism generate instability that must be fixed one way or another. Capitalist class structures are not naturally sustained, and they only stabilise by means of a mechanism (of which race is one) that serves to divide the exploited; in turn, race increases the odds of the reproduction of the class structure, thereby helping to explain why it exists.”
Hence, race is explained by capitalist class relations because it exists where it helps to reproduce class structures, even if race is not necessary for capital.
Why not have a theory where class is explained by its role in stabilising systems of race?
In theory possible but haven’t seen it articulated and would struggle to explain the decline in racism over last 100 years.
But also: “At the highest level of abstraction, we argue that there is good reason to believe that race – which we call elsewhere a belief-dependent social construct – ought to be functionally explained by class – which we call a structure-dependent social construct.” … “Belief-dependent constructs, like religion, are fundamentally sets of beliefs and values that inform people’s worldviews and provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. By contrast, class systems, as ‘structure-dependent constructs’, are based on tangible social and economic arrangements that dictate the distribution of power, resources and opportunities within a society [biological sex is another such tangible arrangement]. Meaning systems will naturally assign meaning to those distributions. Therefore, religion, like race, works fundamentally as an ideological meaning-making system that justifies social arrangements, and these are natural candidates for the dependent rather than independent variables.”
“The main alternative to to class as prime mover would be a political mechanism: if we consider the case of anti-Asian sentiment in the US, it is clear that inter-group conflict can emerge in the political-cultural sphere without entailing material exclusions (i.e. class) at all. This provides an alternative explanation, but, again, race is not the prime mover. Both mechanisms avoid assigning a prime-mover status to race per se; that view entails a race-essentialist argument wherein race captures a fundamental groupness that most sociologists would disavow.”
Critique:
Can you really integrate these five statements on relationships between class and race when the statements are so heterogeneous?
Billeaux-Martinez and Calnitsky also seem to admit that this is not a universal account of race… “The empirical effects of race on class that effectively reproduce the class structure are those that can be functionally explained... On the other hand, those effects of race on class that do not have an impact on the class structure are not functionally explained by class.” So how to explain those other aspects of race? Just inter-group conflict?
Julian Go’s “Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism” provides a brief sketch of different uses of the term, drawing out two key features of it:
The assertion that there are deep connections between racism or racial inequality and capitalism (mostly links between precapitalist racial divisions in Europe and the subsequent development of capitalism, or slavery and capitalist development, or Apartheid and South African capitalism, or in modern disparities within the working class, or in modern capitalism’s ongoing dependence on violence)
It is is typically used to refer to global relations rather than capitalism within a single national context.
The first critique that Go makes is to question what its proponents mean by “race”. Robinson himself oscilates between describing linguistic and religious differences as ‘racial’, at other times he calls them ‘ethnicities’, elsewhere ‘national differences’. In fact, Go suggests an alternative reading of Robinson in which “racialization—the process of turning groups into biological entities called “races”—was a part of modern capitalism, not its precursor”. Citing Robinson: “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (p. 26).
The main question though is what is the relationship between ‘race’ and ‘capitalism’? Is it just contingent, historical accident (Walzer)? Or logically necessary (racial capitalism proper)? Latter comes in two forms: Ideological (capitalism requires inequality and racism legitimises it), and Fraser’s argument that capitalism requires both exploitation (through wage labour) and expropriation (of racialized “dependent subjects”). Go finds the arguments for logical necessity unpersuasive because there is no necessary reason why ‘race’ should play either of those roles. He suggests social difference as a better category for thinking about what justification and expropriation require.
Onur Ulas Ince’s Before the Colour Line (2025) argues that the “racial capitalism” literature has ignored the role of capitalism on processes of racialization (focussing instead on how racialisation affects capitalism).
He rejects Robinson et al.’s “civilizational” models of racialism, instead understanding racialism as being connected to modernity (quotes Nancy Stepan, “What is striking is that, while Greeks assumed they were superior to all ‘barbarians,’ no attempt was made to rank the non-Greek peoples in a hierarchy of inferior and superior types, as judged by some Greek standard of physical and cultural worth.”)
Colonial capitalism - “neither the practices associated with colonialism (conquest, subjugation, exploitation) nor the motives behind it (pursuit of power, revenue, and resources) are in themselves modern or European. The world-historical significance of modern colonialism cannot be explained by sheer quantitative intensification and geographic extension of these general practices… I submit that capitalism, as an epochal social order with historically unique dynamics — above all the drive towards endless accumulation, commodification, and abstract domination — gives modern European colonialism a number of its defining characteristics”
Capitalism defined by “structural imperative of ceaseless accumulation”, ever-increasing commodification, extraction via surplus value. Three elements: “accumulation/profitability, commodification/commensurability, and exploitation/productivity”.
Primitive accumulation at the heart of colonialism was process of “violent expropriation of colonial populations and… experimentation with novel methods of organizing land and labor, finance and investment, and security and risk”.
Latter is often ignored but is vital: “This preoccupation with productive capacity has been thematized under the ideology of “improvement,” which threads through seventeenth and eighteenth century English and British social thought, both at home and abroad... Exemplary in this regard were seventeenth-century political economic arguments in England, excavated by Steven Pincus, which attributed the capacity to create economic value to labor rather than land. The corollary was to pursue colonial and commercial policies that promised greater stimulus to employment and labor productivity, steering away from the Spanish model of conquest and resource extraction (which had become a cautionary tale to the English) and promoting colonial settlement and commercial agriculture overseas and export- oriented manufacturing at home. Pincus 1998; Pincus 2009, especially chapter 12.”
Hence “archipelagic view of capitalism’s development parts with single origin stories… The archipelagic model instead focuses on specific sites, networks, and the cumulative intensities of colonial capitalist formations, such as slave-plantation capitalism, company capitalism, and settler capitalism, in their dynamic, networked totality”. Puts particular emphasis on way colonialism fed into state-development (“war made the state, and the state made war” + “commerce made the empire, and the empire made commerce”).
“To the ever-expanding range of social alterity disclosed by colonial encounters, European intellectuals responded by filtering and molding such diversity into commensurable units that were legible as part of a social hierarchy”
Co-development of racialisation and capitalism:
Subsumption of labour. “The crucial feature of capitalist subsumption, one that Marx deems “common to both forms” (formal and real), is the transformation of the social character of subsumed labor into wage labor even though this does not necessarily assume the form of legally free wage labor.. “wage labor” in the Marxist sense does not mean legally free wage labor but living labor whose access to means of production and reproduction is mediated by capital and conditional upon its production of surplus value.” But “Whereas formal subsumption can extract only absolute surplus value, real subsumption extracts “relative surplus value” by raising unit labor productivity.”
““Formal subsumption” obtains when “capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is, takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production.”74 In this process, the technical composition of laboring process remains largely unchanged but, first, production is now brought under the command of capital and pressed to yield commodifiable surplus, and second, direct producers’ ability to perform labor as before now depends on the material conditions controlled by capital”
“This is in contrast to “real subsumption,” which “transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions” by reconstituting the technical aspects of the production process… [through] the “socialization of labor” through cooperation, division of labor, and application of technology and scientific knowledge to production under the direction of capital”
Actually existing capitalist formations include “various combinations of formal and real subsumption of labor. These combinations render colonial capitalism a variegated totality… the capitalist “articulation” of slavery, serfdom, independent commodity production [was less] a process of their conjoining with wage labor through commodity exchange than their reconstitution as wage labor (that is, capital-positing labor) in the sphere of production”
“The variegated, archipelagic totality of colonial capitalism, comprising not just free labor and slave labor but a whole spectrum of coerced and dependent forms including indenture, debt bondage, corvée, sharecropping, tenancy, and peasant production, brings into view the correspondingly archipelagic topography of experiments with ordering and encoding subject populations in the service of profit and revenue… The concept of subsumption thus furnishes a meso-level conceptual tool for parsing the internal variegation of historical capitalism, illuminating specific colonial capitalist formations that conditioned the perception and ordering of colonial difference into proto-racial schemas”
Real abstractions: “An enduring, if under-appreciated, insight of Marx that capitalist abstractions are not formal abstractions of the mind [Hegel] but “real abstractions” that obtain where the principal mode of organizing social interdependence is the exchange of commodities between property owners”. Real abstractions exist in “structures of practice”.
“What the process of subsumption reconstituted, therefore, was not only the forms of labor in the narrow material sense but also the socio-symbolic systems of difference and hierarchy in which these forms were encased. The capitalist subsumption of labor was at the same time the capitalist subsumption of social difference, its subordinate incorporation into a system of signification aligned with the capital’s way of seeing, dividing, and ordering the world… Along with their forcible integration into a capitalist world system, peoples, lifeworlds, and cosmologies that were literally and figuratively continents apart were corralled into an ordinal schema that deemed them advanced or backward, superior or inferior, by the extent to which they were organized around the production of value. Thus the “barbarous Hottentots” of southern Africa would compare favorably to the “savages” of the Amazon because the former had formed rudimentary notions of property and political organization. Both would rank below the “agricultural” societies of India in which social division of labor and wealth accumulation had developed much further. And the latter would pale in comparison to European “commercial” societies…
“What is remarkable is that the purported European difference and superiority derived not so much from possessing some unique and inimitable ontological traits as from occupying a particular coordinate in a universal model of socioeconomic progress keyed to capitalist social forms”
Capitalist racialization - “the ideological process of elaborating social difference into racial categories through civilizational hierarchies that are predicated on the degree of subordination of social production to capital accumulation… a principle of ordering that is common to capitalist and racial hierarchies, one that is conceptually continuous across racial compartmentalizations so as to make ordinal comparison and ranking possible…
The emergence of such standards over the longue durée of colonial capitalism was without doubt entangled in multiple, intersecting, and shifting languages of ordering and judging human diversity, but from the late-eighteenth century onwards it found its predominant ideological expressions in “civilization” and later “race” as cardinal paradigms for organizing plurality into hierarchy”
“One ought to seek this mode of perspectivization — “seeing like capital” — in the outlook of colonial merchants, planters, administrators, surveyors, labor recruitment agents, as well as metropolitan merchants, financiers, statesmen, lobbyists, and publicists viewing the world as a domain of possibilities for profit, revenue, and power. These are the dramatis personae” of this story.
The link between capitalism and racialisation is that they have a shared logic of differentiation-in-commensurability: in both cases labour/meaning are “subsumed” by capital, a “real abstraction” produced through social practices and actions of colonial states and colonial capitalists. But also admits to existence of “proto-racial material” out of which these systems of meaning were constructed. And some instrumentalisation in claim that racial systems of differentiation were functional for colonial capitalism.
Catherine Hall’s essay in History Workshop Journal, “Racial Capitalism: What’s in a Name?” provides a useful summary of classic Marxist accounts of the relationship between race/plantation slavery and the development of capitalism (also noting that this implicitly frames slavery as pre-capitalist in keeping with Marx’s own thoughts on the subject).
Eric Williams’s argument in Capitalism and Slavery about the relation between wealth derived from plantation slavery and the development of industrial capitalism (provided capital for investment and innovation) (UCL's Legacies of Slavery project). Williams also showed that plantation slavery itself was a capitalist system
In Hobsbawm’s classic essay, ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’ (1954), he argued that the colonial plantation was intrinsically linked to metropolitan accumulation: the demand from Africa and the Americas for manufactured goods stimulated modern industry. The major achievement of the seventeenth-century crisis was the creation of a new form of colonialism.
Robin Blackburn, following Marx and Hobsbawm, insisted the plantation system facilitated the emergence of a fully capitalist economy, and ‘extended primitive accumulation’. The plantations were ‘dependent and hybrid socioeconomic enterprises … an artificial extension of mercantile and manufacturing capital in the age of capitalist transition, extending their reach at a time when fully capitalist social relations were still struggling into existence’.
Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism insisted that the historical development of capitalism and race were inseparable, unearthing the deep histories of the unity of capital and race to medieval Europe and to the tendencies within European civilization to read the full gamut of social differences as, in some manner, ‘racial’ ones
She also cites Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis, Walter Johnson’s Cotton Kingdom of the Mississippi Valley, and James Vernon’s essay “Heathrow and the Making of Neoliberal Britain”.
Her analysis of how racial capitalism functioned in the eighteenth century Atlantic world is worth quoting at length (esp. for its focus on the role of the state):
The system of West India trade was a capitalist system. It centred on enslaved Africans, sugar, and rum and developed over time across the Atlantic. It was complex and hybrid, transformative of African and Caribbean societies and the mercantile capitalism of early modern Britain. It marked a particular phase in the organization of racial capitalism, when goods were exchanged for people, and cane was 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, utilizing different regimes of exploitation.26 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. Their labour, once purchased, involved no monetary cost for their owner for the rest of their lives. 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 by predominantly white waged labour. 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. Each moment in the circuit of capital –production, reproduction, distribution, and consumption – was embedded legally and politically in racialized. gendered, and class practices …
Mercantilism was never hegemonic, but it framed the metropolitan/colonial settlement which was established from the time of conquest and remained in place when Edward Long was writing his history. He accepted its basic premises: it was the protection offered to the planters by the metropolitan government through supports from the military, the navy, the law, and the system of imperial preference for West Indian sugar that had ensured that merchants would be prepared to offer credit. The loans which facilitated the purchase of land, labour, and the works, were all essential for the development of a sugar economy… Geopolitics played a defining part in this system. The rival mercantilist claims of the British and French empires dominated the eighteenth century with a succession of wars. Since wealth was believed by the mercantilists to be finite, struggles for control of territory, of peoples, of enslaved Africans, and of sugar, tobacco and other commodities erupted globally …
The island was a garrison state from the time of conquest, initially ruled by martial law. A small island in the Caribbean sea, dangerously close to the territories of France and Spain, traditional enemies of England, meant that the protection of trade from foreign competition was vital … Planters were insistent from the earliest days of the infant colony on their need for captives. The population of the enslaved expanded, soon hugely outnumbering the whites. This was an object of concern to the colonial state: could the armed minority defend themselves and their property effectively? Efforts to attract new white settlers were a feature of metropolitan and colonial policy-makers, well aware of the acute demographic imbalance and its dangerous implications …
The form of racial capitalism that operated across the mid eighteenth-century Atlantic depended on the articulation of state powers with the economic and labour practices of the West India trade and the plantation, and with their concomitant racialized ideologies and reproductive systems. Jamaica could not have functioned as a successful plantation economy without mercantile capital from the metropole, preferential duties for sugar, and military and naval support. The enslaved population could only be held in subjection by the individual violence of planters combined with the settlement that had been made with the Maroons, the slave codes of the colonial state, and the presence of two British regiments. The system was never without conflict and contradiction: whether in the form of rebellions of the enslaved, tensions between the aspirations of colonists for their ‘rights as freeborn Englishmen’ and metropolitan determination to preserve imperial authority, or dependence on assumptions of racial difference that had to be constantly reworked since they could never be finally settled. It was this combination of powers and practices which enabled the plantation system to function and reproduce itself, accumulating capital and in the process enriching some lives while wrecking many others.
Satnam Virdee, writing in Historical Materialism, sets out to complicate the ‘long-standing consensus that the origins of racism lie in the capitalist colonisation of the Americas’. He criticises Political Marxists - who think that ‘race is crystalised’ (Charles Post) in seventeenth century English America - for having a narrow and static view of racism as anti-blackness. And he criticises decolonial thinkers - who push the historical formation of racism back in time to sixteenth century Spanish America - for ruling out a priori the possibility of intra-European racisms.
Virdee explicitly celebrates Robinson’s work:
“racism is ‘not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples’ forming an intrinsic ‘part of the inventory of Western civilization’ since the twelfth century... In particular, Robinson focuses his attention on the widespread use of migrant slavery in the Mediterranean region in occupations as diverse as domestic service and mining … the prevalence and persistence of such slavery required justification, particularly after the consolidation of Christianity in Europe. And as Robinson shows, it is during the medieval period that the writings of ancient apologists for slavery including Aristotle and Plato were wrenched from their historically specific contexts to provide the intellectual legitimation for feudal elite oppression and exploitation of the migrant and slave”
“because capitalism emerged from within this feudal order, an order that was already deeply stained with the logic of racialised difference and hierarchy, Robinson contends it was inevitable that capitalist development and expansion would also pursue ‘essentially racial directions' ... instead of reducing difference, the emphasis in Robinson’s account is placed on the continuities with developments in feudal society and particularly the tendency of ‘racial capitalism’ to extend modes of racialised differentiation as the European elites moved to bring the world under its domain
He then restates the classic constructivist account of race: “Racism doesn’t emerge with the politicisation of phenotypical differences as decolonial scholars claim nor with the sifting and hierarchical ordering of humans into discrete biological categories as Political Marxists argue because there is no such thing as an absolute biological substance… this essay is informed by an understanding that ‘the visibility of somatic characteristics is not inherent in the characteristics themselves but arises from a process of signification by which meaning is attributed to certain of them.’”
He then traces the emergence of racism back to the crisis of European feudal society in the aftermath of the Black Death and in the intra-elite and class conflicts around the emergence of the Absolutist state:
Spain: Reconquista launched to (re-)Christianise the peninsula they had conquered but which was now multi-ethnic and multi-religious (1000s - 1200s). Crisis of Black Death and feudal production fed antisemitic theories about origins of the plague and pogroms of the 1300s which marked shift away from attempts at conversion in early centuries. Jewishness came to be seen as 'transmitted in the blood' and came to dominance by 1400s blood purity statues [limpieza de sangre]. Emergence of racist antisemitism linked to struggles to absolutist state formation as Church and Monarchy and Nobles forged unity through Christianity. Inquisition established immediately after official inauguration of Spanish absolutism with marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. At this exact moment Colombo set off for Americas and expansion in number of blood purity statutes. “the Spanish who left for the Americas emerged from a political culture where they already understood themselves as battle-hardened Christian warriors imbued with a racialised religious superiority rooted in blood and descent ... in the New World, these Spanish conquistadores and missionaries would go onto adapt this racialised mental framework to make sense of the Native American and the African – except now, the tainted bloodlines could be discerned on the body itself”
England: Nobility were jealous of Spanish Empire and its wealth and explicitly used racial cleansing of Iberian peninsula and the Indies as model for colonisation of Ireland. Gaelic Catholicism looked quite different to English Catholicism so Irish quickly branded as pagans, then barbarians - people who could not be bargained with and had to be dealt with viciously and violently. Arguments about race as lineage then developed alongside increasing violence of colonisation. English Civil War – itself triggered by the Gaelic Irish rebellion against colonial subjugation in 1641 – involved its own racial categories: Freeborn Englishmen vs Norman-descended Nobility. Also coincides with English colonisation of Americas: conflicts in Ireland and within England itself helped produce a racialised self-understanding among the Puritans migrating to the Chesapeake region. With profit/production threatened by non-compliant multi-ethnic workforce comprising English and Africans labourers, from 1640s elites of Virginia adopted categorisation of English and ‘Negro’. This happened at level of law but it wasn't accepted by English labourers as a group. After defeat of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 (1,000 English and African labourers rose up in armed rebellion against the Governor William Berkeley demanding end of ‘chattel bond-servitude'), Viriginia elite embraced language of whiteness to break this solidarity (black-white dyad fixed on top of English-Negro dyad, which itself had built on Christian-heathen dyad - three linguistic shifts in three generations).
William Conroy (building on Go and philosophical discussion of contingency/necessity) distinguishes between three tendencies in modern accounts of the “problemmatique of race and class”:
Reject the claim that capitalism and racism are necessarily related, argue that they are discrete social systems (dual systems theory - Walzer)
Racism and capitalism (or race and class) are not two separate systems, but rather mutually constituted distinctions within a shared unity (Althusser via Stuart Hall). “Social totality is comprised of many moments and contradictions – of many partial totalities – none of which is directly reducible to, or independent from, the others. One must attend to historical specificity in order to understand the conjunctural placement of racism vis-à-vis capitalism … even if each part of the whole is understood as reciprocally co-evolutionary.”
The ‘strong program’ on racial capitalism: capitalism is necessarily racialized because (i) capitalism requires expropriation, dispossession, and/or working-class stratification [three most commonly referred to functions of racism], and (ii) race and racism (must) name the process of social ascription through which that occurs.
He argues that arguments for the ‘strong programme’ are a form of ex-post facto functionalism. He quotes Go: “A theory of capitalism might demonstrate that race has been historically necessary for capitalist accumulation by reference to empirical reality... But the claim that race is a logical necessity to capitalism would have to derive from a theory of capital, not from the empirics alone.”
Race is therefore “a contingent – which, emphatically, does not mean local or insignificant – relatively autonomous, and historically path-dependent terrain of struggle in capitalist society, which has largely functioned to maintain capital’s necessary disequilibrium between the value form and its value relations [i.e. between circulation of capital through commodities and wider socio-ecological networks which make that circulation possible], but need not do so.”