Racial Capitalism: What’s in a Name?

Abstract

Racial capitalism is a way of talking about the intersections of racisms and capitalisms: but how does it operate in practice? This essay explores the derivation of the term and focuses on one concrete example from the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Hereditary racial slavery and mercantile capitalism were articulated together: the expropriation of African lives and labour enabled the production of wealth for slave-owners and merchants. Both the metropolitan state and the Jamaican colonial state were critical in providing economic, legal, political and military frameworks legitimating White power and Black subjection.