Reproducing Race across the Black/White Atlantic: England and Jamaica in the mid-C18

This lecture, focusing on the slaveholding family of the Longs and the plantations they owned in Jamaica, will explore the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies in the mid-C18.

‘The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe’, wrote Marx, ‘needed, for its pedestal slavery pure and simple in the new world…Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.

Capital and labour were neither abstract nor anonymous; rather they were men and women with blood coursing through their veins: the bloodlines of white colonists were supposedly pure, those of the enslaved supposedly polluted, and this provided one legitimation for their subjection.

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