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HomeNews and eventsEventsOpen lecturesSummer 2022Reproducing race across the Black/White Atlantic: England and Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century

Reproducing race across the Black/White Atlantic: England and Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century

Talk

Professor Catherine Hall, Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London

This event has now finished.

This event has been rescheduled, the new time and date is shown below.

Event date
Thursday 30 June 2022, 6pm to 7pm
Location
In-person only
Room K/122, the Huntingdon Room, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (Map)
Audience
Open to alumni, staff, students, the public
Admission
Free admission, booking required

Event details

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.