The mind of the plantation owner

A review of Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2024), £26.99

Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, excavates the economic, social and political context formative in the writing of Edward Long’s three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774. Still in print today, History of Jamaica is regarded as a key historical document of the period. Long’s influence as an architect of English racism from the days of plantation slavery was identified by the Marxist author Peter Fryer in Staying Power. Fryer referred to Long as the “father of English racism”.1

Hall is to be commended for bringing to light elements of Britain’s past often shrouded in half lies and deliberate misrepresentations. One immediate agenda is to analyse the complex and violent historical relationship between Britain and Jamaica, so as to pursue and underline the demand for reparative justice today.2 The book builds on her earlier work at University College London’s “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project”, which has now given rise to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at the same university.3 The research project illustrated the degree to which the ties between the Caribbean and Britain provided an invaluable boost to the prosperity of the latter.

A comparable work would be Paul Lashmar’s Drax of Drax Hall, with its singular focus on a particular plantation family.4 However, whereas Lashmar’s text adopted a journalistic and investigative style to reveal hidden connections, and was aimed at a popular readership, the approach taken by Hall’s book is more scholarly. It offers a critical and exploratory investigation of a historical text to uncover the underlying power relations.

As a socialist historian working in this field, Hall’s intention is to examine an area of the history of empire that has often been ignored by traditional historians, illuminating how racism is inextricably entwined with liberal thought. Her work seeks to answer a range of questions: what are the origins of English racism? How exactly did the newly developed category of race function in 18th century Jamaica? What would a case study on such a formative moment in what she refers to as racial capitalism look like? The result is a fascinating book.

Who was Long?

The role of Long’s History of Jamaica has been two-fold. First, the text provides us with a detailed account of how plantation slavery was organised. Second, it gives us an insight into the early racialisation of the enslaved, showing how race demarcated the division of labour.

The ironic title of Hall’s book, Lucky Valley, comes from the name of Long’s plantation, with its slave holding, which he, as part of a family with deep colonial roots, acquired in 1761. He had travelled to Jamaica three years earlier to seek his fortune and would return to England in 1769 as a prosperous man, but one now concerned about the rise of abolitionist sentiment among the masses. Furthermore, there would soon be a major legal challenge to the West Indian planter class, calling into question their rights to their “property”, with the Somerset v Stewart case of 1772. In the case, a judgment from Lord Mansfield declared that an enslaved person brought to England could not lawfully be recaptured and returned to his owner abroad. Once they set foot on English soil, the formerly enslaved person would be deemed free.

Long wrote his History of Jamaica with the aim of promoting Jamaica as an invaluable colony and convincing readers that the slave trade was vital to the overall financial wellbeing of Britain. It would become a hit with supporters of slavery but also furnished abolitionists with damning evidence of the trade.

Key concepts

In her work, Hall’s historical methodology makes use of a series of key concepts: racialisation, reproduction, disavowal and racial capitalism. Hall explores how Long became an early pioneer of scientific racism, presenting a taxonomy that would have an enduring and corrosive legacy. In terms of reproduction, enslaved families were not recognised as such by their owners; offspring could be sold and exchanged. In addition, enslaved women were forced to submit sexually to their owners.

Disavowal, a psychoanalytical term, is a recurring theme. It is applied here to explain how the ruling elite refused to recognise the full humanity of the enslaved, referring to how racialisation affected the slave owners’ minds: “Disavowal is connected with the denial of external realities, a refusal to think the unthinkable, a wish to put aside what cannot be integrated. This is a crucial aspect of the racist’s thinking”.5 This is a useful term, bringing some nuance to our understanding of the bonded dynamic of slaveowner and the enslaved.

Hall’s employment of the term racial capitalism is more speculative. The term was first applied in the context of apartheid South Africa, as activists debated the precise nature of the relationship of racism to capitalism in that context.6 Hall recognises that the term has been subject to a great deal of debate, especially when used as a more universal concept. If limited in its analytical utility, the term at least captures the evidently racial dimensions of the capitalist enterprise of slavery, with its associated racialised hierarchy and its ability to extract wealth to further the competitive accumulation process characteristic of capitalism.

In his book Black Marxism, which has become popular in academic circles, Cedric J Robinson offers his own interpretation of the term.7 However, Robinson does not locate the origins of racism in the material and ideological processes of transatlantic slavery. He instead views racism as a transhistorical phenomenon, of which modern capitalism simply offers a contemporary expression. Cedric Johnson, in a tour de force polemic, challenges Robinson’s conception as an idealist one, which fails to situate racism clearly within the emerging capitalist system: “Robinson’s account of racialism conflates various medieval forms of discrimination, hierarchy and affinity for modern racism. Racism is a type of prejudice, but not all forms of prejudice are racism. While there were all manner of tribal, ethnic, religious and sectional prejudices in pre-capitalist Europe, these were not racism”.8

Similarly, Alex Callinicos’s offers a suggestive comment:

We should treat capitalism and racism, as Antonio Gramsci would put it, as “methodologically” distinct, even if “organically” they are always found together in actuality. The merit of this approach is that it allows us to analyse the historically variable forms taken by both terms of the relationship and also to identify the equally variable mechanisms that connect them in different contexts.9

It is beyond the scope of this review to explore in further detail the complexities of the concept of racial capitalism, but clearly it needs to be treated with some care.

Plantation life

A strong section of the book under review is Hall’s outline of the system of racialisation as it operated in the Jamaican plantations. She writes:

In the minds of the planters, enslaved men and women were capital of a very particular kind, human capital. Their aim was to accumulate money capital through their production and sale of sugar. Eighteenths century planters were capitalist farmers and manufacturers operating in a mercantile frame which secured the economic and political interests of the mother country and within a colonial system organised on the basis of racialisation.10

Credit, in the form of paper bills, was crucial for the circuit of racial capitalism depicted by Hall. West Indian merchants, based in the City of London, offered credit and became significant links in the chain of British commerce. In accounting procedures such as double-entry bookkeeping, the enslaved were confirmed as goods and used as collateral for debt-recovery, along with other “physical assets”, such as cattle or furniture. She argues that many of these modern accounting systems developed from managing slavery, coining the explanatory term “dispassionate accounting”, reflecting how this approach supresses the suggestion of violent capture and enslavement in the planters’ minds.11

Hall explains how slave owners purchased the capacities to labour of those enslaved. Without the slave, the land had no value. It was the labour of the enslaved that created new value. She writes:

The circuit [of the triangular slave trade] operated within racialised and spatial specificities, utilising different regimes of exploitation, both wage labour and chattel slavery. It was a form of combined and uneven development; captives on the west coast of Africa, slavery in the Caribbean, wage labour in the metropole… Each moment in the circuit of capital production and reproduction…was racialised in specific ways.12

Furthermore, these were “factories in the field”, with the slave owners’ authority upheld by the colonial state and the militia. The “well-constructed machine” of the plantation required a clear division of labour: a hierarchy of white planters and then white overseers. Beneath them, the white craftsmen, stock keepers and storemen, then the servants who assumed superiority simply by the marker of skin colour. Most of the craftsmen were from among the enslaved, but even in these strata there were elites—coppersmiths, plumbers, carpenters, and so on—even if none escaped the threat of the whip. Plantations were run by a gang system, with slaves formed into units of production with specific tasks to be realised according to strict time constraints. Women worked mostly in the field.

The idealised, harmonious account offered by Long sought to erase any suggestion of the dehumanising existence of the enslaved. Consequently, he also divested himself of any responsibility for the appalling birth and death rates on the island. Plantation owners themselves claimed the high mortality rate was due to illness contracted in Africa, depression and general discontent—and nothing to do with the brutalising regime.

The construction of a racial ideology

The broader historical context for the emergence of racial ideology has been described by Ellen Meiksins Wood as a “paradox”.13 If, under capitalism, workers are encouraged to perceive themselves as formally equal and free subjects, liberated from feudalism as a result of the bourgeois revolutions, how could the unique status of the enslaved be explained? To justify slavery, an ideology arose that excluded the enslaved from the human race, declaring them “non-persons”, therefore denying them the status of “free” labourers.

In her chapter “Theorising racial difference”, Hall states that Long, living back in Britain, had to argue that colonial slavery was both legitimate and essential to the country. The absentee landlords, also living in Britain, had to be mobilised and had to recognise that their particular form of life was now under threat. To present slavery as a “natural” institution, Long had to normalise racial difference. Hall also writes of a paradox: that Long, who knew that the enslaved people were actual human beings, with human needs and skills, portioned off that aspect of his mind. In Hall’s terminology, this was the “disavowal” at the core of the plantation owner’s justification of racialised slavery.

In the early years of the Caribbean plantations, when bonded labour was widely used, the distinction, for instance in Barbados, between the Irish indentured servant and the imported African enslaved was one between Christians and non-Christians. Race, by contrast, was constructed as an inescapable condition, using it as an ideological rationale of the kind of “scientific” racism in which Long indulges. In Long’s taxonomy, on the first tier were the white men born in the colonies: “white creoles”. Particular qualities were attributed to them, such as being “tender fathers” or “firm friends”, but, on the negative side, they were said to lack public spirit and patriotism. Long was keen to defend these white creoles from the accusations of cruelty levelled at them by the abolitionists. In his racial hierarchy, white domestic servants were sometimes a necessary evil. White women were listless and indolent, often giving the task of breastfeeding to a “negro” or “mulatto” (a racial classification referring to those of mixed African and European ancestry), even if this had the perceived danger of corrupting the child’s blood.

The emergence of “free blacks”, who were able to buy their freedom, and “mulattos” presented a problem in Long’s racialisation. Long writes little of the “free blacks”. The “mulattos” aroused mixed feelings in him, as he was disgusted by the idea of miscegenation. To him, the growth of this group was a symbol of a lack of control by white men, which could impact negatively on the right to inherited property. He regarded the maroons, Africans who had escaped from slavery, hiding in remote environments, as “insufferable and insolent”.14 The colonists did however seek to co-opt the rebelliousness of the maroons, forging alliances with them to suppress the enslaved.

For the black enslaved, there were still further categorisations. These included “Creole negroes” (those born in the Caribbean), alongside “imported” or African blacks. The nature of “blackness” had itself become a subject of pseudoscientific inquiry from the 17th century. What caused it? Climate and environment? Or was it rooted in the blood and bile? It was in describing the supposed character of black people that Long’s racism was given full vent: blacks were brutish, licentious and lacked civilisation. However, by contrast, Long argued that the “creole negro” was capable of being made diligent and moderately faithful, through regular discipline from the master. Plantation life had, he argued, civilised them to some degree. Nonetheless he still described them as irascible, conceited, proud, indolent, lascivious, credulous and artful. Moreover, he was fond of describing the black enslaved using language that reduced them to the state of animals. Hall argues that this too was paradoxical, that “his use of animalising language never slipped into thinking that Negroes were not human. It was their human characteristic that the planters depended on”.15

Overall, Hall’s origin story of English racism is detailed and often innovative in its approach, utilising psychoanalytic techniques and terminologies, such as that of disavowal, to enter the mind of Long. At times, some sections felt repetitive and the work could perhaps have benefited from more ruthless editing. Nonetheless, Hall successfully elaborates on the racial encoding enacted in these times, and in a manner sensitive to issues of gender and class. Her work prefigures that of others, such as David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism, in the way she teases out contradictions and nuance, and in her use of a framework applying Marxist terminology and concepts to explain the labour process of slavery.16

She rightly concludes that we still inhabit the world Long helped construct—and that we need to redress and repair this injustice.

Stephen Philip is a long standing member of the SWP and is currently active in the Haringey and Enfield branch.

Notes