The visual economy of race and capitalism

RECITALS SEMINAR

By Diamond Ashiagbor and Raphaële Xenidis.

This session will explore the legal form and material form (images and artefacts) underpinning the political economy of slavery, indenture, and transitions to ‘free’ waged labour. The aim is to interrogate the visual and/or representational dimensions of the role of race and colonialism in the evolution of the legal form which governs contemporary work organisation.

It has long been recognised that the transition from feudal to modern work relations entailed ongoing obligations of obedience, discipline and service for workers, albeit in new legal forms. There was, arguably, no ‘clean break’ between ‘unfree’ and free labour, whether on plantations after the abolition of slavery, in the introduction of indentured labour, or in the quasi-penal master-servant model of capitalist work relations, and the modern waged labour contract.

The session traces the visual economy of racialisation and colonialism, focusing on the manner in which legal and material forms functioned as instruments by which coercive and unequal work relations were both developed and transformed. Material examples to be considered include financial instruments that created and maintained the trans-Atlantic slave trade – such as maritime insurers’ ‘risk books’ i.e. the ledgers in which underwriters would list the agreements they underwrote to insure the loss from slaving voyages; and contracts of indenture which marked the point of transition (1834-1917) whereby indentured Indian and Chinese labourers were recruited to replace enslaved West Africans in Caribbean plantations.

More information: Recitals website