Capitalism and Slavery. Part 1.

The Dig

Daniel Denvir

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2019

⏱️ 134 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three interviews: historians Linford Fisher, Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, and Emily Owens.

Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig's recent Slavery's Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This first of two episodes begins with historian Linford Fisher, who explains that the English settlement of North America was a settler-colonial project that required genocidally dispossessing indigenous people of their lands. What you might not know is that a central tactic for that dispossession, in New England and Virginia alike, was the threat and actual enslavement of native people, including the widespread practice of forcing native youth to labor in English homes. Then historians Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, who pick up where Fisher leaves off: slavery wasn't the South's peculiar institution; it was the bedrock of the northern economy. And finally, historian Emily Owens on sexual labor under slavery: what, Owens' work explores, did slavery and freedom mean for women for whom, in brothels or the home, sex was work? On the next episode, Dan has two more interviews looking at the big picture questions of slavery, capitalism, revolution and colonialism, and an interview with a group of public historians who teach about slavery today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters at patreon.com and by Nplus1 magazine,
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0:14.3	and cultural criticism. Nplus one's brand new issue, Headcase, is now available in print and online, and it is full of great pieces that are perfect for dig listeners like you.
0:29.5	One that you might like is Spade Work by political theorist and friend of the dig, Alyssa Battastony, whose stellar and mind-bending interview with Donna
0:39.6	Haraway appeared on the show last week. In the essay, Battastone discusses her work as a union
0:46.6	organizer at Yale in the face of institutional and political opposition, and reflects on the lived
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1:41.1	That's N-P-L-U-S-O-N-E-M-A-G.com slash The Dig.
1:59.5	Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.
2:04.0	My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.
2:10.0	We're not typically taught that the history of American slavery is also the history of capitalism, and that the history of capitalism is,
2:21.7	by the same token, fundamentally rooted in enslaved labor and the murderous trade in human property.
2:30.0	I, for one, grew up thinking that slavery was something bad that the South did, because of a moral failing and character flaw called racism.
2:40.0	But, as Barbara Fields put it, in her classic 1990 New Left Review essay, Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America, quote, the object was to produce
2:54.9	cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy. White supremacy, however, was still no
3:06.0	doubt produced, and in great quantities. And so racism became
3:11.8	a force that not only continues to serve capitalist political economic purposes today,
	...

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