Analyses of āracial capitalismā in the United States still tend to be parochial, limited to the American nation-state and rooted in American slavery. But American slavery was part of a world system of empire and settler colonialism, as Beckertās book so usefully demonstrates. Indeed, as Onur Ince observes, nation-states are themselves a product of imperial and colonial policy. When tracing the history of capitalism, then, it is better to start with early-modern ācolonial empiresā than individual nation-states. As Ince notes, colonialism was important not just for organizing and controlling land and labor in newly intensive ways; it also provided, with the help of violence, new ways of organizing social production. Colonial and imperial entrepreneurs found themselves with a free hand in āestablishing regimes of bonded labor, extirpating indigenous inhabitants, and wreaking havoc on the forms of land tenure they found in place, from America to India to Australia.ā The new political, legal, and social arrangements born in colonialism and imperialism allowed, in turn, āfresh fields of investment, expanded markets ā¦ and novel forms of economic enterprise called forth by colonial ventures, such as colonial joint-stock companies that prioritized the interests of their āshareholdersā over the well-being of the āstakeholders.āā They allowed new forms of direct control over menās and womenās bodies, enabling black bodies to function as capital. As Sylvia Wynter argues, āManā as the universal subject of history was invented on the plantation, defined against indigenous, immigrant, and imported populations considered savage, heathen, and lacking the capacity for self-determination. āEconomicsā was invented there, too, Wynter argues ā understood not as the science of provisioning for human beings in general, but rather the science of reproducing the material conditions of existence for the production and reproduction of Man.
