“To see the Issue of these his exorbitant practices”: A Response to “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century”

This essay responds to the articles included in the special issue of ECTI, “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” and uses its response to those essays, plus a reading of archival documents from a law suit brought by a slaveholder against a former slave, to argue that racialized systems of accumulation during the eighteenth century proceeded by dispossession and possession all at once.