Figuring Enslavement

While there is no doubt about the historical, cultural, and political significance of Atlantic slavery in the making of the modern world, the question of how its multiple legacies can be further, and more concretely, specified in the contemporary moment is currently at issue both inside and outside the academy. The campaign for slavery reparations has been reactivated, most notably by the recent articulation of a set of demands made to the European slaving nations by CARICOM.¹ The extent of contemporary human trafficking is itself raising questions about the place of Atlantic slavery within wider histories of enslavement and their afterlives. At the same time, the official memorialization of Atlantic slavery is taking shape, although often problematically, in the context of the everydayness of black killings by the police and an increasingly reactionary set of public discourses about racial justice. These discourses and actions are being resisted spectacularly and energetically in the explosion of radical protest associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. In short, questions of how to relate slavery’s past to an uneasily multicultural present remains the subject of raw and contested public debate in a variety of interrelated ways and places.

One of the ways in which reparations activists have been trying to secure the notion of the concrete legacy has been to engage in historical projects that attempt to “trace the money.” In the early 2000s, particularly in the United States and the UK, activists and academics began exposing the extent to which many contemporary multinational corporations have their foundations in slavery—especially banking, railroad, tobacco, and insurance companies. On the basis of their evidence, African American reparationists launched lawsuits against these corporations. These suits have since failed or stalled, but the very fact that they were brought stimulated public debate, and provoked significant reaction. Some companies hurriedly sought to translate the exposure of their corporate complicity in slaving into signs of what we now call corporate responsibility. For example, several large multinational insurance companies admitted the fact that they once insured the lives of the enslaved as an early practice in the United States and the UK, and apologized for having done so. Under legal duress, some disinterred the slaving policies buried in their archives and made them publically available. These apologies and the disclosures have become milestones in the argument for reparations, which itself has a long history.

More recently, the British Legacies of British Slave-ownership Project has activated the archive in a related way.² It has examined the records of the commission set up to administer payment of the £20 million paid by the state to British slave-holders as part of the Emancipation Act. Eric Williams’s argument about the significance of British colonial slavery for the takeoff of Britain’s industrialization is finally acquiring the detailed empirical evidence that confirms his claim. An extraordinary, and hitherto hidden, picture is emerging of not only a set of corporate foundations in slavery but also the subsequent trajectories of those funds that were acquired as compensation for slavery’s ending, and that were funneled—postemancipation—into key financial, industrial, and political institutions. The members of the research team are not only tracing the evolution of particular financial and commercial businesses that received slave compensation (and the redeployment of those monies into other investments) but also tracing further concrete legacies that extend from, and that are intimately bound into, the economic afterlife of slavery. These include a set of imperial legacies to do with the ways in which those monies circulated through the wider contours of the British empire as ex–slave owners moved on as investors, administrators, and settlers in colonial spaces within and beyond the slave colonies, as well as the impact of these monies on the political, cultural, historical, physical, and built landscapes of the imperial nation itself (Hall, Draper, and McClelland, 2014). This kind of foundational research cannot but facilitate, and to some extent shape, the engagement of cultural critics who are interested in tracing the less immediately...