Sylvie Laurent, Capital and Race. History of a Modern Hydra, Seuil, 2024
A little over 500 large-format pages, 70 pages of notes, almost every one of which gives one or more references to other books and/or articles, this is a dense book, to say the least. This should not frighten readers: I give these figures not to intimidate them, still less to boast about having overcome this difficulty, but rather to warn that this note will, once again, only offer an overview of the text. This brevity can be attributed either to a certain intellectual inadequacy on my part or quite simply to the difficulty of the exercise. In any case, I already highly recommend reading this book, written in a clear, precise and very accessible style. It deals with the close link between race and capital, well represented by the figure of the hydra. It is clear that this is still a burning issue today, if only through the ongoing genocide in Gaza, not to mention of course the racism ravaging so-called postcolonial societies, as we saw again this week[1] in France, with the escalation of censorship against LFI, from the refusal of the University of Lille to host a meeting in support of the Palestinians to the summons by the judicial police, on the grounds of “glorifying terrorism”, of the person who was to be the main speaker, via the edict of the Prefecture of the Nord department outright banning this same meeting on the pretext of the risk of “disturbing public order”…
No African trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no gingerbread or indigo… No islands, no land, no land, no trade. Aimé Césaire[2]
The link between race and capital is forged in very specific times and places, even if these times are spread over long periods of time and if these places tend to spread all around the planet, in a first globalization. This is clearly one of the main lessons of this book: capital (and capitalism), like race (and racism), are historical phenomena, one of the common features of which has always been the claim to pass themselves off as “natural” as well as timeless givens.
Sylvie Laurent places their twin birth date in 1492. As we know, Christopher Columbus, a Genoese merchant commissioned by the Crown of Castile and Aragon, which had just completed the inappropriately named Reconquista – a conquest pure and simple, of course – marked by the fall, that same year, of Granada, the last bastion in the hands of the Moors, Columbus, therefore, in search of a direct route to the Indies, finally “discovered” them. What was he really looking for? Spices and gold, especially gold. And so he landed on the shores of an island that its inhabitants, the Taíno, call Ayiti. Before the arrival of the “discoverer” and his henchmen, these aborigines numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even more than a million. In 1514, after twenty-five years of forced labor, war and destruction, there were barely more than 30,000 of them left. […] The Arawaks [an ethnic group to which the Taíno belonged, and who populated the Greater Antilles] would disappear for good a century later […]. These decimations were caused by the two structuring logics of this first colonial capitalism: the extraction of resources from the land through dispossession and the extirpation of the necessary human energy through disciplinary violence and the denial of the sovereignty of the natives over their bodies. It was these, before smallpox or measles, that caused the extinction of the Taínos.
[…] Slavery and land grabbing then became part of America’s historical necessity. Invented by Europe, this land inaugurated an unprecedented geo-history based on total, transatlantic, and then global trade, which called for a new grammar of the world’s value and a new conception of inhabiting the earth. From now on, the earth and its creatures must be put to work and considered only through the prism of future profits. (R&C p. 32-33)
The birth of capital (as a “social” relationship, if we can call it that). It is clear that from the moment it appeared, it effectively prioritized humans (between “civilized” and “savage”) and thus practiced what we would later call racialization and, therefore, racism. However, if we can date the “official” birth of race from this same annus horribilis[3] (at the risk of anachronism because, if I am not mistaken, this word was not used at that time), it was because the Spanish sovereigns, Isabella and Ferdinand (may their name be cursed for ever and ever!) expelled the Jews from their kingdom of Castile and Aragon, inaugurating the sinister policy of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood”. Jews and Muslims had been given the opportunity to convert to Catholicism, failing which they were declared persona non grata in the kingdom. However, a whole policy of “statutes of blood purity” subsequently developed, suspecting the “new Christians” of not really being so and of continuing to practice their original religion in secret. Worse still, these suspicions were repeated against subsequent generations… Thus the genes of the Hebrew and Muslim religions were supposed to be passed on from father (and mother) to son (and daughter)… A concept promised a bright future, in America with the one-drop rule (the rule that a single drop of non-white blood would strip you of your White status), then under the Third Reich (Hitler was a great admirer of white supremacist theories in the United States), apartheid South Africa and finally (but I have only cited the most salient examples here; one might as well have added colonial France, then Vichy France and finally today’s France, its racial profiling and police violence against people of color), the State of Israel, which recognizes only Jews as its citizens.
Even before these inaugural scenes (between the Iberian Peninsula and the “West Indies”) comes another momentous event (if I may say so): the invention of the plantation. Here, I would like to digress a little from Sylvie Laurent’s book (but by no means to express disagreement) and refer to Aurélia Michel’s Un monde en nègre et blanc, about which I have already had occasion to say all the good things I think of it – but to which I have not yet devoted a “real” book review. In 1471, she says, the Portuguese (the great maritime power of the time) occupied a small archipelago off the coast of Gabon, which they named São Tomé. Until then, they had bought slaves on the Gabonese coast, or even further south towards present-day Angola, with a view to selling them to West African merchants in exchange for gold, which was the main object of their desire in the region.
But the capture of São Tomé changed this pattern. Portuguese ships used it primarily as a stopover, especially for the purchase of slaves, which they then resold further north. And so a stroke of genius was to emerge, destined for a sensational future: the first settlers from Portugal […] were ordered to produce sugar, because the king wished to build on the success of Madeira, which was already exporting 2,500 tons per year. To achieve this, the Portuguese used slaves bought in Angola and Gabon on the plantations of São Tomé. The enterprise lived up to its promises and sugar production in São Tomé in 1488 was already equal to that of Madeira. It even quickly surpassed it, to the extent that Portugal became a major importer of sugar in Europe[4].
What had just been invented was quite simply the modern economy – capitalism in all its hideousness, which would then flourish in the Americas on a grand scale. They would arrive somewhere, eliminate the “natives”, as they were called at the time, and replace them with imported slave labor in order to extract and/or process the raw materials they needed, naturally without any consideration for the ecosystems they devastated in the process. “This innovation could be compared,” writes Aurélia Michel, ‘to the outsourcing of labor by transnational firms, as it was invented in late 20th-century capitalism: the establishment of a few international conventions and the possibility of bringing together the most profitable production conditions anywhere in the world’ (AM, p. 83).
According to Sylvie Laurent (who also tells this story of São Tomé, in a slightly different but equally interesting way), the plantation is one of the cardinal institutions of the Siamese development of capital and race. She mentions three others, in as many chapters: the Academy, the multinational and the colonial contract.
The Academy produces the humanist discourses that accompany and cover up the horror of the slave trade and slavery. Someone like Louis Sala-Molins (among others) had already studied the subject[5]. But basically, the most interesting thing in this chapter is the image that European intellectuals produced of themselves and of Europe – of civilization, which at the time was only referred to in the singular – as a reflection of what they said about “negroes” and other “savages”. In fact, the discourse of progress and civilization through “gentle trade” is beginning to appear here, and will flourish a little later. The icing on the cake is this old scoundrel Voltaire who, while deploring the “excesses” suffered by the servile labor force (famous phrase of a “Negro from Surinam” in Candide, while the latter is stunned by Dutch colonial violence – not French, eh! : “That’s the price you pay for eating sugar in Europe”) did not fail to invest in the infamous “ebony wood” trade, and not just a little. He worked with the East India Company, which at the time held the monopoly on the slave trade in France:
In five years, he is said to have financed more than forty expeditions, an investment of 400,000 pounds which would have represented almost half of his total expenditure. It is estimated that the Company’s profit margin in those years exceeded 15%. The philosopher’s profits were therefore solid (C&R p. 136).
The multinational, or rather the multinationals of the time, were precisely these “charter companies” that benefited from an exclusive monopoly granted by the royal authorities of their country. In this respect, one could mention today’s juicy “public-private partnerships”: while the State granted them all the means to make profits without restriction (monopoly, regulation of slavery, the possibility of arming themselves to police wherever they set up and often even governing the colonies or trading posts), they raised funds in the private sector (cf. Voltaire above) to finance their criminal activities. I seem to remember talking in this very place not so long ago about the free zones of the global South where today’s transnationals do pretty much as they please[6]: the know-how of capital has certainly been passed on, thank you very much!
The colonial contract… To sum up, I would say: “Heads I win, tails you lose.” There are people living on the land I covet? Not a big deal, Locke (1632-1704) replies. The English philosopher explains that what counts in establishing a right of ownership is the establishment of sovereignty over the land through its development.
A staunch supporter of the English colonization of North America, Locke justified the confiscation of Amerindian lands on the grounds that they were poorly used (which was not the case) and incapable of being “profitable” in terms of English commercial agriculture. This is the principle of development, in the literal sense: only the “value” produced by working the land through improvement, measured by the growth in yields, matters. Thus, far from being reprehensible, the grabbing of any “vacant” land contributes to the “common good” for Locke[7]. (C&R, p 156)
This is of course the logical consequence of the development of the plantation – the relocation of people and production. It also makes me think of the process, described by Émilie Hache, of the transition from a world of (re)generation to a world of (re)production[8]. The Amerindians clearly took care of their land, but they did not develop it in Locke’s sense. So, exit the “Indians” (remember that 95% of the populations present before the “discovery” had disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Some 55 million of them had already disappeared by 1610, the date on which there was a notable drop in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due to the return of their lands to forest. This was the first time that humans had altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere through their actions, which is why some historians date the beginning of the Anthropocene to 1610)[9]. This theme of vacant land, even land without men, would flourish throughout the colonial expansion of the West – up to its last incarnation, Zionism, whose slogan was: “a land without men for men without land”.
The colonial contract is also the Black Codes.
The “legal reification” of the slave is produced by the establishment of a legal status transmissible by the mother, establishing the doctrine of Partus sequitur ventrem (already in force since 1662 in the American colony of Virginia). This principle of matrilineal transmission not only allows for the social organization of property and production, but is also the basis for the forced reproduction of labor. As the birth of a black slave was the property of the master, repeated births on the plantation itself made it possible to limit the costs of importing labor. This rationalized the labor force, and […] the legal status of slavery was established. Even the clauses that limited the abuses of the planters posited the slave as an “object and not subject of law […]”. (R&C p. 168)
This “master’s property” is the basis of capitalist development. It even gives it such a solid foundation that all the abolitions of slavery, now celebrated as great victories of progress, civilization and human rights, will be paid for – and how much! – by the compensation of the masters. After all, we owed them that much, since we were taking away their property – we were robbing them, to put it bluntly! We know that these indemnities were so exorbitant that they kept Haiti, where abolition, an unbearable snub for the white bourgeoisie, had been decreed by the slaves themselves, in a state of total misery to this day[10].
The third part of Capital and Race is entitled Narratives. It opens with a very interesting analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which Sylvie Laurent sees as a “parable of racial capitalism”. In fact, this English “first modern novel” both shows and conceals what capitalism is – or rather, what a capitalist at work is. Marx was not mistaken in speaking of “Robinsonades” that would tend to make one believe that primitive accumulation could take place without serious problems or problems at all. Even Friday, so named by his master Robinson because he appeared to him on a Friday, is a willing slave, happy to entrust himself to the master’s protection and to work for him, and even to assist him in his battles against a few savages – cannibals, of course! – who might break into the sacrosanct property of the British Empire, of which the shipwrecked Robinson is the worthy representative… A kind of storytelling ahead of its time, which subsequently enjoyed enormous success because it defined the colonial project while concealing its darker sides.
The other set of narratives analyzed by Sylvie Laurent concerns “emancipation through trade”. I won’t dwell on it, having already touched on the subject a little above. To put it briefly, it concerns the discourse of the “political economists” who, starting with Montesquieu, spoke of the “gentle commerce” that softens morals by promoting peaceful interactions between peoples. In the context of the slave trade, this seems to us as credible as the arguments we hear today promising us ‘win-win’ exchanges in this or that domain. “Count on it and drink fresh water,” my grandmother used to say. That said, Sylvie Laurent does detect nuances between different arguments. For example,
Two conceptualizations of the British Empire are in opposition: that of Warren Hastings [first Governor General of Bengal], who defined British colonization as giving a legitimate right to the violent appropriation and subjugation of the natives, and that of Hume, who established a truly liberal theory of the Empire and the necessity of a proper colonial law. […] Hume demands […] that the natives be recognized as “subjects” of the Crown, with status and rights, rather than as foreigners under the arbitrary tutelage of private commercial enterprise.
Hume thus contrasts an “Empire of law” with a domain of the “colonial” governed solely by the law of the strongest. And he distinguishes the civil imperial practices of the “gentleman capitalists” of the City, respectful of the law, [from those of] the English brutes of the companies that ruled the colonies on the margins of the Empire (R&C, p. 226-227).
Good cop, bad cop, virtuous capitalism and savage capitalism, the distinction would make a career for itself… All the way to Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation for the screen of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which we see a maddened colonist establishing his own bloody dictatorship “at the edge of the Empire”. Similarly, Apocalypse Now had the knack of making us forget the reality of the Vietnam War while showing it to us, thanks to the emphasis on monstrous – and therefore exceptional – characters such as the commander of the helicopter squadron who charges to the sound of the Ride of the Valkyries and who only thinks of finding a wave to surf, and, of course, like the ” marginal of the Empire’, Colonel Kurz.
The last part of the book, entitled ‘ Praxis’, links these discourses to practice, as its name suggests, and follows the bloody trail that will lead to the extermination of the Jews of Europe and which passes (among other places) through southern Africa, where the Germans experimented with their first concentration camps and the practice of genocide (against the Hereros and the Namas, otherwise known as the Hottentots[11]).
There are many other things in this last part (and in the epilogue that follows), but well, as I promised at the beginning of this note, I have only given a glimpse of this truly fascinating book, both for the relevance of its analyses supported by impressive documentation and for a fine capacity for synthesis which, alas, I lack to summarize it better. I hope, all the same, that this first taste will whet your appetite… that’s all the harm I wish you.
This April 21, 2024, franz himmelbauer for Antiopées.
[1] From April 13 to 21, 2024.
[2] Quoted in Sylvie Laurent, Race et Capital (now noted R&C), p. 185.
[3] Isabelle of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, on the contrary, decreed it an annus mirabilis…
[4] Aurélia Michel, Un monde en nègre et blanc. Enquête historique sur l’ordre racial, Points/Seuil, 2020, p. 80-81.
[5] Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan, Puf, Quadrige, 2003 [1987].
[6] See my note “Frontières et domination” here, particularly the review of Harscha Walia’s book.
[7] In this regard, see for example Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Contre-histoire des États-Unis. French translation by Wildproject. I mentioned it in this reading note.
[8] Which the same author also calls the logic of replacement: far from the “great replacement” fantasized by the far right, it is the immediate corollary of the reduction of the world to measurable quantities. From the moment everything is accountable with the same instruments of abstraction – and above all with value in the capitalist sense of the term – then we can “replace” one place with another, biodiversity with monocultures and savages with slaves… (The latest avatar, less cruel perhaps but just as catastrophic for ecosystems, is the logic of “compensation” applied to major construction projects such as Notre-Dame des Landes: a wetland is destroyed here, no problem, another one will be made elsewhere! Cf. Émilie Hache, De la génération. Enquête sur sa disparition et son remplacement par la production, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2024. See my review here.
[9] See my review of Andreas Malm, The Anthropocene versus History. To this, it should also be added that this genocide of the Amerindians and its bioclimatic consequences have led some essayists to say that it would be better to speak of the “Capitalocene” or even the “Plantationocene”. Cf. Donna Haraway, “Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene. Making Parents”, in Multitude no. 65, 2016/4, article reprinted in Vivre avec le trouble, Les Éditions des mondes à faire, 2020 [2016].
[10] The story of this absolute scandal was recently told by the New York Times in a dossier accessible online: https://www.nytimes.com/fr/2022/05/20/world/haiti-france-dette-reparations.html
[11] Cf. also Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (a line from Heart of Darkness), Serpent à plumes, 1999).
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