Before the Color Line is a book in political theory and intellectual history that makes three theoretical interventions in the burgeoning literature on the entwinement of capitalism, race, and colonialism. First, the book illuminates the “prehistory of the global color line” by locating the ideational antecedents of nineteenth-century racial categories in eighteenth-century discourses of political economy and ethnography. Second, it aims at “deprovincializing racial capitalism” by widening the aperture beyond Atlantic histories of slavery and settler colonialism and situating the capital-race nexus in a trans-imperial analytic frame encompassing Asia. Third, it develops the notion of “capitalist racialization” to delineate the specific role of capitalist social forms in the elaboration of social difference into civilizational and racial hierarchies, whereby it elucidates the co-constitutive relationship between capitalism and racism while also providing a distinctly materialist angle on the problem of universalism and difference central to the political theory of empire and imperialism.
The book develops its theoretical claims through an imperial intellectual history of the civilizational and racial hierarchies under British colonial capitalism in South and Southeast Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. It contends that the colonial representations of Asian societies that would inform the racist ideology of global capitalism in the late-nineteenth century were initially forged during the heyday of liberal imperialism half a century earlier, thus retrieving a neglected episode in the history of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously labeled the “global color line.”
The study focalizes the formative impact of political economic priorities on the hierarchization of colonial populations in British Asia, which it explicates by introducing the concept of “capitalist racialization.” It contextualizes the dynamics of capitalist racialization in the self-avowed imperial project of transforming Britain’s colonies into commercial agrarian satellites under the command of British capital and in the service of British industry and finance. It is argued that the attributes that distinguished colonial populations in the British imaginary were inflected by their presumed fit with this imperial division of labor. The book specifically focuses on the contrasting stereotypes of the servile and agrestic Indian and the commercial and enterprising Chinese, which, it maintains, took shape in and through colonial schemes for matching the empire’s subjects to its political economic ends. Within these schemes, the book reconstructs two important episodes that have been underserved in the extant literatures on empire and race. The first of these is the aborted program of settler colonialism in India, which envisioned the “colonization” of India by British capitalists as the spearhead of liberal reform and economic uplift in the subcontinent. The second is the British colonial agents’ discovery of “Chinese colonists” in Southeast Asia, whose commercial activities in the region presented a potential model for reconciling plantation agriculture with the British Empire’s newfound commitment to free labor.
In both cases, the book’s attention centers on the British Straits Settlements and Singapore in particular, which exerted an outsized impact on the ideational currents of liberal imperialism. A socially heterogeneous and economically vibrant free port colony between the Indian Ocean and East Asia, the Straits Settlements embodied for many reformers the crystal of a liberal multicultural British Empire in the east. At the same time, the book argues, it formed a key site of the arbitration of various ethno-religious groups into proto-racial hierarchies according to capitalist priorities. British Southeast Asia opened up a space for political economic arguments that suggested the possibility of an empire of free trade, colonization without dispossession, and plantations without slavery. The same political economic arguments, however, formed the basis of ranking the Malays, the Indians, and the Chinese along a developmental spectrum that would eventually ossify into racial taxonomies. Originally articulated in the idiom of civilization and savagery, the distinguishing attributes of “the Hindoo” and “the Chinaman” laid down in this period would gradually harden into racialized features as the century came to a close, culminating, on the hand, in the imperial alibis of insurmountable cultural difference and indirect rule in India, and on the other, in the fear of impending inundation of white settler colonies by a tide of Chinese immigration.
The book contends that the specific terms of ordering the empire’s subjects derived from the overlapping idioms of political economy and civilization/savagery that increasingly circulated in early Victorian imperial networks of print and personnel. As the linchpin of colonial knowledge production in the early nineteenth century, the analysis foregrounds the stadial theory of commercial society and the ethnographic paradigms of “the savage” and “the Oriental” that bookended it. The civilizational gradations themselves drew much of their semantic content from classical political economy’s capital-centric theses on private property, the division of labor, capital accumulation, market formation, and labor productivity. Political economy and Enlightenment ethnography, as the principal languages that ordered the social heterogeneity of the empire, furnished the ideational precursors of racial categories that would contour the global color line at the turn of the twentieth century. The period of liberal imperialism under study thereby constitutes the pivot of the historical arc that extends from the ambivalent cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment thought to the strident racism of the late Victorian imperial ideology.
In substantiating these claims, the analysis draws for its evidence on a range of primary texts, including nineteenth-century colonial correspondence, parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and monographs, which it combines with a critical appraisal of secondary literature on British imperial history, critical political economy, and European intellectual history. Of the primary texts, the practical “middle” political theorizing of colonial officials, travelers, merchants, and publicists familiar with colonial Southeast Asia are accorded particular weight. The interpretive approach adopted in the book is a social history of political thought that does not merely situate political ideas in their imperial contexts of articulation but more importantly develops a critical social theory of the imperial context qua “colonial capitalism.” The analytic framework of “colonial capitalism” expounds the multiple and shifting modes of ordering social difference into civilizational and racial hierarchies with reference to the variegated totality of British imperial political economy.