Before the Global Color Line examines the historical conjunction of capitalist expansion and racial ordering under British imperialism in Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Building on my first book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, it makes a twofold contribution to the study of race and capital by addressing the historical and theoretical limitations of the extant scholarship on “racial capitalism.”
First, it opens to discussion the current literature’s “methodological Atlanticism” that frames the analysis of capitalism and racism with the historical experience of New World slavery and settler colonialism. By widening the aperture to British imperialism in Asia, the book situates capitalist development and racial hierarchies in inter-oceanic, trans-imperial networks. The analysis centers on the nineteenth-century efforts to reform the political economy of Britain’s Asian empire, above all by reorganizing local land and labor in commercial plantations under British capital. This project of “great specialization,” it is argued, grounded the racial ordering of local populations according to the values and priorities of British colonial capitalism. While the specific terms and ends of the racial hierarchies in the Asian context diverged from those of the Atlantic slave-settler formation, they can nonetheless be compared and decoded by a common logic of “capitalist racialization.”
Second, against the backdrop of British colonial capitalism, the book delineates the ideological prehistory of the “global colour line” in the overlapping discourses of political economy and civilisation/savagery circulating in the British Empire. It is argued that the perceived social differences between the empire’s subjects, which would eventually sediment into the categories of nineteenth-century scientific racism, were originally elaborated through a stadial theory of the 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 contoured the global colour line.
Three major theoretical conclusions follow from these historical revisions. The first is to conceive of race as a principle of differentiation internal to “actually existing capitalism,” understood as a social formation with an imperial constitution that has historically developed as much through the elaboration of social difference as its homogenisation. Secondly, the book demonstrates the utility of mid-level concepts, such as “capitalist racialization,” for developing comparative and connected histories of race and capital across inter-oceanic networks. Third, the trans-imperial approach adopted here lends support to conceptualizing race as a distinctly modern structure of domination articulated with capitalist social forms, rather than a feudal European legacy that “intersects” with capitalism. Deprovincializing racial capitalism, both geographically and temporally, therefore directly bears on identifying the conceptual coordinates of the capital-race nexus.