Commerce was becoming central to new forms of accumulation. Ian Baucom argues that Liverpool, was “among the shipping, trading, and financial entrepôts” that “ushered into existence our long contemporaneity”.
Liverpool, he concludes, was “a capital of the long twentieth century”. When a new Exchange was built in Liverpool in 1754, it was circled with series of friezes containing representations of African heads. The following year it was attacked by sailors – who struck for better wages under red flags and were met with cannons taken from the ships in the docks. The sailors’ riot, which did not extend its concern to the enslaved, was put down with lethal violence.
In 1781, a syndicate of Liverpool investors bought a slave ship, the Zong, that had been captured from the Dutch. The syndicate included William Gregson, a former mayor of Liverpool, who had invested in fifty prior slaving voyages. The ship was moored off Accra and the deal included the two hundred and forty four enslaved people already on board. Luke Collingwood, a surgeon, captained the Zong. Doctors were often used to select people for purchase as slaves, and to determine the value of slaves. On 18 August, it set sail for Jamaica. A navigational bungle resulted in the ship passing Jamaica. The ship’s supply of water was running low. The insurance that had been taken out on the enslaved people would not pay out if they died on shore or from natural causes at sea.
It would, however, pay for cargo that had to be jettisoned to save the ship. A decision was taken to count the enslaved people as cargo – as commodities. Beginning on 1 November, one hundred and twenty three people were thrown overboard. The last ten chose to jump over board rather than allow themselves to be thrown off the ship. On 22 December, the Zong arrived in Jamaica with 208 enslaved people on board. They were soon sold. Compensation was sought from the insurers in London. They refused to pay and legal proceedings began in March 1783. They jury found that the enslaved people were cargo, that they were commodities.
For Baucom, in this moment the value of human beings was not tied to their “embodied, material existence” but to “an utterly dematerialized, utterly speculative, utterly transactable, enforceable, and recuperable pecuniary value”. This, he argues, was the moment, the event, following which finance capital, an abstraction, began its domination over the material realm of the human.
Marx was right to observe that “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. The history of the emergence of capital in Europe was brutal. In his study of the public performance of capital punishment in London as a disciplinary tool, Linebaugh called the 18th century English state a thanatocracy – a government of death. But as European radicalism, a project with global ambitions, developed it would, despite Marx’s later writings, the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin on imperialism, and Antonio Gramsci’s innovations, including his essay on the Southern question, often tend to fetishise the factory, initially in Europe, as the central site of domination and resistance. One result of this is that, Robinson argues, when “Black radicalism became manifest within Western society as well as other junctures between European and African peoples … Western radicalism was no more receptive to it than were the apologists of power”.
A strikingly different analysis was developed in what Robinson called the black radical tradition – “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” that “cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action”. In Black Reconstruction, published in 1935, Du Bois wrote that: “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.” Three years later, in A History of Negro Revolt, C.L.R. James arrived at a similar conclusion: “slavery seemed the very basis of American capitalism.”
In Robinson’s analysis the black radical tradition did not only understand capitalism as originating from slavery, rather than transcending it. He argues that it also took black life and struggle seriously and that its leading intellectuals – he examines Du Bois, James and Richard Wright in some detail – were “troubled by the casual application of preformed [Marxist] categories to Black social movements”.
