HIST

This course takes its title from the study by Eric Williams (1911-1981), who became the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. Based on this colonial Caribbean scholar’s doctoral dissertation in History at Oxford University in 1938, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1944) challenged prevailing assumptions about “race” and slavery along with the scholarly consensus that Parliamentary abolition of slavery in 1833 was a national act of humanitarianism that distinguished and exemplified the progressiveness and benevolence of British civilization at home and – through imperial expansion and consolidation – abroad. Not published in Britain until 1964, the book and its arguments have resonated ever since, in the substantial scholarship on histories of Atlantic slavery and abolition, but also in debates over the colonial roots (and routes) of British capitalism in the 19th, 20th and early-21st centuries and, indeed, on the genealogies of what is understood as “modernity” or “the modern,” on the one hand, and the political economy of “race,” on the other?

Pivoting on the book and its receptions, the course explores conditions and relations of knowledge-production, circulation and valuation in our post-colonial present, and modernity. While this is in many ways a course about the relationships between capitalism and slavery in "the past," it is also very much about the conditions under which people have experienced, framed, critiqued and engaged these institutions and the mutually-constitutive discourses on race, gender, sexuality, labor, nation and citizenship with which they have been entwined through time and also in the "present" we all currently inhabit.

The course is designed accordingly, so that students can develop their reading, analytical, critical and expository skills as we proceed through events and debates around slavery, modernity, and historical practice.

This is a reading-, discussion-, and writing-intensive class. Keeping up with assigned readings and films, and informed participation in class discussions is both essential and assessed accordingly. Students are expected to have completed the week’s assigned reading by the Monday class meeting and to come prepared to discuss it in class.