The third in a series of Public Lectures of the Newnham Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry will be given by Prof Catherine Hall at 5pm, 1 June, via Zoom.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry, Newnham College, Cambridge and the Legacies of Enslavement Working Group, Girton College, Cambridge, and part of the Archives of the Disappeared webinar series at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
This lecture will discuss the ways in which the slavery business and the West India trade depended on the racialization of all aspects of life. That was how racial capitalism worked: from birth to death. Economic, political, cultural, reproductive and spatial relations were all structured through the cruel logic of racial difference. Edward Long described this system in his History of Jamaica. This lecture will focus on his mapping of the island: his attempt to racialize space into places for those who were White and those who were Black.
Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Her recent work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002), Macaulay and Son (2012) and Hall et al, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). Between 2009-2015 she was the Principal Investigator on the ESRC/AHRC project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ ( www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs ) – which seeks to put slavery back into British history. Her new book will be Making Racial Capitalism: Edward Long’s History of Jamaica.