Revisiting “Racial Capitalism”

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay

doi:10.1017/s0003975623000358

Arch. eur. sociol.

2023

DOI: 10.1017/s0003975623000358

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Revisiting “Racial Capitalism”

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Abstract: The brief essay is a response to an article by the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant which critiques the concept of “racial capitalism” that has gained much prominence and currency in recent times. It offers a historical analysis of the emergence of “race” as a concept in the Euro-Atlantic sphere and points to the complexities in extending it beyond that space, into the Indian Ocean world for example. As a consequence, the ambitious claims made by some theorists of “racial capitalism” appear difficult to sustai… Show more

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Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

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From “Chinese Colonist” to “Yellow Peril”: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire

INCE

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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The literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.

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From “Chinese Colonist” to “Yellow Peril”: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire

INCE

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Racial Capitalism Decoupled: A Rejoinder and Reformulation

Wacquant

2023

Arch. eur. sociol.

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I respond to the reactions of Gurminder Bhambra, John Holmwood, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam to my dissection of the concept of “racial capitalism.” I reiterate my critique of the latter on grounds of semantics, logics, and heuristics. I warn that racial capitalism erases historical variations, interludes, and contingencies to replace them with monolithic depiction and mechanical necessity. We cannot assume that racial division, colonial or metropolitan, is functional to capitalism across all lands and epochs. We need to recognize and theorize the varieties of regimes of racial domination, anchored by the ideal-typical distinction between “genuine race-divided societies” and “societies with race,” much as comparative political economists have taught us to dig into the varieties of capitalism. Combining these two dimensions serves us well to decouple capitalism and race analytically so that their historical conjunction may be studied empirically.

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Divided by blood: Race and religion in early-modern Iberia

García-Arenal

2024

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

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This article argues that the mass religious conversions that took place in early-modern Iberia from the end of the fourteenth century had enormous consequences, one of which was the increasing racialisation of religion. Jewish and Muslim minorities were forced to receive baptism, and although in principle the Church made no distinction among people who had been baptised, in practice the presence of large numbers of recent converts to Catholicism called this theology into question. In the process, as I will demonstrate in this article, religion was racialised, as many people became convinced that religion (both beliefs and ritual) was biological and was transmitted by blood. To support this argument, the article will focus, as a case study, on the discussion about whether to deny baptism to the children of Moriscos (converted Muslims) in the years preceding the general expulsion from Spain of the Moriscos (1609–11).

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Revisiting “Racial Capitalism”

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

From “Chinese Colonist” to “Yellow Peril”: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire

From “Chinese Colonist” to “Yellow Peril”: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire

Racial Capitalism Decoupled: A Rejoinder and Reformulation

Divided by blood: Race and religion in early-modern Iberia

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