The Hall-Colley Debate: a Stop on the Road to the 1619 Project

Abstract

The publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 by the New York Times Magazine has proved to be a discursive pivot for historiographic debate over the place of liberty, justice and servitude in the social history of the USA. Discussion around this event has been focused and intense, but little has been done to situate the Project in either a wider field of historical sociology or a longer trajectory in the discourses of social and political history. By tracing a certain genealogy in this historiography back through the recent New History of Capitalism to a broader Atlantic and even global set of concerns in late-twentieth century social and cultural history, the article focuses on something I have named the Hall-Colley debate. Back in the early 2000s, this debate struck at the very heart of how liberty, captivity, servitude and domination are conceptualized and experienced historically, and it indicates an early formation of something much more developed by the time of the 1619 Project. While delving into the historiographic particulars of this debate around empire, freedom and capitalism, the purpose of this analysis is to identify how something one might call the ‘hierarchy of unfreedoms’ has gradually insinuated its way into the discourses of historical sociology up to and including the 1619 Project. The implication of this development has been a growing censoriousness in how we do social history, an increasingly maladroit handling of historical revision and reassessment, and a strengthening tendency towards closure in how we explore socially heterogenous experiences of unfreedom in unanticipated places.