Charting an Unheroic Past

During the Easter weekend of 1958, in response to the British government’s recent development of hydrogen bombs, the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) supported a four-day protest march by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, from Trafalgar Square in London to the headquarters of the UK’s nuclear program, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at the former RAF airfield in Aldermaston in Berkshire, more than fifty miles away. The following year CND organized an Easter march in the opposite direction, which then became an annual, ever more popular, international event. In 1963 around 100,000 people streamed into Trafalgar Square at its conclusion. On the website of the British Film Institute you can view some evocative amateur footage of marchers passing through the outskirts of London on that sunny day, carrying banners and musical instruments, talking and agitating for a better, less violent future.¹

Among the intellectual leaders of this movement was Stuart Hall, a scintillating writer and charismatic speaker who in 1951 had arrived in England as a Rhodes scholar from the British colony of Jamaica. His first love was literature: in 1954 he graduated from Oxford with a degree in English and embarked on a doctorate about the novels of Henry James. But a few years later, in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he moved to London and threw himself fully into political thinking and campaigning.

In 1957, with his Oxford comrades Gabriel Pearson, Raphael Samuel, and Charles Taylor, Hall became the joint founding editor of Universities and Left Review, and later the editor-in-chief of its successor, New Left Review. The following year he joined the first Aldermaston march and became active in CND. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to London in the autumn of 1961, Hall shared a stage with him and the South African ANC leader Robert Resha. The following Easter he addressed the crowds at the great CND rally in Trafalgar Square. He was already on the way to becoming one of the dominant figures of the late-twentieth-century British New Left and an extraordinarily influential political and social theorist. In the decades that followed he would be revered as an endlessly imaginative pioneer in the new field of cultural studies, as well as a coruscating Gramscian critic of neoliberal political and economic views. (It was Hall who most sharply defined the meaning of “Thatcherism,” even before Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979.)²

In the spring of 1963 he was ferociously busy but lonely and unattached. On that year’s march from Aldermaston to London, as the year before, he walked with his Oxford friends Mike Rustin and Margaret Barrett, and Margaret’s younger sister Catherine, a keen Young Socialist and member of Young CND, who was just finishing school. Though their politics were aligned, in other respects she and Hall could hardly have seemed less alike. She was seventeen, white, the much-loved daughter of a teetotal Baptist minister and his Oxford-educated wife, and had never had a boyfriend. He was a thirty-one-year-old brown Jamaican intellectual in flight from his difficult, status- and color-obsessed colonial family, a worldly, appreciative reader of D.H. Lawrence, and an experienced survivor of unhappy relationships. And yet they fell for each other. By the end of the following year Catherine and Stuart were married. They remained together until his death in 2014. “She rescued me, and saved my life,” he recorded poignantly in a posthumously published memoir, and for half a century she also profoundly influenced his work: “Even when we are not actually speaking, I am in perpetual conversation with her.”

Catherine Hall is now one of Britain’s most celebrated and important historians. Her first book, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987), written with the sociologist Leonore Davidoff, was among the most significant works of scholarship to emerge out of the women’s liberation movement in the UK and is still widely taught, read, and debated.³ At one level the book is an in-depth case study of the mental, economic, and daily lives of middle-class individuals, families, and organizations in two specific locations: the expanding commercial and industrial town of Birmingham and the rural counties of Essex and Suffolk. At another level it advanced a set of much broader arguments about the interrelated dynamics of class and gender formation across late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English society, showing how notions of manliness and femininity shaped every aspect of this private and public world.

It also set the pattern for Hall’s later books. Densely textured in its prose, enormously ambitious, continually attentive to the interplay between individual actions and attitudes on the one hand and the larger forces that shaped them on the other, and drawing on a wide interdisciplinary range of methods and approaches, from quantitative analysis through literary exegesis, socialist feminist theory, and questions of gendered subjectivity, it was also, like all her subsequent monographs and the many coedited collections of essays that have accompanied them, based on a deeply collaborative academic practice.

The word “race” does not appear in the text of Family Fortunes, except in some passing references to horse racing. For the first quarter-century of their life together, Hall later wrote, “the division of labour in our household was that Stuart worked on race, which meant black men, and I worked on gender, which meant white women.” But in 1988 a difficult family visit to Jamaica with their children, at a time of increasingly explicit racial tensions in British society, impelled her to confront a new set of questions about her own identity and the connected histories of England and Jamaica—in particular, how the two-way relationship between colony and metropole had played out in the lives of English Baptist missionaries and abolitionists from nineteenth-century Birmingham, her family’s intellectual forebears.

The resulting book, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002), once again focused in granular detail on the actions and ideas of particular men and women in order to illuminate a vast general subject: the “everyday racial thinking” that not only stubbornly saturated even the most liberal corners of nineteenth-century English culture but was constitutive of Englishness itself. Then as now, Hall showed, the imagined community of the nation was always created in relationship to the colonized or alien other. “Empire” was never just something that happened far away, in distant lands, as earlier generations of historians had generally presumed: it profoundly affected the culture of the home country itself.

Hall pursued this theme in Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), begun after September 11, 2001, during the “war on terror.” It explored the roots and lasting effects of the visions of race, nation, and empire that had been put forward by two especially influential nineteenth-century Englishmen. One was Zachary Macaulay, a leading evangelical abolitionist and colonial administrator; the other was his son Thomas Babington Macaulay, an equally influential imperial politician, whose five-volume The History of England (1848–1861), a triumphant narrative of English progress, superiority, and exceptionalism, became the most popular history of its time.

Slowly but surely, from a position originally at the margins of British academia but increasingly accepted into its establishment, Hall and her body of work have helped transform the way that British history is conceived by those engaged in studying and writing it. She has also had an extraordinary impact beyond the academic world. In the mid-2000s she co-supervised the doctoral work of a former JP Morgan banker, Nick Draper, which traced the gigantic amounts of money (20 million pounds, the equivalent of many billions in today’s currency) borrowed and paid out by the British state in the 1830s to compensate the owners of enslaved people in overseas colonies who had been freed by the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. This huge distribution of wealth had been carefully administered by a government commission, which left voluminous records documenting 46,000 claims by men and women (about half of them resident in Britain itself) who had held 800,000 human beings as their enslaved property. Hall and Draper subsequently obtained a grant to computerize these records, and in 2013, together with Keith McClelland, they published them as a free, searchable online database, The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership.

Nothing has done more to raise Britons’ awareness of their unheroic colonial past and its aftereffects than the availability of this public resource (since expanded and rebranded as the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London). Because it makes previously inaccessible archival information easily searchable by journalists and members of the public, because it vividly documents the men and women across Britain who profited from enslavement as a financial investment, and because it is not hard to trace the descendants of these people, it has compelled individuals and institutions of all kinds (universities, banks, insurers, legal firms, wealthy families, the Church of England) to begin investigating their historical links to slavery and to face up to what these might mean for their responsibilities today. It has transformed British public discourse about the history of slavery. Not many historians can say that their work has changed the present as well as illuminated the past.

Hall’s new book, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, develops further this lifetime of engaged historical scholarship. Long was a young Englishman who in 1758, aged twenty-three, went out to Jamaica to make his fortune. His family’s history there stretched back to England’s capture of the colony from the Spanish in 1655; ever since, the Longs had owned plantations worked by enslaved African and African-descended people. Later, the family settled back in England, managing their holdings from afar as absentee owners.

The plantation economy was always characterized not only by the potential for huge profits but also by high levels of debt, risk, and failure. When the family’s wealth declined, Edward’s father and two older brothers had returned to the island in an effort to make more money. But then his father and one of his siblings died there, leaving him only (by gentry standards) a modest inheritance.

After his arrival in the West Indies, Edward fared better. His sisters married into the local white plantocracy, giving him valuable connections and making him the brother-in-law of Jamaica’s lieutenant-governor. He himself quickly wooed and wed a rich local widow, borrowed large sums to “improve” his own plantation, called Lucky Valley, and reaped the profits of the mid-eighteenth-century boom in sugar prices. He became a judge and a leading member of the local assembly as well as a successful planter. In 1769 he returned to England with his wife and young children and remained there until his death in 1813.

Long’s early adulthood coincided with a great British-led expansion of the transatlantic slave trade and of the wealth derived from the merciless exploitation of its captive human capital. But it also spanned an important break in the politics of slavery. When he left England in 1758 there was no organized movement questioning the practice of racialized bondage: its existence was taken for granted. On his return, barely a decade later, Long was horrified to find that this had changed: some people were now actively challenging slavery in the courts and in public discussion. In 1769 its most active British opponent, Granville Sharp, published A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, in which he attacked the settled legal presumption “that a Negro Slave is neither man, woman, nor child” but merely property. For that argument to work, he pointed out, “the Negro must be divested of his humanity, and rendered incapable of the King’s [i.e., the law’s] protection.” Three years later, in the case of Somerset v. Stewart, Sharp helped win a famous courtroom victory that seemed to establish that slavery would henceforth be illegal in England.

This turn of events enraged Long, as it did many other white Britons and West Indians. In response he spent the rest of his days agitating in favor of colonial slavery and promoting the further development of Jamaica’s plantation economy and slave society on rational, scientific principles. To this end, in 1774 he published his three-volume magnum opus, The History of Jamaica; in the later 1780s, when the campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade reached Parliament, he was preparing a (never completed) updated edition of it. The book’s main purpose was to persuade British readers that the established system of enslavement in the Americas was essential to their nation’s wealth and power—and therefore that Black people were inherently subhuman and unworthy of freedom. “A negro must be divested of his Humanity, and rendered incapable of the King’s protection before he can become private property,” Long jotted down in a draft of his text, directly reversing Sharp’s argument: that, in a nutshell, was what he set out to prove.

The History of Jamaica became not only the most authoritative contemporary work about the British Caribbean and a classic of Enlightenment literature but also one of the foundational texts of scientific racism. That is evidently what first drew Hall to investigate its author and his writings. But the book she has produced is not only a penetrating intellectual history of the making of racialized ways of thinking in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. It also ranges well beyond that, in particular by exploring how Long, his family, and other white people on both sides of the Atlantic were enmeshed in and helped perpetuate the complex global organization of “racial capitalism”—the always unstable, contested, self-contradictory, but nonetheless powerful ways in which racism and capitalism were intertwined, both in practice and in principle.

Long and other writers like him tried to portray this system as self-evident and natural. Hall brilliantly examines both how it worked—on the plantation, in the merchant house, in the slave trade, and through the gendered marriage, inheritance, and property relations of white merchants and slave owners—and how much conscious and unconscious disavowal and repression of obvious but inconvenient truths was involved in its intellectual construction. Eighteenth-century assertions of white power and supremacy were not only manufactured through the willful destruction of millions of Black lives. They also, Hall argues, required a strenuous, continual psychological effort on the part of their proponents. That was because their articulation was always shadowed by anxiety that they might be logically or ethically untenable, as well as by dread of Black power and resistance. By revealing the silences, denials, fictions, and contradictions of these ideologies and the economic structures they underpinned, she aims to help undo the damage they have perpetuated, across generations, in the world into which she herself was born.

This is a different project from that of the American scholars who in recent years have in varying ways transformed our understanding of Black lives under British slavery, such as Jennifer L. Morgan, Vincent Brown, Saidiya Hartman, or Marisa J. Fuentes, to name but a few. It also leaves aside questions about the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century British ideas and practices compared to those of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danish, and the French, who also established racialized slave societies in the Caribbean and across the Americas. Yet in other respects the book could not be more self-consciously in conversation with an enormous range of past and present writers: every page and footnote is peppered with generous acknowledgments of concepts and insights developed by others. The book’s prose, in turn, is unremittingly analytical, never seeking to carry its reader along through rhetoric or narrative excitement, always careful to point out the complexities, gaps, and limits of its own assertions. This is partially a matter of personal style—Edward Said once remarked, not unadmiringly, on the “characteristic severity” of Hall’s authorial self-judgment. But it’s also in keeping with her intellectual project, whose aim is precisely to uncover the hidden valences and telling omissions of smooth and persuasive writers like Macaulay or Long—to expose and thus reduce the harm of their seductive and emotive formulations.

Despite this dispassionate, academic approach, and despite the gruesome subject matter that underlies it, Lucky Valley is also a profoundly personal and moving work. It was begun shortly before the death of Stuart Hall; it has been published a decade later. Yet as Hall avows at the outset, despite his physical absence she has written it with, and even for, “my Jamaican husband”: “Stuart has accompanied me through these years, living as he does in my mind and my dreams…. I’m in dialogue with the dead, writing through the feelings.” The book has its origins in their own transatlantic, mixed-race family history and in her visceral understanding of how the traumas of racialized enslavement can continue to wreak havoc long after its legal abolition.

And so it is dedicated not to the memory of Stuart Hall but to his active presence in the world (“For Stuart”). Its very first image is a photograph of him. The opening pages describe him; the footnotes refer repeatedly to his writings. His words provide both its introductory epigraph and the impetus for its concluding arguments: that history is never settled, and that its more equitable rewriting is not just possible but urgently necessary. The past was terrible; the present is grim; nonetheless, we must strive to create intellectual and practical pathways to a better future. That is the spirit in which this book lays bare a crucial chapter in the histories of racial capitalism and of the British Empire, in order to try to undo their poisonous legacies in the present. It is a fitting monument to the passionate, lifelong partnership between two of the most inspired and inspiring Anglophone thinkers, writers, and campaigners of our time.