Catherine Hall’s plenary lecture on ‘Gendering Property, Racing Accumulation’

 Janet Weston is a second year PhD student at Birkbeck, researching the history of medical approaches to diagnosing, treating, and curing sexual offenders in mid-twentieth century Britain.

A quotation from Marx provided the leitmotif for this plenary session: ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’. Professor Catherine Hall’s outstanding lecture addressed the themes of gender and race, now self-evident in their absence in Hobsbawm’s work, demonstrating not only that questions of gender and race address this blood and dirt, but more importantly, that the role of slavery and the plantation in building Britain must be revisited and reintegrated into the history that we do.

Agreeing with Eric Williams’ controversial assertion that slavery played a key role in the growth of capital in Britain, she drew attention to the persistent disavowals that still take place amidst a conviction that slavery simply ‘didn’t happen here’. Citing as one example the recent ‘Georgians Revealed’ exhibition at the British Library, which was silent on the origins of the wealth of the Georgian world, she argued for the absolute necessity of research into slaves and enslavers alike, not simply to fill a lacuna in research, but to build a complete picture of British capitalism, of industrialisation, and of a society in which the beliefs about whiteness, non-whiteness, property, and colonialism that underlay slavery were omnipresent.

Much of the lecture referred back to the project at UCL dedicated to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, for which Professor Hall is the Principal Investigator. This collaborative endeavour is part of a larger undertaking to study slaves and enslavers alike, providing a British counterpart to the extensive research by Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on slavery in the American south. Interspersed throughout the lecture were examples of slave-owning families and individuals, their opinions, and sometimes surprising statistical information: 41% of claims for compensation in the Caribbean following the abolition of slavery were made by women, and many of these were women of colour.

Anne Marriott was one such slave owner, whose position highlighted the entanglements of family with industrial capitalism. The illegitimate daughter of Joseph Marriott, a wealthy MP, she inherited little on his death since his estate was largely funnelled into his marital family unit, and avoided marriage herself in order to retain her own wealth within her control. Hall discussed the ways in which familial alliances and gendered perspectives on property and position within the family both bolstered the building up and consolidating of capital, but also led to conflict within families and consternation more widely about the immoral plantation owner and his dilution of the white race, white wealth, and white numbers in the colonies.

Thus, whiteness in the Caribbean was imbued with fear as well as power. Slave owners felt their colonial world to be dangerous, demanding of the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of the enslaved to maintain order. Their families were denied and destroyed, and Hall ended her lecture with an impassioned plea for us to recognise that the trauma of slavery is not over, mentioning the persistent privileging of whiteness and the persistent poverty of the Caribbean. In rethinking classical accounts of industrial capitalism, previously dominated by the mill and the emaciated body of the factory worker, she insisted that we must look for the ways in which gender and race structured the organisation of property and power, recapturing that which has been forgotten: this process of forgetting took work, and the process of remembering will demand work too.