The Scholarly Business of Corporations and Slavery: Political Fault Lines of the Economic History of Empire

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.1