Leviathan and the Asiento: A Counter-History of the Racial Contract

Abstract:In his famous work The Racial Contract, the late Charles Mills briefly gestures at a hypothetical counter-history of the "racial contract" which he argues drives the history of white supremacy. Mills suggests that the vision of contract defined by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan comes much closer than its Lockean and Enlightenment successors to understanding the physics of power: the relationship between the texts of contracts and the kinetic forces that they regulate. In this essay, I develop a framework for a counter-history of the racial contract by locating Hobbes' Leviathan in the timeline of a slave-trading contract called the Asiento de Negros. As texts and contexts for each other, Leviathan and the Asiento de Negros suggest how the history of the racial contract evolves in relation to a kinetic relationship between the forces of race war and racial capitalism as defined respectively by Michel Foucault and Cedric Robinson. Peace was one name for this kinetic relationship, as I show through a reading of the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty signed at Madrid in 1667. Leviathan and the Asiento both explain the combination of historical forces that drives this treaty from within – their absence from its juridical exterior helps explain how the race of peace and peace of races advances the contradiction between white supremacy in its de facto and de juro manifestations.