Enslaved Labor and Cultural Capital

Using the tools of economic analysis and art history, this article analyzes John Singleton Copley’s colonial portraits as goods in an imperial economy anchored, in part, in the transatlantic slave trade. A public-facing database details the relationship each sitter had to the institution of slavery, and the text explains how and why Copley’s portraits of them speak to this largely unrepresented context. In commissioning portraits of themselves as wealthy individuals, the sitters transmuted Black enslaved labor into white cultural capital. This finding reveals the racial politics of the culture of gentility and the imbricated economic histories of art and slavery.