Christian Gregory wrote:
> > Race was
> > created by capitalism & modern capitalist slavery. Pre-modern
> > peoples had no belief that humanity should be divided into such
> > categories as "blacks," "whites," "Orientals," "Indians (= indigenous
> > peoples of the New World)," etc., though they did have contempt for
> > outsiders, serfs, slaves, etc., regardless of colors of those
> > outsiders, serfs, slaves, etc.
> >
>
> As Raymond Williams once said, the problem for analysis is not complex
> determination of x (identities or historical events, for example). Rather
> it's understanding the _order_ of determinations at a given moment. In
> precapitalist economies, the category of slave was determined differently
> than in 17th and 18th century colonial economies. Serfdom as an institution
> allowed many of the legal distinctions that supported slavery in the middle
> ages to fall away, while preserving its social forms.
>
> But "race" as the byproduct of capitalist slavery is a pretty North American
> construct. In the transatlantic slave economies outside of North America
> (excepting perhaps Barbados), non-European racial otherness and slavery were
> not nearly as coextensive as in the North American new world colonies.
> (Olaudah Equiano's autobiography is instructive in this respect.) As Robert
> Brenner has argued, modern slave economies are in many ways non-capitalist,
> or only formally so, since they rely, like feudalism, on the threat of force
> to extract wealth, rather than on economic pressure or motives (ie.
> competition). In that sense, "race" as we understand it belongs to that
> twilight moment of development between feudal and capital social relations.
> It's not a product of capitalism, but of a residual social formation that
> supported it in the 17th-and 18th centuries.
>
> Christian