Invisible hands of empire: the black radical tradition and the longue durée of racial finance capitalism

This article explores the co-constitution of finance capital and racialisation through a staged conversation between world-systems perspectives and the black radical tradition. While world-systems theory emerged in a global context of decolonisation and black liberation struggles, analyses of race and colonialism have been relatively absent from its longue durée accounts of financial expansion. To rectify this, the article re-reads Giovanni Arrighi’s work on financialisation through the critiques of racial capitalism developed by Oliver Cromwell Cox, Walter Rodney, and Cedric Robinson. Focusing on Genoese, Dutch, British, and American cycles of accumulation, it argues that racialised dispossession, appropriation, and enslavement provided the grounds for financial innovation, while finance capital simultaneously operated as an engine of empire. The recent wave of neoliberal financialisation is but the latest phase of this much longer history of finance-driven racialisation, dispossession, and subordination.