Lucky Valley with Catherine Hall

Please join us for our next event in the NACBS Book Launch Series.

Lucky Valley with Catherine Hall

Tuesday, September 17 8:00am PT/ 10am CT/ 11am ET/ 4pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate Catherine Hall’s recent work Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism. Antoinette Burton will join Catherine Hall in conversation.

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“Why does Edward Long's History of Jamaica matter? Written in 1774, Long's History, that most 'civilised' of documents, attempted to define White and Black as essentially different and unequal. Long deployed natural history and social theory, carefully mapping the island, and drawing on poetry and engravings, in his efforts to establish a clear and fixed racialized hierarchy. His White family sat at the heart of Jamaican planter society and the West India trade in sugar, which provided the economic bedrock of this eighteenth-century system of racial capitalism. Catherine Hall tells the story behind the History of a slave-owning family that prospered across generations together with the destruction of such possibilities for enslaved people. She unpicks the many contradictions in Long's thinking, exposing the insidious myths and stereotypes that have poisoned social relations over generations and allowed reconfigured forms of racial difference and racial capitalism to live on in contemporary societies.”

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Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL. She has written extensively on the history of Britain and its empire including Civilising Subjects (2002) Macaulay and Son (2012) and, with others, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). From 2009-2016 she was principal investigator on the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project. Her most recent work is Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024).

Antoinette Burton is professor of History, Swanlund Chair and director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A feminist historian of empire and archives, she’s also committed to anti-colonial methods and world histories from below. Her most recent publication is Gender History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2024). An edited collection, in collaboration with Renisa Mawani and Samantha Frost and entitled Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury UK in 2025.