Catherine Hall, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism – Cambridge University Press, February 2024

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.

• The first critical exploration of Long’s History of Jamaica in its full political and economic context 
• Essential to understanding the history of racial difference through ‘enlightenment’ definitions and how these have shaped society even to the present day 
• Explores the concept of racial capitalism and how race and wealth could not be disentangled