Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

During the 1970s, a wave of landlord arson coursed through cities across the United States, destroying large portions of neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Despite its massive toll — hundreds of thousands of housing units were lost in these years — historians have neglected the burning of the nation ’ s cities, and popular memory has confused the 1970s arson wave with the less destructive urban uprisings of the 1960s. How was it possible that urban areas across the United States, all within the same years, experienced such unprece-dented levels of arson? The answer hinges not on insurrection but rather indemnification, and at the center of this project is the untold history of the racially stratified property insurance market, a key force in the making of U.S. urban inequality. Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century positions the 1970s arson wave as a singular window into late twentieth century transformations in racial capitalism, or the entanglement between racial hierarchy and the imperatives of capitalist accu-mulation. The project is propelled by three questions that I ask in sequence: Why did cities go up in flames in these years? How were their fires extinguished? And what arose in their ashes? Together, these seemingly simple lines of inquiry cast new light on the restructuring of the built environment, the business environment, and American capitalism over the past five decades. This project is grounded