Capital, “Moralization,” and Race in the French Imperial Plantation Zone, 1830–1848

When France’s liberal July Monarchy took power in 1830, there were immediate calls to abolish slavery. In the ensuing debate, commentators proceeded from the assumption that the labor of the same colonial population—whether enslaved or free—should remain integrated within a substantially continuous process of commodity production. Not only slaveholders but also abolitionists of many stripes envisioned the destiny of colonial society as the commodity-producing plantation—which they intended to uplift rather than end. Arguments of political opponents converged, because they were constructed in terms of racial categories whose inner structure articulated to capital, displacing its components across human bodies. Post-abolition, these racially displaced elements of capital were to be reintegrated by a quasi-educational process. This debate—engaging figures as disparate as liberal Alexis de Tocqueville, radical republican Victor Schœlcher, and slaveholding planters—specified preconditions for capitalism that surprisingly prefigured the social logic later developed systematically by Karl Marx.