Racial Capitalism and the Workhouse–Plantation Nexus in the Atlantic World

Abstract

This paper re-examines the British workhouse within the framework of racial capitalism and the Atlantic world. Traditionally understood as a domestic mechanism for managing poverty and labour in an era of industrial capitalism, we argue the workhouse was deeply intertwined with global systems of racial exploitation and accumulation from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Tracing the workhouse's connections to Britain's colonial plantations, the transatlantic slave trade, and the circulation of finance, goods, ideas, and people in the Atlantic world, the paper challenges understandings of the workhouse's purely domestic function. Instead, the workhouse and plantation are understood as constitutively interlinked—forming a “workhouse–plantation nexus” which operated as a key component in shifting articulations of racial capitalism. Understanding this nexus reconfigures understandings of welfare histories that continue to shape racialised welfare systems and racial capitalism more broadly and is crucial for reparative justice.