Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The introduction of Calculating Race positions the process of racial formation in the context of the risk society. The relationship between race and risk stretches back to the transatlantic slave trade, an era in which enslaved Africans were insured during their voyage across the Middle Passage. Calculating Race begins with a striking account of an uprising on the ship Thames, preserved as a historical record of how the nascent insurance trade of the early modern period viewed enslaved persons as both at risk and a risk. By insuring enslaved persons against the risk of mortality and insuring the ships that carried them against insurrection, maritime slave insurance established a complex relationship between enslaved Africans and risk even before they came to the Americas. This introduction sets the stage for this relationship and previews the intersection of risk and race in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.