Racial-Settler Capitalism: Character Building and the Accumulation of Land and Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, Northern social reformers turned to the cultivation of self-governing Black and Native subjects as a method of racial and colonial governance that simultaneously sought to suspend state violence and preclude resistance to racial subordination and territorial occupation. This articles examines records from the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (Virginia) and the Haskell Indian Industrial Institute (Kansas) to reveal “character building” as pedagogical mode to make both labor and land available for capitalist exploitation without recourse to violence. Bridging scholarship on racialization and colonization, this article theorizes the concept of racial-settler capitalism as an intervention into prevailing approaches to racial capitalism and settler capitalism.