On Bankers and Empire

Abstract

This essay offers a critical engagement with historian Peter James Hudson’s groundbreaking text Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. It begins with an analysis of Hudson’s detailed account of the entanglements of the internationalization of US banking, imperialism, and (neo)colonialism in the epoch of US-led finance capitalism. Then it builds on Hudson’s concept of “racial capitalism,” which the author defines and explicates as a war-driven racially hierarchical global system constituting white supremacist accumulation, dependent extraction, imperial expropriation, labor superexploitation, and (neo)colonial absorption of financial risk. Next, it analyzes antiblackness—understood as legitimating architecture that devalues, distorts, criminalizes, and abjects those racialized as black—as a constitutive feature of racial capitalism. Finally, the essay illuminates the latter’s inextricable link to antiradicalism, defined as the disciplining of communists, socialists, and other radicals whose ideas, politics, or practices are deemed subversive of or threatening to the perpetuation of the capitalist world-economy.