Opening remarks by Amiel Melnick:

In tracing out links between what have been understood as different forms of insurance in the United States—insurance taken out on slaves, and life insurance—Michael Ralph’s paper draws our attention to speculative capital and its differential evaluation of human lives—or, as he puts it, the “subterranean trajectory that traffics in embodied labor and in the value to be extracted from the human as a capital asset” (19). This takes slave insurance as the basis for a range of evocative parallels between the logics of slavery and that of modern capital. These parallels are grounded in the histories of capital formation in the West—since the slave trade arguably provided the capital basis for the industrial revolution—and the 19th century emergence of a variety of financial techniques that continue to be of relevance to Continue reading…