Financialization and the Early Portuguese Slave Ship

This paper will examine the confluence between the financialization of risk and the early transatlantic slave trade. It will argue that the early Portuguese slave ship and transatlantic trade were symptomatic of the particular way that financialization organizes social relations. As opposed to the later ship, which was technologically precise and end-oriented, the early ship was a hybrid: part commercial, part martial, agile and adaptable to changing circumstances of the emerging trade in human lives. Referred to at the time as a floating tomb and more recently as a mobile prison, the slave ship was a site for the commodification of humans. To the inherent threats of the oceanic environment, the slave ship added the violence of a new racialized political economy.

To compensate for the unnatural violence of the maritime slave trade, financial instruments calculated its costs to protect investments. Aside from the inherent anomaly of the financialization of human lives, what we might call the trade’s financial infrastructure augmented racialization by limiting access to means. As opposed to ships, which are visible and can be appropriated, sabotaged or assimilated to divergent cultural matrixes, the invisibility of finance is key to its social effects. The archive of the early slave ship registers this planned opacity. Through readings of the few documents available on the early slave ship, this paper will argue that the limits of this archive register how financialization structures racial capitalism.