Gendering Property, Racing Capital

In his autobiography, Interesting Times: a Twentieth Century Life, published in 2002, Eric Hobsbawm reflected on the shifts in the historical discipline in his lifetime. Perhaps his greatest regret, he reflected, despite the development of global history, was 'the almost total failure, largely for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this provincialism was probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime'. 1 Hobsbawm inspired us to think about the international and the comparative, he insisted on asking the why questions, convinced of the need for historians to be able to generalize and to explain, to focus on 'the big picture'. Rooted in European cosmopolitanism and a particular version of Marxism he had scant sympathy for some of the new approaches of historians. He was critical of the cultural turn. The emphasis had moved, he argued, from analysis to description, from fact to feeling, from the macro to the micro, and he made clear how much he thought had been lost in this shifting of the gaze. Feminist history, in his view, was at best interested in 'winning collective recognition' rather than interpreting the world; postcolonial approaches were not on his radar beyond the work of Subaltern Studies. 2 As a protagonist of feminist and postcolonial work far from abandoning the why questions or the significance of the macro, I want to make an argument about the value of connecting these insights with older Marxist traditions particularly in relation to the debates over slavery and capitalism. The absence of grand narratives is a weakness of these new approaches in some respects but the more elaborated understandings that we are developing of the complexity of the social formations that we aim to understand offer novel and significant perspectives on the evolution and character of modern capitalism. As we struggle politically in a neo-liberal world in which the clear battle lines that once seemed to be in place no longer work, as critical historians we need new maps that fully engage with the differentiated understandings of class, of labour, of