As made known by Cedric Robinson (Robinson Reference Robinson2020 [1983]), the concept of racial capitalism has been both a means of entering debates on the relationship between race and class in the making of the hierarchies that have ruled the modern world and a methodological intervention into historical sociology. In its latter capacity, especially, racial capitalism becomes a term rich with implications for thinking about law and juridical relations, pointing, for example, to long-standing questions crystallised in Marxian theory around the so-called ‘modes of production’ debate (Salyga and Valadbaygi Reference Salyga and Valadbaygi2026). In some instances, those debates have pivoted on how (or whether) ‘capitalist’ and ‘pre-capitalist’ modes ‘articulate’ with one another. In others, it more specifically implicates questions about whether chattel slavery should be seen as an endogenously capitalist institution or, instead, some kind of anomalous add-on. Viewed in relation to such concerns, Catharine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism can profitably be read alongside other more telescopic works of global history. Among the more recently published, for example, there is Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Beckert Reference Beckert2025) and, even more saliently, David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (McNally Reference McNally2025), with its insistent showing that trans-Atlantic slavery – and the ‘chattel proletariat’ whose unwaged labour it fed upon – was fully part and parcel of modern capitalism.

Operating as it does somewhere between a biographical history of Long and his family lineage and a micro-history of the sugar plantation giving the book its title, Lucky Valley thus serves as its own stark reminder of Marx’s observation in The Poverty of Philosophy that:

Of course, associated ideas like ‘race’ as ‘the modality in which class is lived’ through which thinkers beyond Robinson, like Stuart Hall, further elaborated racial capitalism (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978), mean that the concept proves even closer to Lucky Valley’s home than its subtitle otherwise might suggest. With the book’s author being Stuart Hall’s widow, Lucky Valley – as we learn in the prologue – sets out to ‘tell[] the story of’ one family history, Long’s, while ‘ha[ving] its origins in another’, meaning Hall’s own. It was in 1965, as (Catharine) Hall explains, ‘the year after [her] marriage to Stuart’ that she ‘had [her] first visit to Jamaica’, only two years after she left Leeds, the place of her own upbringing and formative years (p. xxii).

For the scholar of law, then, Lucky Valley constitutes its own kind of insistent reminder that slavery was among capitalism’s key juridical foundations. After all, in Jamaica the legal sanction slavery enjoyed as an institution would not even be withdrawn until the Abolition Act of 1833, nearly three decades after the banning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Accordingly, what the slave-production system of Jamaica reveals about how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism proved capable of reproducing itself is one of Hall’s key themes, connecting Lucky Valley’s story of Long, his family lineage and the titular plantation its members oversaw. It can be no surprise, then, that Hall’s study is more fascinated with Long’s work as a historian than as a legal expert (given that he also served ‘for years as judge in Jamaica’s Admiralty Court’ [p. 376]). It is Long’s History of Jamaica, first published in 1774, that makes for Lucky Valley’s central archival touchstone. Hall mines its three volumes both as a repository for understanding its author’s insistently race-based worldview and for exploring the inherent ties between the ethic of White superiority and the perpetuation of colonial Jamaica’s slavery-based capitalist social order/system.

At the same time, and especially in its later chapters, Lucky Valley foregrounds a second theme of note for our understanding of law’s connection to capitalism, as Hall draws out the implications of Long’s legal training and, in ways, juridicised imaginary. Here, more specifically, it is less with the particulars of Long’s work on the bench than with his self-styling as a man of the Enlightenment and Whig that Lucky Valley is concerned. As such, in Hall’s telling Long can be seen as partly ventriloquised by ideas about law’s rule, which end up buttressing/being buttressed by his views on race, Jamaica’s social hierarchy and Lucky Valley’s role as a node within capitalism’s Anglophone empire. This goes especially for his ‘belief in the intimate connection between liberty and property’. Indeed, as Hall shows, to hold what views about racial ordering he did demanded that Long normalise – and champion – the ways in which ‘the colonial state, a slave state, operated very differently’ with respect to its juridical cast (p. 322). Indeed, the stage was set for this well before Long’s own landing in Jamaica, where he found himself ‘in a garrison society, racialized, masculinized and militarized’ that was ‘subject to martial law and beset by enemies’ (p. 323). Moving back and forth across aspects of the story of family lineage, Hall thus excavates how Long evolved a political theory of colonial difference by which planter-dominated Jamaica was both like and unlike the metropolitan state, including on grounds of the need for it to ‘make laws specific to a tropical island with a majority of enslaved population’ (p. 325).

These twin law-related themes are pursued across Lucky Valley’s eight chapters (bookended by a Prologue, Introduction and Epilogue), which are distributed into three parts: a first focusing on ‘Growing up English’ and comprising two chapters; a second focusing on ‘The Lineaments of Racial Capitalism’ and comprising three chapters; and a third on ‘Making a Slave Society’ and comprising three others. Given its close attention to Long and his family, the analytical voice that animates Lucky Valley does not shy away from working in the descriptive mode. The book’s argument thus often emerges from the narrative flow of details as much as from the punctuating moments of observation or contextualisation through which Hall breaks from that flow, even as it rushes forth against the backdrop of the baseline commitment to demonstrating the inextricable ties between the logics of racial hierarchy-as-White superiority and capitalist profit-making.

At the same time, Hall structures the book so that the presentation becomes more telescopic as it advances across its three parts. It is the first, therefore, that most insistently narrows the lens to the proportions of a biography of Long and his family line. Chapter two, for example, starts from Long’s youth and upbringing as part of what chapter one previously shows to have been, by then, a lineage dating back to his great-grandfathers that was intimately linked to Jamaica’s place within the empire of plantation capitalism. As chapter two’s biographical history progresses, in a manner characteristic of Lucky Valley’s overall style, Hall braids in relevant context about Britain’s ongoing transformation into the world’s ‘major slave-trading nation’ amid sugar’s own transformation ‘from luxury to everyday commodity’ (p. 71). In this manner, the story of Long’s life as a ‘cultivated Englishman’ in training and his aborted career as a picaresque novelist ‘writing for the marketplace’ becomes the springboard for both the narrative and the young Edward – at the urging of his family – to (re)turn to Jamaica. There, as Hall puts it, he combines his ‘English birthright … with a providential imperial future’ (p. 84).

The lens on the Long family reaches its widest aperture in chapter five, on ‘Reproducing Capital: the Long Family’, which closes part two. As its title suggests, the chapter revisits Lucky Valley’s thematic preoccupation with planter capital’s social reproduction from its perhaps most irreducibly embodied perspective. Through tracing the Long family’s ‘survival over six generations and beyond’ via ‘strategic marriages and patterns of inheritance’, Hall also gives us one of the book’s most extended and expressly law-centric intervals (at least in the sense of law as a regime of rules). The concern with inheritance and (gendered) property brings us into the vicinity of the workings of ‘family law’, ‘[w]ill-making’ and dynastic succession (pp. 211, 213). Hall’s archive here also expands from Long’s History as the principal source to other materials like personal letters that are used to trace the anxiety of White racial superiority that animated Long’s ‘vision of the family’, his ideas about managing family property and his views on providing for kith and kin (p. 212).

Beyond the question of the connection between reproducing a family line and plantation capitalism’s social reproduction, other chapters in parts one and two can be read as more clearly taking up the theme of slavery as part of capitalism’s institutional foundations. Here Hall brings us more intently into the vicissitudes of the global commodity economy, as Lucky Valley explores the plantation as a production unit and the colonial Jamaican merchant house as a front-facing node within the triangular trade. While expanding on the latter, for example, we find Hall filling in important background about ‘the circuit of people, commodities and capital’ connecting London to West Africa, ‘across the Atlantic, to Jamaica, and then back to London’ (p. 165), including through considering the pro-creditor Debt Recovery Act of 1732.

On the other hand, Hall’s scrutiny of the plantation as a production unit proves the book’s lengthiest, zeroing in on Lucky Valley as an enterprise and the way its lineage of planter capitalist overseers and enslaved labourers were fashioned, jointly, into a ‘well-constructed machine’ for extracting profit (p. 124). Here too Hall never drifts far from her priority of demonstrating how Long’s way of parsing racial difference was inseparable from his understanding of Lucky Valley’s prospects for capitalist success. This is borne out in various aspects of Hall’s discussion, including her canvassing of how Long reacted to the high cost that planters shouldered due to acute death rates among the enslaved and his views on the most economically judicious ways for the planter class to proceed in the face of such facts. It also emerges in Hall’s treatment of Long’s belief that African populations were characterised by a ‘fecundity and excess’ born from a ‘sexual depravity’ that he argued made their home continent a source of ‘superfluous peoples’ so as to obviate ‘any accusation as to the responsibility of the slave-owners’, themselves, in the fate of the enslaved (p. 139). In moments such as these, Lucky Valley vindicates what its author explains to the reader already in the prologue about ‘[w]hat impel[led her] to write about’ Long’s History: as ‘a key architect in the mid-eighteenth century of the practices and the theoretical justifications for racialization’, he proves characteristic in his insistence on naming ‘himself and his family White, with a capital W, owners of property and freedom’ and the enslaved ‘“Negroes” with a capital N’ (p. xxvii).

As Lucky Valley’s most persistent theme, racialisation – and Long’s role as racial theorist – figures prominently in the final chapters comprising part three of the book as well. Hall pursues Long’s way of reckoning with space and geography, for example, through the passages of his History that chart Jamaica’s topography and climate and the attendant recommendations he makes about the health of the White population, which are offered in ultimate service to ‘making, marking and … fixing racial binaries’ (p. 265). Overall, through Lucky Valley’s closing stretch Hall takes on ‘the work of the colonists in attempting to make and secure a slave society’. Here, then, her examination of Long’s ‘racialized gaze’ (p. 263) means that Lucky Valley can be read as ending by bringing its account of racial capitalism closer to the vicinity of questions about state formation, administration and – once more – legality.

For example, against the backdrop of England’s ongoing evolution into a ‘full-scale’ fiscal-military state (p. 317), in these chapters Hall returns to Long’s ‘Whiggism’, taking us back into his training as a lawyer and how his return to Jamaica obviated any particularly emphatic embrace on his part of his legal studies (p. 319). His time in the legislature, and its centrality to his History, are also treated here (as is Tacky’s Revolt, the famed insurrection by Akan-speaking slaves on the island against British colonial rule that unfolded from April 1760 to 1761). Indeed, by Lucky Valley’s last chapter – as the reader follows Long back to England – Hall finds him ‘honing his thinking about the law, slavery and blackness’ (p. 372), including through his anonymously published 1771 satire The Trial of Farmer Carter’s Dog Porter for Murder. As Hall explains, ‘the moral of’ the tale the work tells was ‘[t]hat law in the wrong hands was an ass’, with the hanging of the titular dog ‘memorialized with an epitaph denouncing despotism’ (p. 375). The irony, of course, is that Long ‘refused to see … that his satire on a law that could make dogs speak might be correlated with colonial laws which tortured rebels to obtain confessions and refused the enslaved the right to speak or be tried by their peers in a regular court of law’ (pp. 375–76).

To be sure, Lucky Valley thus concludes with some of the book’s most extended discussion of legal affairs, arriving at the ‘emerging matter of debate’ that ‘the legality of slavery’ was becoming. Apropos of the book’s most continuous preoccupation, Hall deftly connects these matters back to Long’s binarised, race-based worldview, which underpinned his indifference to the ‘volume of legal arguments’ against slavery that he surely would have come to encounter (p. 376) and licensed his commitment to a regime in which ‘Negroes’ were granted neither acceptance as ‘persons in law’ nor, even more ‘horrifying’ to Long, ‘subject[s] of the realm’ (p. 378).

For the scholar of law and capitalism focused on the contemporary world more than its historical pasts, reading Lucky Valley for what it reveals about racial capitalism will also prove illuminating for the questions it leaves unanswered. How far, for example, can Hall’s demonstration that slavery was an inherently capitalist institution inform us about our own world? Of course, insofar as capitalism – whether on a world or domestic scale – today continues to ‘articulate’ with ostensibly non-capitalist forms the answer must surely, in part, be to affirm that lessons abound – like about how market efficiencies remain covertly subsidised by all kinds of unpaid labour (Callaci Reference Callaci2025). On the other hand, if one starts from within the purported boundaries of the capitalist market as defined by what social relations have been commodified, then to ask such a question is to beg another: what more precisely do we mean when we speak of institutional-cum-juridical contingency?

In contrast to the tradition from within which Lucky Valley works, in the (internally riven) terrain of law and economics the question of institutional contingency has less to do with capitalism being subsidised by ostensibly ‘non-capitalist’ forms (which is rendered invisible in these accounts) than it does with how purely ‘calculability’ captures its supposed ethic. This is because calculability is linked to the issue of the predictability of the institutional backdrop of the ‘free’ market. Accordingly, the issue – if not the competing ways from within legal economics of addressing it – remains the same, whether calculability is considered as an ethic attributable to the private actors the market brings together to engage in economic action in light of their jural entitlements or the adjudicator who must settle the matter of who has what entitlements when social relations between private actors erupt into dispute.

To be sure, as Lucky Valley’s subtitle signals, it is hardly Long’s capacity as a judge or legal functionary – and, hence, as some font for rendering the legal institutions of the market, including property rights, predictable – that connects him, for Hall, to capitalism. Yet all the same, one perhaps unplanned gift of encountering Hall’s trenchant account is to inspire curiosity about how the broadly ‘Black Marxian’ vein it works within might, itself, be related to heterodox strands of legal/institutional economic analysis. This is because like Hall’s account these, too, harbour a deep scepticism of the idealised portrait of capitalism’s free market that the so-called new institutional economics (NIE) continues to maintain, even as it has continued to accrue a historicist reputation to the contrary.

Indeed, the pride of place NIE enjoys has only increased since the 1990s – when Douglass North’s macro-historical focus (e.g. North Reference North1990) more overtly coalesced with the micro-oriented ‘law and economics’ perspective associated with Ronald Coase (e.g. Coase Reference Coase1960) after their sustained but more inchoate earlier co-mingling going back to the 1970s. The award of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson – two of whom were authors of the ubiquitous Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Reference Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson2013) – thus made for another feather in NIE’s cap (with Coase and North winning their own respective prizes in 1991 and 1993). So too did it function as further boosterism for the tradition’s central – if wan – insight that economic growth and development is crucially determined by the market being sufficiently undergirded by an infrastructure of property rights-cum-private law institutions. On the other hand, as Ha-Joon Chang explains, the so-called new institutionalism was never the old institutionalism, the early twentieth-century origins of which can be traced back to its own set of twin identifications with economics, through figures like Thorstein Veblen, and law, through figures like Robert Hale (Fried Reference Fried1998). As Chang thus notes, unlike in first-wave law and economics/institutionalism, in NIE while ‘institutions may be able to shape individual behaviour’ they ‘are not able to change the motivation itself’, thus remaining ‘products of maximizing behaviour by individuals with pre-formed preferences’ (Chang Reference Chang and Chang2003, pp. 54–55 [emphasis in original]).

More proximally to the interior of the law’s own logic, this meant that the first wave of legal economics manifested as a programme for demonstrating not just that institutions were constitutive of the preferences of actors in the market but also that the key legal institutions connected to the market were normatively equivocal – and, hence, less than fully predictable and highly politically saturated – at their core. In this respect, institutionalism 1.0 gave the lie to laissez faire in a way that was fundamentally different as compared to its late twentieth-century counterpart. Insofar as the old institutionalism remains part of the shared root system of various contemporary strands of heterodoxy within both law and economics, then, there is a fruitful question as to where the twain meets with a sceptical account of capitalism’s juridical and institutional underpinnings like Hall’s (or, for that matter, McNally’s). It is to Lucky Valley’s great credit that it gets us wondering.