125th Anniversary PhD Scholarship in Politics - PhD Project: Stuart Hall, Racism and Capitalism in Postcolonial Britain.

About the project

The PhD project examines the relationship between race and capitalism in postcolonial Britain through the work of Stuart Hall. With an interdisciplinary outlook, the PhD project will contribute to contemporary debates in fields such as political theory and political economy.

Scholars and activists are now engaged in fierce debates over the relationship between ‘race’ and class, between practices of racialized domination and the systemic imperatives of capital. Within political and social theory, thinkers have turned to the concept of “racial capitalism” (Robinson 2021) to explain how the abstract logic of wage labour exploitation is dialectically related to the racialized logics of dispossession that fuelled European colonial projects (Alami 2023; Chakravartty and Silva 2012; Dawson 2019; Fraser 2016; 2018; Kelley 2017; Melamed 2015; Virdee 2019). By contrast, the new “historians of capitalism” have sought to explain the racialized and colonial origins of modern capitalism through sociologically embedded engagements with specific industries and geographies (Baptist 2014; Beckert 2015; Follett et al. 2016; Johnson 2013; Smallwood 2007; Jenkins and Leroy 2021; Williams 1994). Yet stark disagreements remain over how best to understand the entanglement of capitalism and racism — i.e., whether that relation is a necessary one, or whether it reflects the contingent developments of the modern economic order (Bhattacharyya 2018; Conroy 2022; Go 2021; Táíwò and Bright 2020). 

This PhD project will intervene in these discussions by returning to the work of Stuart Hall. While often known for his thinking on diasporic Caribbean identity and for his critique of Thatcherism, Hall spent decades grappling with Marxism’s inattention to the problems of ‘race’ and racism (Hall [1980] 2021; 1986). In particular, he argued that the breakdown of the social-democratic consensus in 1970s Britain could not be understood without reckoning more deeply with the colonial relations that fueled industrialization and continued to shape British politics through its imperial decline (Hall et al. 1978; Hall 1978; 2017a; 2017b). Yet many of Hall’s insights on this front remain unpublished and understudied, in part because he preferred to write a series of “interventions” in existing debates rather than stand-alone monographs (Hall and Back 2009). 

The PhD researcher will fill this gap by drawing on Stuart Hall’s archive and on the papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Both archives are hosted by the University’s Cadbury Research Library, where they were recently made publicly available. In particular, the PhD researcher would seek to answer the following questions: 

• RQ1: How did Stuart Hall’s thinking about the intersections of ‘race’ and ‘class’ develop through his career? 
• RQ2: How did Hall’s work on the Caribbean inform his account of British capitalism? 
• RQ3: Which aspects of Hall’s writings, if any, might help us to understand and diagnose contemporary capitalist formations structured in racial dominance? 

Methodology

This project will require extensive archival research. It will also use methods developed in political theory (namely, conceptual analysis, historical contextualism, and social critique) and political economy (such as Hall’s own conjunctural approach and emphasis on practice-driven theory). The PhD researcher will critically evaluate the theoretical toolkit that Hall developed to understand colonial capitalism, postwar British capitalism, and the racisms that they mobilized in discrete historical conjunctures. Finally, they will also offer preliminary thoughts on how Hall’s analyses might “intervene” in contemporary debates about racial capitalism.

Expected Outcomes

By the end of the project, the PhD researcher will be positioned to make a compelling and substantive contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate, one that has sparked interest from political theorists, sociologists, political economists, economic historians, and geographers. They will have written a thesis, but they will also be encouraged to publish thesis chapters as standalone articles, to present their work at seminars and events organized by the Stuart Hall Archive Project, and to attend conferences in critical political economy and political theory. The PhD researcher will also be involved in the hosting of a full-day workshop on contemporary theories of racial capitalism with the two co-supervisors.

Training Support and Development Opportunities

The PhD researcher will have the full support of the supervision team. They will also be encouraged to get involved with the Stuart Hall Archive Project, including with the project’s fulltime archivist and with their regular seminar series and events. In addition to departmental training courses, they will benefit from a vibrant research environment in POLSIS and can attend seminar series offered by both the Political Economy Research Group and the Political Theory Research Group to further develop their network and hone their work.

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