This volume is a collective endeavor and the result of several years of work. We are indebted to everyone whose work appears here, and to those whose does not. Histories of Racial Capitalism began while we both held fellowships at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, where Walter Johnson first convinced us of the project’s viability. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago also provided support for two in-person collaborative discussions among the contributors. We extend thanks to Stephanie Smallwood, Peter James Hudson, Megan Ming Francis, Jackie Wang, and Michael Ralph, who also participated in those discussions.
We are especially indebted to the Race and Capitalism project housed jointly at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington. Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis not only provided essential funding; they also created opportunities for us to secure constructive criticism from Adom Getachew, Ashleigh Campi, Jodi Melamed, Mark Golub, John Robinson III, Emily Kazenstein, Amna Akbar, Shatema Threadcraft, Alfredo Gonzalez, Tania Islas, Leach Wright Rigeur, Rutger Ceballos, and Federico Navarrete Linares. We have also benefited immensely from Mark Jerng and the Mellon Initiative on Racial Capitalism at the University of California, Davis.
Columbia University Press has been an extraordinary partner throughout this process. The History of U.S. Capitalism series editors, Julia Ott, Devin Fergus, Bethany Moreton, and Louis Hyman, have believed in the importance of this volume from the earliest stages. Bridget Flannery-McCoy, and later Stephen Wesley and Christian Winting, took on much of the work of managing production, allowing us to focus on the volume itself.
Lastly, we are grateful to our students who entertained early versions of our interpretive claims and helped us sharpen our ideas.