<i>Lucky Valley</i> in the World

This review places Catherine Hall’s important book Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024) within the global contexts of the eighteenth-century British Empire, where the violence and practices of the Atlantic world did not stay put but traveled to impose their hierarchies on other oceanic domains. It argues that close attention to the demographic and cultural pluralities of the imperial provinces, from the Kingston Maroons to the enslaved rebels of Bengkulu, Sumatra, can uncover new avenues of research into and reclamation for historical Black lives. Finally, it uses Hall’s and other scholars’ insights to demonstrate how barbarity and civility were mutually reinforced through the edicts of mercantile capitalism and knowledge-production in the long eighteenth century, inscribing racialized meridians of slavery and freedom on the globe that refuse to fade away.