The Plantation Slavery of the Blankenburg Boode Family: The Rationalization of the Enslaved Body as Capital in Dutch-English Demerara and Essequibo (1753–1834)

Despite their significant footprint, German proprietors in the Dutch-English Atlantic remain marginalized in the historiography of Atlantic capitalism. Migrating to Demerara and Essequibo since the 1750s from Brunswick- Lüneburg, Saxony, Pomerania, Berlin, and Hamburg, they formed a powerful branch of the local plantocracy. Foremost among them was the Boode family of Blankenburg (Harz), who became the preeminent proprietors of human chattel in Demerara and Essequibo. As the colony’s largest single owners of slave plantations and plantation slaves, the family controlled a vast commercial empire that encompassed five estates, 1,249 enslaved individuals, an armed shipping firm, and an investment fund by 1793. Applying a globally connected history perspective, this paper examines how the Boode family integrated local violence into global financial networks to maximize wealth creation. To theorize the systemic nature of these operations, the study bridges continental and transatlantic debates by drawing upon Michael Zeuske’s conceptualization of slavery as the 'capitalization of human bodies' (K.rperkapital).1 By doing so, it contributes to current scholarship on the 'New History of Capitalism' and the micropolitics of coercion. On this theoretical basis, the paper investigates how the Boode family's specific regimes were systematically rationalized as economic mechanisms to transform human beings into depreciable capital, operating across three distinct functional axes: the discipline of the physical body, the judicial containment of the legal body, and the gender-based sexual exploitation of the female body as a dual site of capital accumulation and racialized violence.