Capitalism + Racism = Keith Piper’s The Trophies of Empire
Keith Piper, extract from The Trophies of Empire, looping Slide/Tape sequence, 1985 © Keith Piper
Taous R. Dahmani is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is doing a thesis in history of photography under the supervision of Prof. Michel Poivert and taught the history of 20th century photography for three years. She is the recipient of the Prix de la Chancellerie and is currently based in Oxford at the Maison Française. Her research focuses on the photographic representation of struggles and the struggle for photographic representations.
by Taous R. Dahmani
As I walk around Kara Walker's Fons Americanus, a 13-metre tall sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall — a cement monument inspired by the Victoria Memorial — I am once again reminded of the power of looking back to understand life today.[i] Anyone who has visited London has likely seen the white marble and golden memorial to the Queen and Empress of India created by Thomas Brock in 1911. Located at the end of The Mall, next to Buckingham Palace, Walker’s sculpture overturns Brock’s work.
However, one is likely to miss the less grand Dominion Gates, and especially the South and West Africa Gate. The latter was photographed by Black British artist Keith Piper who included it in his 1985 cut and mix aesthetic slide show installation, entitled The Trophies of Empire. The slide show arranges photographs Piper took as he toured some of the problematic monuments that are scattered around London.[ii] Photographs of the statue of Sir Julius Charles Wernher,[iii] the Memorial to the Crimean War, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens (with its allegories of the continents), and the Great Western Railway Memorial[iv] can also be found in The Trophies of Empire, emphasising the need for a less monolithic and more complex frame of reference.[v] As such, both Walker and Piper, thirty years apart, question the power of historical narratives through the contextualisation of monuments.[vi] Both offer an inquiry into the romanesque and idealistic narrative of British history, which camouflages the violence in the relations of domination that built the British Empire. That said, based on an analysis of Keith Piper’s The Trophies of Empire, I address how an artwork can tell the ugly truth that lies behind Britain’s wealth: its ties with slavery, a kickstarter to its ever-expanding capitalism.[vii]
Born into an African-Caribbean working-class family in Malta in 1960, Keith Piper arrived as a child in Birmingham and pursued his studies and career in England. It was at university that his artistic development and the awakening of his political consciousness took place. At this time, Piper met Eddie Chambers with whom he co-founded the BLK Art Group in 1982. Alongside other artists like Marlene Smith and Donald Rodney, the young Fine Art students held radical exhibitions that questioned history, society and their own identity. In 1985, Piper—influenced by the film Expeditions One: Signs of Empire8 which was made by his friends and colleagues from the Black Audio Film Collective—created The Trophies of Empire as a constantly looping slide sequence comprised of one hundred and sixty two 35mm transparencies, with a Letraset transfer lettering applied directly to the surface of the transparencies, enabling him to put together a textual and a visual narrative. At the core of The Trophies of Empire is the idea of an extension of colonial history into England’s streets and London life, of its echoes in the most mundane. It tells the story of colonisation, slavery, the resulting classist and racist domination structures, and their survival in the politics and economy of England in the 1970s and 80s. In The Trophies of Empire, Piper provides us with a reflection on history and its transmission, but deviates from the linear codes of the historian and prefers the freedom of a vacillating reflection between fragmentary continuity and globalizing juxtaposition.
The second half of the slide show will be my main interest here. Indeed, after a summary of England’s political and economic state in the 1970s and 80s, Piper offers a radical criticism of the hegemony of capitalism as an economic system based on the accumulation of wealth and on private property. This indictment is made via the prism of the historical explanation of the genesis of so-called “primitive accumulation” — in Marx’s terms[viii] — made possible because of colonization and the slave trade. Through the appropriation and reproduction of a great diversity of images — engravings, drawings, caricatures, etchings – as well as his own photographs for the visual part, and through quotes by Karl Marx, Rudyard Kipling, and Walter Rodney, Piper paints a richly evidenced portrait of the links between the British Empire and Great Britain’s economic development and also links these to the development and spread of racism.
In The Trophies of Empire, Piper reveals how politics, economics and ideology infiltrate the most banal things. For example, he uses the Letraset transfer lettering applied directly to the surface of the transparencies to quote an 1878 song entitled “By Jingo” (that is "By God"), composed by G.H MacDermott and George William Hurt and sung in pubs and music halls in the Victorian era. The lyrics go: “we don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too”. Using the song “By Jingo,” whose words recall and affirm England's dominance over the rest of the world through its royal navy and merchant fleet, its soldiers and its capital, Piper summarizes the colonial history of the country, the violence of colonial wars and the anchoring of these facts in greed and in the need to go ever further—to have more and more. For 400 years, slavery allowed England to use the globe as its granary, like a city would do with its surrounding countryside. Moreover, colonialism introduced an international division of labor using workers all over the world, fetching palm oil for its soaps from Africa and cotton for its clothing from the Caribbean. The London management of this commerce and the traces of this lucrative trade are observable in the English environment as Piper remarks in particular with his photographs of the “Imperial Building” and “Plantation House” located in the heart of The City of London. These places remind us of the origins of Western capitalism and the role of trading capital and slave trading in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Keith Piper’s statement is clear: triangular trade and slavery in plantations, before and during colonisation, are the source of the enrichment of white and English entrepreneurs whose money was used to erect English economic power. This thesis, since C.L.R James in1938[ix] or Eric Williams[x] in 1944 is well known, shared and institutionalized in academia, but less so within the general public. It is therefore interesting to highlight art’s outreach power. If it is possible to obtain a rough consensus on the role of colonialism and slavery in the genesis of capitalism, the details of its system and structure are still widely debated.[xi]
Nevertheless, there is a strong link between the exploitation of slaves in the Americas and the production of British industrial products. Exportation of goods and commodities inevitably led to industrial growth, which in turn led to the structural changes necessary for the country's growth and development. Thus, Piper engages in a direct denunciation by listing, head on — through text and photographs — those multi-nationals of today, built with the blood of slaves. The most striking example is certainly Unilever, an enterprise that has greatly benefited from the exploitation of African natural resources. In 1885, William H. Lever needed palm oil for his soaps and turned to West Africa, the largest area of palm production in the world at the time. In 1902, Lever sent his own "explorers" to Africa and within 30 years, Unilever had become the multi-national we all know.[xii] Another significant example is the establishment of British banks, as Eric Williams recounted in Capitalism & Slavery[xiii] with the cases of Lloyd's and Barclay’s. Williams reports that in the early years of slavery, the London Gazette published ads for fugitive slaves telling people where to bring them back, and often it was to a Lloyd's Cafe. Seizing the opportunity for massive economic growth, Lloyd's quickly became the biggest fire and property (including slaves as human property) insurer in the West Indies. For their part, David and Alexander Barclays, were engaged in the slave trade as early as 1756; the Barclays had married into banking families and Barclay's Bank was born from this connexion. But Piper also names Tate & Lyle, whose founder Henry Tate owned sugar plantations in Jamaica and a refinery in Liverpool. Tate & Lyle would become one of the success stories of the Industrial Revolution. Piper also mentions Lonrho whose business was and is to protect British interests in African countries after their Independence.[xiv]
If slavery is undoubtedly the origin of capitalism, Piper also proposes viewing it as an explanation of the birth of racism. Indeed, Piper summarizes his thought with this equation: “Capitalism + racism = the trophies of empire”. While the assertion is largely defensible, its ins and outs can only provoke. Thus, according to Sivanandan, director of the Institute of Race Relations : “capital requires racism not for racism’s stake but for the sake of capital.”[xv] However, according to the sociologist William J. Wilson: “Class or caste membership develops from historical contact in which groups possessing a power advantage have been able to place themselves in superior positions by solidifying a social structure that features a racial stratification system.”[xvi] Whether racism is a consequence of capitalism or vice versa seems to have as much consensus as the story of the chicken and the egg. However, in the case of the Southern States, the legal distinctions between black slaves and white servants only appeared after 1660.[xvii] It was then that black skin became synonymous with slavery and misery. With slavery then violence and brutality redoubled, and black skin became associated with savagery, immorality, ignorance and the primitive. In short, racism was materialized.[xviii]
A considerable literature on the relations between colonialism, slavery and capitalism exists. As these are deeply political questions, they create intense debates between historians, sociologists, economists and political scientists. Depending on the view point, a distinction in analysis is made between slavery from a moral point of view and slavery from a systemic point of view, that is, not merely thinking of its vile character but thinking of its archeology and its mechanisms, which question what makes it a system whose consequences were decisive in the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. However, I am guided by the idea that there is a correlation between the two concepts as C.L.R James explains in The Black Jacobins : “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”[xix] It thus seems necessary to analyze the question of capitalism and class division at the same time as that of race, looking at these questions as if the lines of inequality overlapped with the lines of color.
Keith Piper’s second thesis is socioeconomic: he tries to show the reification of systems of domination. Piper draws parallels between slavery and “under paid black labour” in the English globalized form of neo-liberal capitalism. A fairly simple analogy can be made with the economic functioning of slavery and the neo-liberal capitalist system in which we live today. Indeed, slavery was essential to British growth, creating, in England, a large and prosperous middle class with growing demands, such as its sugar consumption, the direct consequence of which was the necessity for plantations in the West Indies to yield a maximum by using slaves. In the same way, the 20th century created a population with a growing appetite for consumption leading to low-paid jobs to produce inexpensive goods. Low-paid jobs were and are also occupied by people from southern countries and migrant workers. In this way, slave trade became the prototype of the capitalist system. This idea is summarized in The Trophies of Empire with a quote from the 31st chapter of Karl Marx's Capital : “the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. It is therefore the intersection of class and racial hierarchies in the creation and perpetuation of capitalism that interests Piper.
If it would be naïve of me to tell the story of art’s “grand impact” on the general public – especially in the case of a work of art like that of Keith Piper’s Trophies of Empire overlooked by mainstream institutions and art histories – it seems necessary to emphasize the power of creation and its surrounding writings in the implementation of shifts, reorientations and metamorphoses of narratives. Black radical artists, especially in the 1980s in Britain, were forerunners in the way they linked their visual practice and their theoretical knowledge. Their politics made them trailblazers in thinking the power-knowledge nexus of capitalism and racism, and thereby created a precedent for next generations. They led the way for the creation of monumental works, commissioned by popular galleries and continuing to open up discussions and debates on an ever more public arena.
[i] Clara Kim, Hyundai Commission: Kara Walker (London: Tate Publishing, 2019).
[ii] Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
[iii] A German-born Randlord who moved to London at the age of 21 where he then became, in 1872, an agent to the diamond mines of Kimberley, South Africa.
[iv] The Great Western Railway was founded in Bristol in 1833 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it met the need for links between London and the major British ports in the west with the idea of continuing the economic expansion of the city of Bristol, already prosperous due to the slave trade.
[v] Olivette Otele, "Bristol, Slavery and the Politics of Representation: The Slave Trade Gallery in the Bristol Museum." Social Semiotics (vol. 22, no. 2, 2012): 155-72.
[vi] Madge Dresser, "Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London." History Workshop Journal (vol. 64, no. 1, 2007): 162-99.
[vii] To see the film : http://www.keithpiper.info/trophiesofempire.html; To see a video excerpt : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPEWyGj6L-8
[viii] To be found from chapter 26 to 33 of Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
[ix] C. L. R. James and James Walvin. The Black Jacobins : Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2017).
[x] Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) ; Barbara L. Solow, Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery. The legacy of Eric Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
[xi] In Capitalism & Slavery, Williams introduces four strong ideas: 1) Slavery was an economic phenomenon; and so racism was a consequence, not the cause of slavery 2) The slave economies of the British West Indies caused (the strong version) or contributed much (the weaker version) to the British industrial revolution 3) After the American Revolution, the slave economies decreased in profitability and / or in importance for England 4) The abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves in the British Antilles are not driven by philanthropy or humanitarianism, but for economic reasons in England.
[xii] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle L’ouverture Publications Ltd, London, 1988), 180.
[xiii] Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 101-104 .
[xiv] Chibuike Uche “Lonrho in Africa: the unacceptable face of capitalism or the ugly face of colonialism?”, Enterprise and Society (vol. 16, no 2, June 2015), 354-380.
[xv] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Race, Class and the State: the black experience in Britain (London: The Institute of Race Relations, Race & Class pamphlet No1, 1976), 367.
[xvi] William J. Wilson, Power, Racism and Privilege. Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973), 7.
[xvii] Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 22.
[xviii] Carter A. Wilson, Racism. From Slavery to Advanced Capitalism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.; London: Sage Publications, 1996), 50.
[xix] C. L. R. James and James Walvin. The Black Jacobins : Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2017).