The Value of Life: Ability, Race and Expertise

“The Value of Life: Ability, Race, and Expertise"

This paper examines how current-day techniques for assessing the monetary value of human life are based on historical notions of ability, race, and expertise. The first section shows how the corporate life insurance industry in the United States was built from the legal rationale and commercial logic of marine insurance and, later, slave insurance. After the slave trade to the US was outlawed in 1808, a thriving rental market in slaves emerged, where planters could recover the value of these premium human assets if they died while in someone else’s possession. Slaves occupied a complicated position where their skills and health concerns were a part of their “value, though they were not, in an actuarial sense, free citizens contracting life insurance. The second section of the talk shows that while slaves could inhabit social standing approximating that of dehumanized free workers, free people could also be trapped in a predicament that approximates slavery. I examine how the practice of convict leasing--- providing prisoner labour to private parties such as plantation owners and corporations--- emerged in the decades following American independence. The practice can be traced to a wealthy textile merchant, Joel Scott, who leased a state penitentiary from the state legislature, to have inmates farm hemp—a crop so grueling it had only been worked by slaves until that juncture. Combining historical approaches with medical and economic anthropology, my talk shows how a unique historical intersection of incarceration, slavery, and illicit substances created a broader discourse on race, biology, punishment, and expertise, leading Kentuckians to call hemp a “n***** crop.”

Speaker Bio: Prof. Michael Ralph teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the School of Medicine at New York University, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Africana Studies. His research integrates political science, economics, history, and medical anthropology through an explicit focus on debt, slavery, insurance, forensics, and incarceration.

His first book, Forensics of Capital (2015) explores how Senegalese people determine who owes what to whom, and how people adjust social standing based on whether they receive payment for outstanding goods and services, as well as for crimes and offenses. He argues that the social profile of an individual or country is a credit profile as well as a forensic profile. He is currently at work on two books that center on slavery, insurance, and incarceration. He is also engaged in ethnographic research in Eritrea concerning commendations the state prepares for the families of veterans who died during more than three decades of warfare with Ethiopia in order to secure and defend independence. He has also built the multimedia archive, Treasury of Weary Souls, the world’s most comprehensive ledger of insured slaves.