Julie Hardwick

An Intimate History of Racial Capitalism in a French Slave Port City

On 28 May 2026, the French National Assembly repealed the Code Noir, a law dating from 1685, which classed enslaved people as property. This revocation forcefully reminds us about France’s deep entanglements with, and long suppression of, the histories of slavery.  My book explores the lives of enslaved young women and men off West African descent, mostly teenagers, in France’s largest slave port city from the late seventeenth century. Whether they had been enslaved in West Africa or born in slavery in the French Caribbean, thousands of people of West African descent – mostly teenagers – shared migration stories of captivity, corced migration, forced labor, and fugitivity as Nantes became a key site of the West African diaspora. I use the intimate scale of the household to explore the emergence of racial capitalism in France in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. Micronarratives illustrate the emergence of practices in Nantes in which white women and men, clerical and lay, as well as enslaved women and men worked to stabilize, reproduce, and resist a transoceanic system of labor, production, and investment. These capsule histories highlight how enslaved people moved through a series of households, not simply that of their legal enslaver, that were critical to the daily maintenance of slavery and central to the lived experience of enslaved and free people of color.

Julie Hardwick works at the intersections of legal, economic, social and family/gender history in early modern France and the early modern French world.  She grew up in the U.K, and did her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Her current book project is An Intimate History of Racial Capitalism in an eighteenth-century French Slaving Port. Her most recent book is Sex in an Old Regime City: young workers and intimacy in France, 1660-1789.  She has written two earlier books, The Practice of Patriarchy: gender and the politics of household authority in early modern France (1998) and Family Business: litigation and the political economy of daily life in early modern France (2009).  She has many essays in edited collections, and her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Modern History, The William & Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Women’s History, European History Review, History Compass, and French Historical Studies.  She was the founding director of the Institute for Historical Studies at UT.

For more information, see https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/cwgs/faculty/jholwell