Unusual Returns: Transnational Whiteness and the Dividends of Empire (original) (raw)

It is widely assumed that W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the public and psychological wage,” famously elaborated in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, is primarily a feature of the racial-capitalist order within the United States. Examining his World War I era writings on imperialism, this essay elaborates a distinctive conception of transnational whiteness in Du Bois’s thought I call the dividends of empire. Like the wages of whiteness within the United States, the dividends of empire granted white workers within imperial metropoles extra-economic forms of psychological and political compensation that reshaped transnational working-class solidarities and obstructed the emergence of transnational industrial democracy. Yet unlike the wages of whiteness, they rendered white workers as passive recipients of imperial compensation akin to corporate shareholders who relinquish power over economic decisions for financial benefit. Distinct from wages, the financial language of shares and dividends allowed Du Bois to capture the failed dynamics of transnational solidarity between white and colonized labor rather than strictly the racial divisions of the U.S. working class.