Treble Troubles? Marketization, Social Protection and Emancipation Considered Through the Lens of Slavery

This chapter considers white European and American thinking on transatlantic slavery historically and, more briefly, in relation to today’s antislavery movement. Combining historical longue durée and a critical engagement with Nancy Fraser’s neo-Polanyian position, O’Connell Davidson shows that abolitionists were, and are, hard to fix as proponents of either market freedom or social protection, or indeed of ‘emancipation’. The postabolition experience of freed slaves shows that marketization, social protection and emancipation are not fully disarticulable political forces, suggesting that the idea of the ‘triple movement’ may be less useful for those committed to a politics of nondomination than it may initially appear.