In Out of the House of Bondage, Thavolia Glymph showed us what a plantation household looked like from the inside out. Her description does not fit the traditional frameworks that historians have applied to it. It was neither the Genoveses’ neofeudal barony nor Oakes's quintessentially capitalist enterprise. It was neither Johnson's ideological instrument of race-making (though it was that in part) nor the New History of Capitalism's vanguard of capitalist exploitation.1 It was instead a sphere of intimate, everyday violence that she calls the militarized household. It was a workplace whose daily operation consisted of violating, exploiting, and cruelly leveraging Black families’ care for one another in the interests of the production of crops and the social reproduction of white families. It provided them with leisure and gave them the goods that made their daily lives relatively easy.2
The household was militarized in the sense that violence...
