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Urbanization of Empire: Plantation, Space, and Racial Terror

February 11, 2026

This essay rethinks urbanization as a historical process inseparable from colonialism and racial violence. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between city, countryside, and the urban, it argues that the urban should be understood not as a spatial form but as the generalized organization of capitalist social relations in space. From this perspective, the colonial plantation is examined as a key socio-spatial configuration in which racial differentiation, economic extraction, and the administration of violence were intensely articulated. Rather than treating the plantation as the origin of modern urban forms, the essay approaches it as an exemplary site where principles later rearticulated by capitalist urbanization become visible. In dialogue with Ida Danewid’s analysis of the urbanization of empire, the essay shows how techniques of differential exposure to violence, first intensified in colonial contexts, are reinscribed in contemporary cities through housing policies, territorial control, and uneven access to protection. The argument proposes racial terror as a constitutive principle of modern spatial production, linking plantation economies, colonial cities, and present-day urban formations within a shared imperial rationality.