Our current AI moment has darker historical echoes

The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter

“American berserk”, “speedball capitalism” — thanks to the malign coincidence of Donald Trump and AI hyperscaling we are living through a conjuncture that defies conventional thinking and challenges us to coin new terms. We need new conceptions that allow us to grasp both the dynamism of America’s political economy and its transgressive character.

For our current situation, the Manhattan Project is far too quaint to serve as a useful reference point. The dot.com bubble of the 1990s was an altogether sunnier time. In terms of sheer spending, even the epic railway booms of the late 19th century are being eclipsed. As the full scale of the AI boom becomes clear, these familiar reference points all fall short.

What if we turn to the darker moments of modern history? The most dramatic and violent programmes of modernisation in the 20th century were state-led — Stalinist industrialisation, for instance. Our moment is one in which the US government plays a supportive role. But private business is in charge. So perhaps the Industrial Revolution is the obvious precursor. Although this is closer to the mark, the accompanying ideology of the Industrial Revolution was classical liberalism — not so today.

As you work your way down the list of possible histories to reference, before long you arrive at a jaw-dropping conclusion. If you are looking for moments of capitalist resource mobilisation that transformed societies and threatened to deliver nothing short of the end of the world for those who stood in their way, it is empire and colonialism that we have to consider, and chattel slavery in particular.

The point, of course, is not to suggest any moral equivalence between our current moment and the horror of the Atlantic slave trade. But what histories of slave societies and the slave trade remind us of is how little room there is for complacency with regard to the guardrails that supposedly constrain the reasonable or the possible in modern society.

The latest histories to perform this service are the Register of British Slave Traders and William Pettigrew’s book of the same name. They show us how the uprooting and enslaving of over 12mn African people involved financial innovation and new logistical systems; state power not just mobilised in support of the trade but reinvented around it; cultural production and the media touting a new national myth of innovation and empowerment; economic argument energised by the question of licensed monopoly or free trade, in enslaved people.

As Pettigrew shows us, Atlantic slavery sucked in a substantial part of the British elite. Britons who celebrated their own freedom hitched their national development to the enslaving of others. If Britain, in its rise from second-tier European player to global hegemon, pioneered a new form of Anglo-globalisation, then a modernised slave supply chain was among its first projects.

The very idea of a project as a globe-spanning “venture” was a product of this early modern period. The vision of remaking the future by collective corporate mobilisation, the obsession that echoes down to 21st-century Silicon Valley, took root in Britain in the Tudor and Stuart age. The aim was profit. But the logic was not that of careful maximisation of rate of return. As today, speculation was fundamental to the spirit of venture capital.

When a businessperson tells you they are embarked on a vastly lucrative project that will change the future of humanity, but which comes with a risk of ending the world as we know it, take them at their word.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 is commonly remembered as the world’s first Ponzi scheme. But in focusing on the financial aspects, we obscure its real underpinnings. The South Sea Company did not deal in tulips. It was a gigantic human-trafficking operation, licensed by a monopoly contract with the Spanish Crown to supply tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to Spanish plantations.

If you truly want reference points from the past to enhance your situational awareness of the present, don’t flinch from what histories of slavery have to tell us. There is nothing in the combination of finance, enterprise, unfettered technological innovation, radical modernist thinking about the category of the human and state power that should reassure us.