Virginia Humanities Fellow Virtual Talk | The Insurance-Industrial Complex of Slavery

The Library of Virginia will present “The Insurance-Industrial Complex of Slavery,” a virtual talk by Virginia Humanities HBCU Fellow Michelle Oliver, a financial genealogist, preservation strategist and public history researcher. Slavery in the United States has most often been interpreted as a system of coerced labor and racial domination, but while these dimensions are essential, they do not fully account for the financial structures that sustained and normalized human commodification. Oliver’s presentation introduces the concept of the Insurance-Industrial Complex of Slavery to examine how insurance markets, public infrastructure and industrial enterprise converged to transform enslaved lives into risk-managed financial assets.

Drawing on archival research conducted during Oliver’s Virginia Humanities HBCU Fellowship and informed by more than two decades of professional experience in financial systems and risk analysis, this study reexamines antebellum Virginia through the lens of insurance design. Policies written on enslaved laborers working on canals, railroads and other industrial enterprises reveal that enslaved individuals were not only exploited as laborers, but also actuarialized within mechanisms of capital protection and loss mitigation. Insurance contracts, corporate charters and state infrastructure documents demonstrate how financial institutions integrated slavery into a broader economic architecture.

By reframing slavery as a structured financial system rather than solely an agrarian labor regime, this presentation argues that capital markets were central to its durability and expansion. In the context of the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, examining the economic design of slavery is essential to telling a more accurate and institutionally grounded history.

Oliver is a Virginia Humanities HBCU Fellow in residence at the Library of Virginia, where her research centers on Virginia records and bridges African American genealogy, financial records, business history, archival research and public humanities. She is the founder of Genconcepts, LLC, a heritage research and preservation consulting firm, and serves as president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Richmond, Virginia Branch. Her broader work includes African American cemetery preservation, funeral home records, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction history, Black preservation and the financial dimensions of slavery and memory.

This is a free, virtual event, but registration is required. For more information, contact education@lva.virginia.gov