Jim Watts, Imagining the Economics of Jubilee  Utopia Before and After Utopias
Channel: jimwwatts
Date: 2021-03-25

In the Bible, Leviticus 25 contains utopian legislation for resetting agriculture, land transactions, and slavery every 50 years, during what it calls the “Jubilee” year. While the surrounding story of the exodus to the promised land is famous for both inspiring freedom movements as well as being used to justify settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East, the influence of this chapter’s vision of a static agrarian community is less well known. Later Jewish and Christian traditions have often used the Jubilee as a symbol of release and freedom. Yet the distinction between native and foreign slaves, freeing the former but not the latter in the Jubilee, has been used to justify racialized chattel slavery. Watts’ exploration of the history of Leviticus 25 in interpretation and economic practice offers a vantage point for observing some of the social effects—both oppressive and liberating—from envisioning economic futures based on a utopian vision of the past.