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Genealogical investigations that attend to colonial rule reveal the intimate alliance between social welfare policy, racial slavery and modern power. In this paper, I intervene in the historiography of social welfare policy to disrupt a long line of academic study that severs studies on the poor from the history of racial slavery. This separation is enormously productive and conceals the ways in which knowledge systems and social policies are organized by and through racial ideologies, early liberalism and its use of population science. To illustrate this point, I show how concerns with knowing and targeting the bodies of poor and enslaved women helped formulate the new economy, white bourgeois power and the extension of empire.