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A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (U California Press, 2025) traces the rhetorical strategies of religious radicalization that encouraged fifth- and sixth-century miaphysite Christians to be willing to suffer physical deprivation and harm rather than abandon the church that the late Roman Empire defined as heresy after the Council of Chalcedon in 451. These Syriac texts created genealogies of orthodoxy and heresy, represented their heroes as martyr saints, and reminded their followers of God's coming judgment. Later they gained renewed relevance when they were copied and translated under the emerging 'Umayyad caliphate of Islam. This book reshapes representations of late antiquity by centering Syriac Christianity in these complex and politicized doctrinal conflicts. Tracing these rhetorical strategies not only sheds light on early Christian history in the Middle East, but also provides a rich case study of religious schism, devotion, and survival that continues to resonate today.

New books in late antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review

Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at University of Tennessee Knoxville

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.

Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people as profound labour struggles.

He posits a "social conception of freedom", contrasting it with the liberal individualist view, asserting that for enslaved people, freedom was communal and collective, as no individual could break the structures of slavery alone. The book revives a "forgotten critical Marxist tradition" that consistently upheld the capitalist nature of New World slavery, drawing on three crucial thinkers:

• C.L.R. James, who argued that the collective labour of enslaved sugar cane workers on Haitian plantations was "closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in the world at the time".

• W.E.B. Du Bois, who described the overthrow of slavery in the U.S. Civil War as a "general strike of the slaves," recognizing their withdrawal of labour as commodity producers.

• Sylvia Wynter, who referred to this "new world enslaved class" as the "plantation proletariat," seeing them as "the most thoroughly modern social class".

At the heart of McNally's analysis is the concept of the "chattel proletariat," which he describes as the "pivot point" of his analysis. This concept challenges the idea that the proletariat must mean "free workers". He demonstrates that enslaved people were economically bonded to capital, much like "free" labourers are bonded by economic necessity, with both forms of labour exploited for surplus value. Contrary to common belief, enslaved workers on Atlantic plantations "regularly used the strike weapon," engaging in collective acts like mass strikes (e.g., Toussaint Louverture's call, Bussa's rebellion, the 1831 Jamaica strikes, and Du Bois's "general strike"). These actions lead McNally to assert they were "among the foremost innovators in mass strikes" and should be recognized as part of the proletariat, necessitating a rewriting of modern labour history.

McNally incorporates the insights of Marxist feminists and social reproduction theorists, emphasizing the "life-making" aspect of the chattel proletariat. He highlights that enslaved Black women not only produced commodities but also performed the essential, gendered labour of reproducing human existence. He also stresses the "necessity of theory" in historical analysis, arguing that empirical approaches alone cannot grasp "collective social processes" without a broader theoretical framework of commodity and social relationships. This book represents a significant confrontation with racial capitalism, weaving together McNally's long-standing interests in political economy and anti-racist commitments.

In Tales of Militant Chemistry (U of California Press, 2025), Alice Lovejoy tells the untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear weapons, shaped by centuries of violent extraction. The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.