Slavery and Capitalism by David McNally - Paper - University of California Press

Reviews

“Historical works like McNally’s have never been more necessary.”
— Cosmonaut

"Chapters are brisk and passionately argued, and McNally’s knowledge of Marx’s published work and correspondence is encyclopedic and impressive"."
— Journal of Social History

"Slavery and Capitalism was a tremendous pleasure to read and chew over. I think many of us who teach the history of slavery from a more materialist perspective have been waiting for a book just like this."
— LAWCHA (The Labor and Working-Class History Association)

“Ultimately, Slavery and Capitalism succeeds not because it offers a novel moral condemnation of slavery – something few would dispute – but because it reorients the historical and theoretical terrain on which such condemnations are made.”
— Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

“McNally ranges across several centuries without the book ever feeling superficial or overly general. Instead, vivid stories pepper the text, drawn from colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, slave narratives, and recent historical scholarship.”
— The AAG Review of Books

“A historical and theoretical case for the views that Atlantic chattel slavery was formally capitalist . . . that the enslaved of this system constituted a chattel proletariat.”
— Journal of the History of Ideas

"With rich and well-chosen evidence, McNally establishes the ways in which the history of enslavement is best understood within Marxist categories. He writes of unspeakable exploitation and human drama in a frame that never loses track of constant resistance."—David Roediger, author of An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education

"David McNally's deft application of Marx's theory and method not only unearths the hidden dynamics of slavery's political economy but radically broadens our understanding of modern capitalism and its class struggles. The result: a new history of slavery that centers the enslaved—the chattel proletariat—not as 'constant capital' or fungible cogs in the machine but as its gravediggers."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

"Slavery and Capitalism powerfully employs Marxist categories to provide new insights into the capitalist nature of New World slavery, the lives and labor of the enslaved, and, fundamentally, their resistance."—Pepijn Brandon, Professor of Global Economic and Social History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and lead investigator of Amsterdam's historic connections to slavery

"What a remarkable book. Grown from the theoretical soil of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, Slavery and Capitalism nourishes readers with example after thrilling example of how to think dialectically. McNally’s archival evidence tells stories he uses to make a compelling, cumulative argument about class composition centered on the chattel proletariat. Suggesting critical elements of internationalism, the book invites methodological extension and substantive debate to connect his cases to the vast South Atlantic world where most enslaved people lived, worked, and fought. Fresh historical understanding of past social reality can refocus contemporary political analysis of racial capitalism. McNally sharpens dynamic awareness of highly differentiated sectors and regions of value production and social reproduction—the overlapping and interlocking realities where people self-consciously make freedom by remaking place."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography

"This is that rare object—writing that is scholarly and gripping, crammed with insight and the engaging detail of the best history writing. Reframing the non-debate about race and class to return to questions of agency, McNally reminds us that the question is how to become free."—Gargi Bhattacharyya, author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival

Slavery and Capitalism

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards

Slavery and Capitalism

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards