Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them.
Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (University of California Press, 2025) gives what may be the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery — using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives — to support the provocative claim for enslaved labor in the plantation system as capitalist commodity production. [Read more…] about Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History