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University of California Press

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

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Title
Title: Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History
Author: David McNally
ISBN: 9780520435827
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2026
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 368
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery.

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 gives 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.

Weaving together history, political economy, and radical abolitionism, McNally demonstrates that plantation slaves formed a modern working class. Unlike those scholars who insist that enslaved people were too sensible to set their sights on liberty, he highlights the self-activity of enslaved people fighting for their freedom and reframes their resistance as labor struggles over production and reproduction, with significant implications for US and Atlantic history and for understanding the roots of racial capitalism.