David McNally Slavery and Capitalism review, recensie en informatie boek met een nieuwe Marxistisch geschiedenis van de slavernij. Op 2 september 2025 verschijnt bij University of California Press het boek van David McNally, Professor of History and Business aan de University of Houston. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

David McNally Slavery and Capitalism review en recensie

• “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)
• “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

A New Marxist Theory

• Auteur: David McNally (Verenigde Staten)
• Soort boek: slavernijgeschiedenis
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: University of California Press
• Verschijnt: 2 september 2025
• Omvang: 368 pagina’s
• Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
• Prijs: $ 32,95
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek van David McNally over slavernij en kapitalisme

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.

David McNally is Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston, where he directs the Project on Race and Capitalism. He is the author of seven previous books and more than sixty scholarly articles.

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