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.
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 re-frames 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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