A01=David McNally
Atlantic history
Author_David McNally
capitalist slavery
Category=KCF
Category=NHB
Category=NHTS
economic history of slavery
enslaved labor
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
labor resistance
labor struggles
Marxism and slavery
Marxist history
plantation economy
plantation working class
political economy of slavery
racial capitalism
radical abolitionism
slavery and capitalism
US slavery history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520435827
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
