‘Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History’ by David McNally reviewed by Sam Ben-Meir (opens in new tab)

In Slavery and Capitalism, David McNally advances a bracing and uncompromising thesis: racialized chattel slavery was not an archaic residue or external appendage to capitalism but one of its formative conditions. Against lingering narratives that treat slavery as a moral contradiction gradually resolved by capitalist modernity, McNally insists that capitalism emerged through, not despite, regimes of extreme coercion, racial domination and dispossession. Slavery appears here not as a regretta...