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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.
“Historical works like McNally’s have never been more necessary.”
"Chapters are brisk and passionately argued, and McNally’s knowledge of Marx’s published work and correspondence is encyclopedic and impressive"."
"Slavery and Capitalism was a tremendous pleasure to read and chew over. I think many of us who teach the history of slavery from a more materialist perspective have been waiting for a book just like this."
“Ultimately, Slavery and Capitalism succeeds not because it offers a novel moral condemnation of slavery – something few would dispute – but because it reorients the historical and theoretical terrain on which such condemnations are made.”
“McNally ranges across several centuries without the book ever feeling superficial or overly general. Instead, vivid stories pepper the text, drawn from colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, slave narratives, and recent historical scholarship.”
“A historical and theoretical case for the views that Atlantic chattel slavery was formally capitalist . . . that the enslaved of this system constituted a chattel proletariat.”
Introduction: Whisperings of Freedom
Part One. The Planter, The President, and the Political Economist: Foundations of Capitalist Slavery
1. Planting and Profit: Richard Ligon and the Birth of Capitalist Slavery
2. George Washington: Land Grabber, Slave Hunter, Bourgeois Planter
3. "Without a Servant to Make His Bed": Labor and Race in Colonial Capitalism
Part Two. The Political Economy of the Plantation System
4. Living Labor and Planter Profits
5. The Wages of Slavery
6. Steal Away: Capital on Legs
Part Three. The Making of a Chattel Proletariat
7. Bonded Proletarians
8. Life-Making and Enslaved Reproduction
9. Cultures of Freedom
10. Empires of Capital, Worlds of Revolt
Concluding Thoughts: Ghostly Hauntings, Dreams of Freedom
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index