Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labour have fallen out of favour 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 labour 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 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 labour struggles over production and reproduction.

This book has significant implications for the history of slavery and other forms of oppression across the world, as well as for understanding the roots of racial capitalism.

The present Indian edition includes a Foreword by Rudrangshu Mukherjee.

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.