Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. By David McNally

Slavery and Capitalism, by the political scientist David McNally, is not precisely a work of history. Rather, it is a revision to Marxist theory and its applicability to the study of enslaved labor in the Americas. McNally argues that transatlantic slavery played a pivotal role in the rise of capitalism, and that British and American plantations were capitalistic from their inception. His theoretical argument is that only Marxist analysis can provide the “concepts necessary to comprehensively theorizing [sic] capitalism and Atlantic slavery” (6). And yet, though history and theory cross-pollinate, historians and theorists ultimately have different scholarly projects, and different methodologies. Few historians commit to comprehensive theorising, at least to the watertightness on which McNally insists. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, McNally analyses the careers of Richard Ligon, George Washington, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. All three are well-known figures. Washington is universally familiar, and Ligon (a seventeenth-century colonist in Barbados, and the author of a history of English colonisation in the Caribbean), and Wakefield (a key figure in the British colonisation of South Australia) will be very familiar to specialists. The second part refutes claims about the place of enslaved labor and enslaved laborers in the history of capitalism that McNally considers evasions of, or challenges to, the applicability of Marx’s critique of political economy. For example, in one chapter, McNally argues that enslaved laborers, forced to work according to the industrial rhythms of clock-time, brutally and violented exploited, and wholly alienated from the products of their labor, ought to be considered "proletarians" despite not being wage-laborers. In another, McNally draws on histories of racial capitalism to insist that “racialization must be understood as, among other things, a modality of capitalist discipline” (83). These chapters are brisk and passionately argued, and McNally’s knowledge of Marx’s published work and correspondence is encyclopedic and impressive. Ironically, McNally often praises Marx’s own theoretical flexibility, quoting Engels, who wrote of Marx’s work, “It should go without saying that where things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed, but rather as changing … they are not to be encapsulated in rigid definitions, but rather to be developed in their process of historical or logical formation” (110).

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