Reclaiming Marx for the History of Slavery: A Review of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

For nearly two decades, debate over slavery and capitalism in the United States has been shaped by the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC), a loose group of scholars whose influence reflects less intellectual strength than the deep disorientation of contemporary bourgeois scholarship. Arising after the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of neoliberal triumphalism, the NHC has sought to offset its theoretical weakness through extensive empirical accumulation. Its central claim—that plantation slavery was integral to capitalist development—is correct, but it reaches that conclusion without grasping capitalism itself.

This is no accident. The NHC is a petty-bourgeois ideological formation rooted in academic middle layers whose outlook is marked by hostility to Marxism, suspicion of theory, and retreat into descriptive empiricism. Its scholars have produced vast archival detail yet remain unable to explain the structural relationship between slavery and capitalism. Their work reflects a wider crisis: the abandonment of historical materialism in the universities and the rise of identity politics, moralism, and methodological fragmentation.

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History enters at this moment of theoretical collapse. More than a contribution to slavery historiography, it directly challenges the petty-bourgeois drift of contemporary scholarship. It restores Marxist method to a field that has grown uncertain of its capacity to explain the world.

McNally counters long-standing caricatures by showing that Marx understood Atlantic plantation slavery as capitalist commodity production and the enslaved as a “chattel proletariat.” This is more than a small interpretive correction: it decisively refutes the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free wage labour, a view that obscures its global, violent, and coercive development.

The Argument: A Systematic Reassertion of Historical Materialism

McNally’s book proceeds in two parts. First, through case studies of Richard Ligon’s account of Barbadian sugar production, George Washington’s role as an agrarian capitalist slaveholder, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonial labour, it shows that plantation slavery bore the defining marks of capitalist production: production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, and constant pressure to raise productivity.

The second part shifts to political economy, showing how capital derived from slavery helped shape modern financial institutions, including the Bank of England, and later influenced the development of American capitalism. The conclusion is clear: slavery was not outside capitalism but structurally central to it.

McNally places his work within a “forgotten critical Marxist tradition” of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, all of whom rejected the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free labour. By reviving this tradition, he exposes the NHC’s theoretical bankruptcy: its attempt to explain capitalism without Marx and slavery without class analysis.

Where the Book Succeeds: Restoring Class Struggle to the Centre of the Narrative

The book’s strongest contribution is its analysis of enslaved resistance. Liberal historiography has often reduced rebellion, sabotage, and flight to moral testimony or narrative detail. Despite its empirical breadth, the NHC largely repeats this pattern, treating enslaved resistance as an outside disruption rather than a structural feature of capitalist production.

McNally breaks sharply with this approach by recasting enslaved resistance as labour struggle, structurally comparable to strikes, slowdowns, and collective bargaining. In doing so, he restores the enslaved to their proper place as historical agents contesting the conditions of production and reproduction. This is a genuinely original contribution that gives his theoretical framework real explanatory force. His prose is clear, forceful, and historically grounded; planter diaries, travel accounts, and slave narratives function not as ornament but as evidence of the lived reality of capitalist exploitation.

David McNally and the 1619 Project: Marxism Against the Petty‑Bourgeois Rewriting of History

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History appears at a moment of profound ideological confusion. Few examples reveal this more clearly than the rise of the 1619 Project, a political and cultural intervention embraced by parts of the media and academia as a definitive reframing of American history. In fact, it marks the culmination of a petty-bourgeois ideological turn: replacing historical materialism with racial essentialism, class analysis with moral narrative, and revolutionary perspective with political demoralisation.

Although not written as a direct reply to the 1619 Project, McNally’s book stands in sharp theoretical opposition to it. While the 1619 Project casts slavery as a story of racial continuity and national guilt, McNally emphasises the structural, global, and capitalist character of New World slavery. Rather than treating slavery as the permanent essence of American society, he locates it within the development of the capitalist mode of production—a system driven not by racial metaphysics but by profit, accumulation, and class domination. The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The 1619 Project: A Petty‑Bourgeois Politics of Race

The 1619 Project is not a serious historical intervention but a political project grounded in the outlook of the upper-middle-class layers that dominate contemporary cultural institutions. Its method replaces historical materialism with racial essentialism, presenting American history as an unbroken chain of racial oppression from the arrival of enslaved Africans to the present. This narrative serves clear ideological functions: it collapses class into race, erasing capitalist exploitation; substitutes moral condemnation for structural analysis, reducing history to a record of injustice rather than social forces; denies the revolutionary agency of the working class by portraying American society as permanently defined by racial hierarchy rather than class struggle; and aligns with the interests of affluent professional strata, who use racial discourse to claim moral authority while preserving their own class position.

The 1619 Project’s hostility to Marxism is deliberate. It reflects the political needs of a social layer threatened by genuine materialist analysis, which would expose the class basis of exploitation and the capitalist state’s role in sustaining inequality.

McNally’s Intervention: Restoring Marxism to the Debate

McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism directly challenges this ideological drift. His claim is not merely that slavery was linked to capitalism, a point the 1619 Project acknowledges only superficially, but that slavery was a form of capitalist production governed by the same structural imperatives that shaped wage labour. This distinction is decisive. Where the 1619 Project treats slavery primarily as a racial institution, McNally shows it was a capitalist institution driven by production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, relentless pressure to raise productivity, and integration into global circuits of finance and credit. By recovering Marx’s writings and the tradition of Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, McNally exposes the theoretical bankruptcy of approaches that reduce slavery to racial essence rather than analysing it as a capitalist relation.

Enslaved Resistance: Class Struggle, Not Racial Allegory

One of McNally’s key contributions is to recast enslaved resistance as labour struggle. This sharply contrasts with the 1619 Project, which presents resistance mainly as racial testimony: a moral counter-narrative rather than a structural feature of capitalist production. McNally instead restores the enslaved as historical agents engaged in class struggle, contesting the conditions of production and reproduction within capitalism. This is a fundamentally Marxist insight, and it is absent from the 1619 Project’s racial-moral framework.

Why the 1619 Project Cannot Explain Slavery

The 1619 Project cannot explain slavery because it cannot explain capitalism. Its framework is moral rather than material, racial rather than structural. It presents slavery as America’s original sin, not as a global capitalist institution embedded in world markets, finance, and imperial expansion. McNally, by contrast, shows that slavery was not an aberration but a central mechanism of capitalist accumulation; that the enslaved were not racial symbols but workers subjected to capitalist discipline; that the plantation was not simply a racial institution but a capitalist factory in the fields; and that resistance was not merely racial defiance but class struggle within a coercive labour regime. In short, McNally explains slavery because he explains capitalism; the 1619 Project explains neither.

Marxism Against Petty‑Bourgeois Revisionism

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is more than a scholarly study; it is a necessary intervention in a historiographical field shaped by petty-bourgeois racial politics and theoretical fragmentation. Despite its cultural influence, the 1619 Project retreats from materialist analysis, recasting the history of slavery as a narrative of racial permanence. McNally’s book restores what that project cannot: the structural, global, and capitalist character of slavery; the agency of enslaved workers as participants in class struggle; and the indispensable role of Marxist theory in explaining the modern world’s development.

Where It Meets Resistance: The Petty‑Bourgeois Fear of Theory

The sharpest critique of McNally comes from a review in the Journal of Social History, which objects that McNally is engaged in theoretical reconstruction rather than conventional archival history. This criticism is revealing. It reflects the methodological conservatism of contemporary academic history, which has increasingly abandoned theory in favour of empiricism and treats conceptual clarity as a threat rather than a necessity.

The objection that “historians and theorists do different kinds of work” is not a methodological point but an ideological one. It expresses the petty‑bourgeois fear of totalising explanation — the fear that a coherent analysis of capitalism might expose the social foundations of exploitation and the class character of the academy itself.

The NHC’s refusal to engage with Marx is not an oversight. It is a political stance. It reflects the ideological position of a stratum that seeks to critique capitalism’s excesses while preserving its foundations, and that therefore cannot tolerate a genuinely materialist analysis.

McNally’s insistence on theoretical coherence is therefore not a flaw but a strength. It is a challenge to a historiographical field that has retreated from explanation into description and from analysis into moralism.

A Necessary Marxist Intervention in a Field Adrift

Slavery and Capitalism is not a conventional historical monograph. It is a theoretically ambitious and politically necessary intervention into a debate dominated by empiricism, identity politics, and methodological fragmentation. McNally demonstrates that Marx’s framework, properly understood, already contains the tools needed to explain the relationship between slavery and capitalism — tools the NHC has lacked and attempted to replace with descriptive accumulation.

Whether or not one accepts McNally’s full theoretical argument, his reframing of enslaved resistance as labour struggle is a major contribution. His recovery of a critical Marxist tradition is timely and essential. And his critique of the NHC exposes the limits of a historiography that has attempted to understand capitalism without Marx.

For scholars engaged in the debate over slavery and capitalism, McNally’s book is a serious, provocative, and necessary work — one that restores historical materialism to a field that has drifted far from it.

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History was published by the University of California Press in September 2025.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Works by David McNally

• McNally, David. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025.
• McNally, David. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.
• McNally, David. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso, 1993.
• McNally, David. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Ideology and Politics. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.

II. Marx, Engels, and the Classical Marxist Tradition

• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume II. London: Penguin, 1978.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin, 1981.
• Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1973.
• Marx, Karl. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004.
• Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

III. The Critical Black Marxist Tradition (Du Bois, James, Wynter)

• Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998 (orig. 1935).
• Du Bois, W.E.B. The World and Africa. New York: Viking, 1947.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989 (orig. 1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of Pan-African Revolt. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1969.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102.

IV. The New History of Capitalism (NHC)

Core Works

• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
• Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Representative Articles

• Rockman, Seth. “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (2016): 335–350.
• Beckert, Sven. “History of American Capitalism.” In Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by Louis Cain et al., 1–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

V. The 1619 Project

Primary Texts

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole, ed. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021.
• The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. Special Issue, August 18, 2019.

Key Essays (Original Magazine Issue)

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written.”
• Desmond, Matthew. “To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.”
• Kendi, Ibram X. “The Anti‑Blackness of American Democracy.”
• Berry, Mary Frances. “How Segregation Shaped American Education.”

VI. Critiques of the 1619 Project

Marxist and Materialist Critiques

• Reed, Adolph. “The 1619 Project and the Racialization of Everything.” Catalyst 3, no. 4 (2020): 1–20.
• Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, February 2020.
• WSWS Editorial Board. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of History.” World Socialist Web Site, September 2019.
• North, David. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.

Academic Critiques

• Wilentz, Sean. “A Matter of Facts.” The Atlantic, January 2020.
• Oakes, James. “The 1619 Project and the Origins of the Civil War.” Catalyst 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–30.
• McPherson, James M. Interview in WSWS, November 2019.
• Bynum, Victoria. “The 1619 Project and the Problem of Historical Truth.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 2020.

VII. Slavery, Capitalism, and Political Economy (General Scholarship)

• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997.
• Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London: Verso, 2011.
• Tomich, Dale. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labour, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
• Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Race in the Twenty‑First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

VIII. Political Economy, Finance, and Empire

• Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
• Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1968.
• Inikori, Joseph. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

IX. Useful Archival and Primary Sources

• Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1657.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A View of the Art of Colonisation. London: Parker, 1849.
• Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
• Slave Narratives (WPA Federal Writers’ Project), Library of Congress.