The New History of Capitalism, its detractors, and the American Indian
Is this our destiny? For most people, Project 1619 is controversial because Nikole Hannah-Jones dissed Abe Lincoln, having the temerity to write that Lincoln regarded free black people as a...
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Commercial Capitalism
COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 I’m not a professional historian, but I get to play one on the Internet. One of the historical debates that I have been absorbed with since the mid-1990s is over...
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Answering some questions about Robert Brenner
Robert Brenner Recently a dissertation student in Brazil asked me I’d be willing to answer some questions he had about Robert Brenner. I replied that I would be happy to but would like to do so on my...
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The Primitive Accumulation debate
I want to alert my readers, especially those living in Europe, to a conference being held on May 9-11, 2019 at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam on the topic of “Toward a...
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Mercantile Capitalism
Jairus Banaji Probably because British colonialism screwed their homeland so royally, Indian Marxists tend to be some of Political Marxism’s most vehement critics. Perhaps the best known of them is...
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Thoughts provoked by the HM Symposium on “How the West Came to Rule”
In 1976, Robert Brenner wrote an article titled “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” in a scholarly journal that defined what would become known as “the Brenner...
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Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery,...
I had high hopes for Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean for a couple of...
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Political Marxism and petty commodity production
1854 Engraving of New England farmers engaged in petty commodity production In his Catalyst critique of books by the New Historians of Capitalism (Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert and Edward Baptist),...
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Charles Post’s palm-leaf hat
Charles Post wearing a palm-leaf hat from the Museum of Social Property Relations collection in Bangor, Maine Largely as a result of the ferocious debate taking place between the New Historians of...
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The dialectical relationship between the steam-engine and slavery
James Watt’s steam-engine In Historical Materialism (2013, 21.1), there’s a 53-page article by Andreas Malm titled “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry”...
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Thoughts on John Clegg’s “Capitalism and Slavery”
John Clegg Like Charles Post’s article in the latest Catalyst (behind a paywall), John Clegg’s “Capitalism and Slavery” that appeared in the Fall 2015 Critical Historical Studies criticizes the New...
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Capitalism and slavery
Read the book here Fifteen years ago I began writing a series of articles about capitalism and slavery to answer Charles Post’s July 2003 Journal of Agrarian Change article titled “Plantation Slavery...
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Sharecropper Nation
White Landowners Weighing Sharecroppers’ Cotton In a fascinating two part interview that Chris Hedges conducted with Michael Hudson on CounterPunch, they agreed that the USA was succumbing to...
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Capitalism, slavery and the search for definitions
John Clegg I finally got around to reading John Clegg’s article “Capitalism and Slavery” that appeared in the Fall 2015, Critical Historical Studies. Like practically all such articles dealing with...
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The specter that is haunting Vivek Chibber: combined and uneven development
Vivek Chibber Leon Trotsky It would appear that Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development informs not only Anievas and Nisancioglu’s “How the West Came to Rule” but four articles I recently...
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“How the West Came to Rule”: a work for the ages
When Jim Blaut succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2000, he was denied the possibility of completing the third and final installment in a series of books about Eurocentrism. The first two—“The...
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Town and Tawney
R.H. Tawney As a follow-up to my articles on formal/real subsumption, I decided to reread Maurice Dobb’s “Studies in the Development of Capitalism”, an economic history of England that I remembered as...
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Once again on the formal/real subsumption question
Definitely not found in a medieval guild In my post on “Anglocentrism and the real subsumption of labor”, I mistakenly attributed Marx’s discussion of formal and real subsumption to the Grundrisse. It...
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Anticapitalism can only be global in scope — the real purview of the...
In the course of writing about the Brenner thesis for the better part of 20 years, I have heard questions about the relevance of the debate to contemporary politics—including I should add from myself....
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Anglocentrism and the real subsumption of labor
An antidote to Anglocentrism Yesterday an old friend from my misspent Trotskyist youth sent me an excerpt from Harry Harootunian’s “Marx After Marx” that he described as “a further contribution to the...
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