The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism--since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today's scholars and activists.

The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism consider anti-Blackness, human commodification, and slave labor alongside the history of Indigenous dispossession and the uneven development of colonized lands across the globe. They demonstrate the co-constitution and entanglement of slavery and colonialism from the conquest of the New World through industrial capitalism to contemporary financial capitalism. Among other topics, the essays explore the historical suturing of Blackness and Black people to debt, the violence of uranium mining on Indigenous lands in Canada and the Belgian Congo, how municipal property assessment and waste management software encodes and produces racial difference, how Puerto Rican police crackdowns on protestors in 2010 and 2011 drew on decades of policing racially and economically marginalized people, and how historic sites in Los Angeles County narrate the Mexican-American War in ways that occlude the war's imperialist groundings. The volume's analytic of colonial racial capitalism opens new frameworks for understanding the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in modern society. Contributors. Joanne Barker, Jodi A. Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho, Michael Dawson, Iyko Day, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alyosha Goldstein, Cheryl I. Harris, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Susan Koshy, Marisol LeBrón, Jodi Melamed, Laura Pulido

'Amidst all this talk of racial capitalism and abolition, there is one thinker we should all be reading: Neville Alexander. He is a revolutionary intellectual for our times and for our planet. For anyone committed to abolishing, not just studying, racial capitalism, this is the book to read'--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams 'Profound and provocative. Grounded in history, engaged with revolutionary theory, and informed by a lifetime of practice, Neville's intellectual acuity and passion for freedom shine through in every page. Read, learn, and join the growing global struggle against racial capitalism'--Barbara Ransby, historian, activist, author of Making All Black Lives Matter 'Alexander's beautiful writing patiently connects theory and method with purpose. Against Racial Capitalism is absolutely necessary for all who struggle to understand and change twenty-first-century conditions'--Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography As a revolutionary public intellectual, activist, and former political prisoner, Neville Alexander is among the most important theorists of racial capitalism to emerge during the struggle against apartheid. Alexander's writings engage with some of the important debates in South Africa from the last 50 years, many of which have international resonance today. An opponent of the neoliberal trajectory embarked upon by the post-apartheid establishment in the 1990s, Alexander was always reflective and humble but never wavered from his own self-description: a non-dogmatic Marxist, pan-Africanist, and internationalist. This carefully curated collection brings his incredible body of work to an international audience for the first time. It features a comprehensive introduction, a timeline of key events in the life of Alexander, selected articles, speeches, op-eds, book chapters, and a bibliography of his writings. Neville Alexander was a revolutionary scholar, educator, and activist in the struggles against apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. He spent ten years (1964-74) as a political prisoner on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela and others before emerging as one of South Africa's foremost public intellectuals.

With its deep roots and global scope, the capitalist system provides the framework for our lives. It is a framework of constant change, sometimes measured and predictable, sometimes drastic and out of control. Yet what is now ubiquitous was not always so. Capitalism took shape centuries ago, starting with a handful of isolated changes in farming, trade, and manufacturing, clustered in early-modern England. Astute observers began to notice these changes and consider their effects. Those in power began to harness these new practices to the state, enhancing both. A system generating wealth, power, and new ideas arose to reshape societies in a constant surge of change. The centuries-long history of capitalism is rich and eventful. Approaching capitalism as a culture, as important for its ideas and values as for its inventions and systems, Joyce Appleby gives us a fascinating introduction to this most potent creation of mankind from its origins to now.

As Europe rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War, the former colonies of the major imperial powers sought their independence at the same time that the United States extended its economic and political power globally. In Turbulent Empires Mike Mason analyzes the struggles for post-colonial sovereignty and economic domination and how these competing forces led to conflicts and shifting alliances around the postwar world. Turbulent Empires surveys the major polities and economies of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Russia, and the West and traces the trajectory of nationalist ruling classes bent on exercising sovereign control over economic resources. It emphasizes the convulsions that brought about unanticipated realignments and shocking reversals, such as the rise and fall of regimes, continuous interventions in the Muslim world, the sudden collapse of the commodities supercycle, and the continuing challenge of inequality. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the global economic crisis of 2008 raised the question of a new global order while the question of American decline, captured in the slogan "Make America Great Again, " became commonplace. Both erudite and accessibly written, Turbulent Empires provides an insightful and sweeping analysis of world political and economic history that is an ideal introduction to postwar political science, history, and development studies.

The authors argue that queer, black, brown, and foreign bodies, and the so-called threats they represent, such as immigration reform and same-sex marriage, have been effectively linked with terrorism. These awful conflations are enduring and help to explain the contradictions of contemporary U.S. politics. We are far from a post post-9/11 world. If you want to understand how a new biopolitics of citizenship is containing bodies of the nation by re-inscribing sex and race into it and how this new biopolitics is being resisted you must read this book.

Is the United States a heterosexual regime? If it is, how may we understand the political position of those who cannot or will not align themselves with heterosexuality? With these provocative questions, Shane Phelan raises the issue of whether lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people can be seen as citizens at all. Can citizenship be made queer? Or does citizenship require the exclusion of those who are regarded as queer to preserve the "equality" that it promises? In Sexual Strangers, Shane Phelan argues that, in the United States, queers are strangers -- not exactly the enemy, since they are not excluded from all rights of citizenship, but not quite members. Rather, they are ambiguous figures who trouble the border between "us" and "them," a border just as central to liberal regimes as to other states. Life on this border structures both the exclusion of sexual minorities and their ambivalence about becoming part of the "mainstream."Sexual Strangers addresses questions of long-standing importance to minority group politics: the meaning and terms of inclusion, respect, and resistance. Phelan looks at citizenship as including not only equal protection and equal rights to such institutions as marriage and military service, but also political and cultural visibility, as inclusion in the national imaginary. She discusses the continuing stigmatization of bisexuals and transgendered people within lesbian and gay communities as a result of the attempt to flee from strangeness, a flight that inevitably produces new strangers. Her goal is to convince students of politics, both academic and activist, to embrace the rewards of strangeness as a means of achieving inclusive citizenship, rather than a citizenship that defines itself by what it will not accept.

A provocative examination of how unequal access to reproductive technology replays the sins of the eugenics movement Eugenics, the effort to improve the human species by inhibiting reproduction of "inferior" genetic strains, ultimately came to be regarded as the great shame of the Progressive movement. Judith Daar, a prominent expert on the intersection of law and medicine, argues that current attitudes toward the potential users of modern assisted reproductive technologies threaten to replicate eugenics' same discriminatory practices. In this book, Daar asserts how barriers that block certain people's access to reproductive technologies are often founded on biases rooted in notions of class, race, and marital status. As a result, poor, minority, unmarried, disabled, and LGBT individuals are denied technologies available to well-off nonminority heterosexual applicants. An original argument on a highly emotional and important issue, this work offers a surprising departure from more familiar arguments on the issue as it warns physicians, government agencies, and the general public against repeating the mistakes of the past.

When an individual or couple is considering a difficult choice such as IVF treatment or third party assisted conception, the moral and ethical basis for their decisions may often be informed by their particular faith traditions. Faith and Fertility is a comprehensive collection of essays by academics and faith leaders from around the world. The reader is introduced to the cultural and religious understanding of fertility as it is practised among diverse international faith traditions. Each chapter is written in an accessible and clear style, outlining each faith's history and its core beliefs and values, showing the influence these have on its moral and ethical perspective on the issues surrounding fertility. This book will be a welcome resource for anyone seeking information on the plethora of attitudes towards fertility that are at work in today's global and multi-cultural world.

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians' racist accounts of reproduction--stories of Black "welfare queens" and Latina "breeding machines"--were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others--from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom Reproductive politics in the United States has always been about who has the power to decide--lawmakers, the courts, clergy, physicians, or the woman herself. Authorities have rarely put women's needs and interests at the center of these debates. Instead, they have created reproductive laws and policies to solve a variety of social and political problems, with outcomes that affect the lives of different groups of women differently. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised "breeding" schemes, when the US government took indigenous children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressured Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the main plot lines of women's reproductive lives, the leading historian Rickie Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time. Revisiting these issues after more than a decade, this revised edition of Pregnancy and Power reveals how far the reproductive justice movement has come, and the renewed struggles it faces in the present moment. Even after nearly a half-century of "reproductive rights," a cascade of new laws and policies limits access and prescribes punishments for many people trying to make their own reproductive decisions. In this edition, Solinger traces the contemporary rise of reproductive consumerism and the politics of "free market" health care as economic inequality continues to expand in the US, revealing the profound limits of "choice" and the continued need for the reproductive justice framework.

Revolutionary feminism is resurging across the world. But what were its origins? In the early 1970s, the International Feminist Collective began to organise around the call for recognition of the different forms of labour performed by women. They paved the way for the influential and controversial feminist campaign 'Wages for Housework' which made great strides towards driving debates in social reproduction and the gendered aspects of labour.*BR**BR*Drawing on extensive archival research, Louise Toupin looks at the history of this movement between 1972 and 1977, featuring unpublished conversations with some of its founders including Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, as well as activists from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Canada. Encompassing rich theoretical traditions, including autonomism, anti-colonialism and feminism, whilst challenging both classical Marxism and the mainstream women's movement, the book highlights the power and originality of the campaign. *BR**BR*Among their many innovations, these pathbreaking activists approached gender, sexuality, race and class together in a way that anticipated intersectionality and had a radical new understanding of sex work.