Colonialism, Slavery and the Origins of Capitalism

Notes on my lecture at the Socialism 2019 Conference, Chicago

August 2022: New audio link added, correcting an earlier problem.

In July 2019 I had the opportunity to deliver a lecture on a topic that’s long been on my mind, to an audience of activists and socialists interested in history and politics — as well as building movements today.

When I said to a friend I was nervous about the talk, they said: “Haven’t you given this a million times before?” The question shocked me because to my mind this was new stuff. In preparing for the talk I studied some history I had never read before, and challenged myself to give a Marxist history of colonialism and slavery that does not act that history itself began — for the enslaved and colonized — from the moment of European contact.

Here’s the audio link to the talk.

And here’s some more about what I tried to do there, and where my thoughts are going on these questions.

Naturally, one aspect of the lecture was to rehash terrain that’s already known to Marxists: that colonialism, slavery, and capitalism are tied together. The accumulated wealth taken from indigenous people in the Americas, from the slave trade and the exploitation of African labor, and from the conquest of South and Southeast Asia became the basis for the Industrial Revolution.

As Marx put it in Capital (1867):

The discovery of gold and…