Capital and Race

1492: a year that captivated the world. Columbus’s “discovery” of a new continent is remembered for revealing both the wonders of the earth and the unprecedented capacity of mankind to free itself from frontiers. But the invention of America was more than a story: it consecrated a new relationship between nature and mankind, which saw capital and race unite irrevocably.   Sylvie Laurent tells the story of racial capitalism as a “two-headed creature” forged by figures such as Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Beneath these authors’ fantasies of a free-market land of endless riches is the empire of racial capitalism. At the same time, this system has been identified and resisted by a long line of anti-colonial theorists, from Rosa Luxemburg to W. E. B. Du Bois. Against the backdrop of their thinking, and at a time when it is commonplace to oppose class struggles and racial demands, Laurent illuminates the rich and little-known intellectual tradition of overcoming the divide. It’s about time, she argues, that Karl Marx and Martin Luther King Jr. got together again.   Capital and Race: History of a Modern Hydra is a timely and gripping intellectual history, of interest to historians and general readers alike. 1492: a year that captivated the world. Columbus’s “discovery” of a new continent is remembered for revealing both the wonders of the earth and the unprecedented capacity of mankind to free itself from frontiers. But the invention of America was more than a story: it consecrated a new relationship between nature and mankind, which saw capital and race unite irrevocably.   Sylvie Laurent tells the story of racial capitalism as a “two-headed creature” forged by figures such as Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Beneath these authors’ fantasies of a free-market land of endless riches is the empire of racial capitalism. At the same time, this system has been identified and resisted by a long line of anti-colonial theorists, from Rosa Luxemburg to W. E. B. Du Bois. Against the backdrop of their thinking, and at a time when it is commonplace to oppose class struggles and racial demands, Laurent illuminates the rich and little-known intellectual tradition of overcoming the divide. It’s about time, she argues, that Karl Marx and Martin Luther King Jr. got together again.   Capital and Race: History of a Modern Hydra is a timely and gripping intellectual history, of interest to historians and general readers alike.