Rethinking Capitalism and Economic Order III

The History of Economic Thought Working Group and East Asia Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative is launching a webinar series that brings critical attention to the idea, practice, and evolution of capitalism. This project aims to reconnect the history of economic ideas with the world they sought to describe, reform, or transform. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it is a lived experience, a political project, and an ideological battleground.

We seek to open a conversation about capitalism as it has been theorised, imagined, and contested across historical periods and geographies. From early critiques of enclosures and slavery, to colonial accumulation and contemporary platform economies, capitalism’s forms have shifted, but its underlying logics—commodification, accumulation, exclusion—continue to shape our worlds.

This series will invite senior scholars who work across traditions—Marxist, classical, feminist, ecological, decolonial—to speak to these shifting realities. Our goal is not to arrive at a unified definition of capitalism, but to stay with its plurality. What is the nature of capitalism in our time? What kind of capitalism is being debated in different contexts? What kind of resistance does it provoke? How do economic theories shape their justification or critique?

Our approach to history foregrounds tension, silence, and the politics of knowledge. The HET WG places special emphasis on themes like decolonisation, pluralism, epistemic difference, and the often under-acknowledged intellectual contributions from the Global South. We invite our participants to think about histories of caste, race, gender, and land, alongside more familiar categories such as markets, property, and the state.

Key areas of focus include:

• Histories of capitalism across continents: not just as diffusion from Europe, but as co-productions and frictions and histories of capitalism have their centres spreading across the globe, not only in the WEST but in the EAST too, from Malacca, Hugli, Calicut, Macao, Nagasaki, Pegu to Batavia, to name a few.
• Capitalism’s relationship with colonialism, racialisation, and dispossession
• Property regimes, financial architectures, and state-market entanglements
• Trade, Tariffs and Wars
• Debates on crisis: inflation, debt, austerity, climate collapse
• Intellectual genealogies: from Marx and Gandhi to Du Bois, Luxemburg, Fanon, and Polanyi
• The metabolism of capital and planetary boundaries
• The role of economics as a discipline in naturalising or resisting capitalist logics

This series is not an attempt to replace critique with nostalgia or celebration. Instead, we want to create a space where histories of capitalism can inform strategies for its transformation or transcendence. Theories of capitalism are not just descriptions; they are interventions. We hope to create a space where critique and imagination work in tandem.

Prof. David McNally

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History, Wednesday, 28 January 2026, 9.00 am EST

Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives—to support the provocative claim for enslaved labor in the plantation system as capitalist commodity production.

Weaving together history, political economy, and radical abolitionism, McNally demonstrates that plantation slaves formed a modern working class. Unlike those scholars who insist that enslaved people were too sensible to set their sights on liberty, he highlights the self-activity of enslaved people fighting for their freedom and reframes their resistance as labor struggles over production and reproduction, with significant implications for US and Atlantic history and for understanding the roots of racial capitalism.

David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston (UH) and Director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. David came to UH after teaching political economy at York University Toronto for over thirty years.

As a high school student, David McNally joined the movement against the Vietnam War; on entering university, he organized a campus chapter of the Committee to Free Angela Davis—early steps in a lifetime of activism in global justice, anti-racist, and socialist movements. Along the way, he earned a Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought in 1983 and was hired as Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, before joining the Department of History at the University of Houston in 2018.

David is the author of seven books: Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988); Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (1993); Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (2001); Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (2002; second revised edition 2006); Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (2011); Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011); and Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (2019). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Historical Materialism, Studies in Political Economy, Capital and Class, History of Political Thought, New Politics, and Review of Radical Political Economics. His next major project involves a study of capitalism and slavery.

David has won a number of awards, including the Paul Sweezy Award from the American Sociological Association for his book, Global Slump, and the Deutscher Memorial Award for Monsters of the Market. David’s research interests include the history and political economy of capitalism; social reproduction theory and socialist-feminism; slavery, capitalism and anti-racism; the political economy of money and late capitalism; classical and Marxian political economy; the theory and practice of democracy; Hegel and dialectical social theory; and the history of abolitionism and anti-capitalist movements.

David has a long history of active support for a number of organizations including the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Faculty for Palestine, Toronto New Socialists, and the Campus Antifascist Network. He is now developing solidarity connections with social movements in Houston. David is also on the Advisory Editorial Board for Historical Materialism: A Journal of Critical Marxist Research. A lengthy interview with David about his intellectual and political biography has been published in Socialist Studies, available here.

‍David McNally lives with his partner and their youngest son in Houston, where he continues to indulge his love of jazz, baseball, and surrealism.

Related Sessions

S01: The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It with Prof. Barbara Harriss-White

S02: A Different Approach to Informality with Prof. Barbara Harriss-White