Historians’ recent investigations of the centrality of racialized chattel slavery to the origins of capitalism -along with activists’ efforts to expose the ongoing legacy of New World slavery – inspire a broad reconsideration of the connections between capitalism, race, and coerced labor across time and around the world. ‘Carceral capitalism,’ the question of reparations, ‘revenue-generating’ policing, international sex-trafficking, and transnational ‘sponsorship’ arrangements that bind migrant workers to their employers: all these pressing concerns call out for interdisciplinary and international investigations of how historical and present-day forms of slavery shape contemporary capitalism.
