David McNally

The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labour have fallen out of favour 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...

In most accounts of the origins of money, we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study, David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be...

In this innovative book, David McNally develops a powerful critique of market socialism, by tracing it back to its roots in early political economy. He ranges from Adam Smith's attempt to reconcile moral philosophy with market economics to Malthus's reformulation of Smith's political economy which made it possible to justify poverty as a moral necessity. Smith's economic theory was also...