The historical relationship between global capitalism and chattel slavery has been a focus of scholarly debate for nearly a century, yet this field has only recently come to focus on the histories of race, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. This paper will first explore the long historiographic controversy about how to understand the role of slavery in facilitating the capitalist economic transformation of the Atlantic world. It will then explore more recent efforts to situate the histories of race and gender within the history of capitalism and slavery, focusing on a number of related sub-fields: the history of reproduction in slave societies, the history of ideas about race, the history of enslaved women’s resistance, the intertwined histories of kinship and commodification, and the histories of marriage and mastery.
