Could Capitalism Have Thrived Without Colonialism? – I

Vijay Prashad

In mid-December 2025, an interview with New York University sociologist Vivek Chibber was conducted by Democratic Socialists of America’s Melissa Naschek for the Confronting Capitalism podcast and then was published as a lightly edited transcript in Jacobin.¹ I listened to the podcast and then read and re-read the transcript several times. Each time I read the transcript, I was surprised to see that Chibber, who is a professor of sociology and the editor of Catalyst journal, had decided to make such strong claims about the origins of capitalism and the minor role of colonialism in its origin as a podcast, and not as a major written text with citations. In the world of Marxism, this debate about the origin of capitalism has gripped scholars who work in many languages. In English – the language of the podcast – the debate originated from a book by Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1948), which provoked a review from Paul Sweezy in Science and Society (1950) and then a debate that was collected by Rodney Hilton as The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976, with essays from Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Lefebvre, John Merrington, Giuliano Procacci, Kohachiro Takahishi, Sweezy and Dobb). This debate was recast once more after Robert Brenner published “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” in Past and Present (1976), drawing responses from a range of scholars (M M Postan, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Patricia Croot, David Parker, J P Cooper, H Wunder, A Klima and Rodney Hilton), which was collected in a volume called The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, edited by T H Aston and C H E Philpin (1985). I offer these two books – the Dobb-Sweezy debate and the Brenner debate – to show that there has been a long tradition of dispute about the facts of the transition from feudalism to capitalism within Europe and how to draw out the basic lines of the theory.² These are supremely careful accounts, steeped in the empirical data available at each time and argued with care from all sides despite their great political differences.
It would have been better if Chibber wanted to initiate a discussion on the issues of the origin of capitalism and the role of colonialism for this origin to have produced something other than a podcast as an incitement to debate. As it is, his dismissive attitude toward the arguments with which he disagrees (“utter nonsense” and “preposterous”, says Chibber; “trendy”, says Naschek) make it difficult to know exactly how serious they are about these issues and whether they would even welcome a serious response beyond the clicks of social media.
However, the matters raised by Chibber are very important not only for an academic understanding of the past, but equally for the political strategy that is required in the present (for instance, around the growing debate in the African left – taken up by the Pan-African Progressive Forum – around the issue of reparations). The headline of the interview reads: “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism.” That seems a very strong version of the argument that Chibber appears to be making, although because this is a podcast, it is difficult beyond that headline to know exactly what he is saying about the relationship between colonial plunder and capitalism. For it is important to point out that the headline negates an argument that is certainly not what is made by scholars who are interested in the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. No serious scholar says that colonialism created capitalism. Serious scholarship (from Eric Williams’s Slavery and Capitalism [1944] to David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History [2025]) makes the argument that one cannot understand the development and expansion of capitalism, and particularly the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, i.e., the emergence of industrial capitalism, without the cyclical process of capital accumulation emanating not only from the surplus value extracted from the workers but also from the cycles of superexploitation of the colonial and then former colonial parts of the world through such institutions as enslavement and permanent indebtedness.³ The argument is not that capitalism could not have emerged in any conceivable world without colonialism, but that capitalism as it historically emerged – industrial, global, racialised and imperial – was inseparable from colonial expropriation.
One of the most interesting observations made by Chibber is when he says that “empirically, we can show that it was mistaken” to believe that “the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South.” It is hard to know exactly what empirical dataset Chibber refers to in this comment. In the 19th century, Dadabhai Naoroji developed the early calculations for the drain from India, for instance, which was then studied at the provincial level by B R Ambedkar, and then recently calculated by Utsa Patnaik.⁴  Over the past decade, Jason Hickel and his team in Barcelona have published a series of important papers that demonstrate the actuality of the drain of wealth from the South to the North, not in the distant past, but since 1960, when the data is more dependable. In one paper, for instance, they calculate that the Global North drained $18.4 trillion through the unequal exchange process (or the global labour arbitrage) in 2021 alone – not including all the more direct ways in which surplus is siphoned off from the Global South.⁵ Grieve Chelwa and I have worked on the drain enforced by the International Monetary Fund on most of the African countries over the course of the past decades and find that the Western bond markets are used as a key instrument to appropriate values through a range of corrupt instruments (including transfer payments).⁶ This ceaseless drain provides a continuous stream of plunder into the Western-controlled financial systems whose power remains intact despite the great changes taking place with the centre of gravity of the world economy shifting to Asia.⁷ I would like to see what Chibber refers to when he says that it is “mistaken” to believe that this plunder is a permanent feature of what Karl Marx (in Chapter 26 of Capital, Volume 1) referred to as “so-called originary accumulation” (ursprüngliche Akkumulation).
Despite the lack of clarity of several points in Chibber’s interview, such as the one pointed out above, I would like to explain three points for the sake of discussion: first on Marx and originary accumulation; second, on the ideas of Political Marxism; and third, on the role of colonialism and capitalism.
Marxism and Originary Accumulation
In Volume I of Capital, Marx develops the concept of “so-called primitive accumulation” or “originary accumulation” (since the term in German, ursprüngliche, stresses the foundational element). The point of this section in Capital is twofold, the former of which is stressed by Chibber: first, to dismantle the bourgeois myth that capitalism emerged from thrift, hard work and peaceful exchange (as would later be developed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904), and second, to insist that capitalism was born globally through organised violence that separated the producers from the means of production. This originary accumulation was not a closed historical prelude to capitalism in Europe, but an ongoing global process inseparable from imperialism and colonialism in all its forms (that is to say, including settler colonialism).⁸ For Marx, this originary accumulation refers to the enclosure of common lands in England, the destruction of peasant subsistence, and the creation of a ‘free’ proletariat compelled to sell its labour power. This process required state violence – laws against vagabondage, brutal punishment, and the coercive power of the emerging capitalist state.⁹ Here, there is no disagreement with Chibber, who emphasises the dispossession and the creation of a new institutional environment for competition and profit maximisation. Yet, Marx is clear that this English and Dutch transformation cannot be understood without its world-historical context (and besides, Dutch ascendancy began to suffer when it lost control of Angola, Brazil, and New Amsterdam).¹⁰ Long-distance trade; colonial conquest; the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa and Asia; the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and the plunder that becomes routine from these areas of the world were constitutive moments in the rise of capitalism.
I suspect that Chibber would have a problem with the phrase “constitutive moments”. This originary accumulation is not something that takes place in the distant past, but is a permanent condition that is imposed on the periphery. Colonialism, and then neocolonialism (as Kwame Nkrumah showed in 1965 and Walter Rodney further revealed in 1972), functioned as a machinery of continuous expropriation: land theft, forced labour, establishment by force of monocrop economies, resource extraction through unfair mining contracts and transfer payments, and the destruction of autonomous social reproduction and sovereign national production.¹¹ National and regional economies in the colonised world were reorganised not to develop their own productive forces, but to serve imperial accumulation processes.
Originary accumulation must be understood as a violent reorganisation of social reproduction, not merely as the expropriation of land and the coercive mobilisation of labour for commodity production. Colonial capitalism systematically dismantled subsistence economies, communal land use, and kinship-based systems of care, thereby forcing the reproduction of labour power onto increasingly precarious and feminised forms of unpaid or underpaid work. In the colonies, women’s labour – food production, care work, water and fuel collection, child-rearing and the maintenance of displaced communities – became an unacknowledged subsidy to imperial accumulation. This was not incidental to capitalist development but constitutive of it. The plantation, the mine, and the monocrop economy could only function because the costs of reproducing labour were violently externalised onto colonised households and, within them, onto women. Originary accumulation thus entailed not only the separation of producers from the means of production, but the separation of social reproduction from collective control, subordinating it to the imperatives of imperial markets, debt regimes, and racialised patriarchy. This destruction and reorganisation of social reproduction remain among the most enduring and least acknowledged mechanisms through which primitive accumulation continues to operate in the Global South.¹²
In the Marxist tradition, there are a variety of interpretations of the idea of originary accumulation, but what the facts show – and has been established in, for example, the oeuvre of Samir Amin, among others – is that imperialism is not an outgrowth of capitalism, but is foundational to capitalism itself.¹³ In fact, the English translation of ursprüngliche as ‘primitive’ is accurate in another respect, because this form of accumulation is conducted not through the law of value but through raw violence, a primitive violence through debt regimes, structural adjustment programmes, land grabs, and the use of hybrid war technologies. This is the violence of primitive accumulation, which Marx emphasised was not so much accumulation as expropriation. It was used not merely to separate the producers from their means of production in England and Holland, but to do so with much more violence in the Americas, Africa and Asia, as well as in Ireland, where producers lost their means of production (especially their land and land rights) and had to work as ‘free’ workers through social hierarchies that were not dissolved (such as hierarchies of caste and race). Entire societies in the colonised world were transformed by the processes of imperialism to serve the appetites of the core countries. The example can come from Ireland itself, England’s first colony, which was designed by the English landlords to transfer grain, meat, and dairy products to England (as Marx noted in Capital) while the Irish peasant subsisted on potatoes and then – as the famine intensified – migrated to England to work for subpar wages in the factories, then later migrated to the colonies for work and the settler colonies for land.¹⁴
The primitive accumulation process structured new social relations (including a new international division of labour), where the people in the colonies found themselves producing vast amounts of social wealth not for themselves or even their own national capitalists, but to be drained to the centre of the colonial system and to enhance its capital accumulation in industry and finance. For instance, in the viceroyalty of Peru, the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo established the system of forced labour, in which one in seven adult males had to go and work without pay for the Spanish Crown. The mitayos worked in the silver mines with their own tools and were supported by their communities, providing labour that was even cheaper than slavery, and establishing new social relations in the Andes that outlasted the silver in the mines of Potosí.¹⁵ The transformation of these social relations into forms of social activity for colonial commodity production that supported the development of capitalism – and established an international division of labour – is ignored by Chibber in this commentary.¹⁶
Chibber makes an interesting observation that it is not merely capital funds pilfered that counts, since the Portuguese and Spanish had drawn in the vast silver mountains of the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula without then converting this capital into industry and thereby into capital accumulation. In 1956, Pierre Vilar wrote a cheeky essay on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) that includes a subsection called “Spanish Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Feudalism.”¹⁷ Vilar suggested that the silver coin that came into Spain created massive inflationary effects and did not transform, as Chibber also pointed out, the Iberian Peninsula into a hub for capitalism. But here Vilar and Chibber remain bound by a view of world history that is nation-centric and do not see the global tentacles that already enfolded the Iberian Peninsula centuries earlier. In 1407, the Genoese financiers created the Casa di San Giorgio, a private bank that controlled Genoa’s public finances.¹⁸ The Casa di San Giorgio and other such institutions became key to the financing of long-distance trade into Asia, into the Black Sea region, and into northern Africa and Spain. In the 15th century, Genoese bankers took over Spanish finance, supported the Inquisition as part of their attempt to become the leading merchants of the Mediterranean region (including Andalusia and Morocco, which held the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean), and then financed the Iberian development of sugar plantations in Madeira (as early as 1450), the Canary Islands (the late 1400s), and São Tomé (the late 1400s). These plantations, capitalist in their orientation, provided tutorials for the plantations that were to come in the Americas (Hispaniola between 1516 and 1520, and Puerto Rico and Cuba in the decade after that).¹⁹ How Chibber (and Vilar) can dismiss the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Americas is befuddling. Marx’s “fourth observation” in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) is worth considering: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”
Spanish and Portuguese theft of the gold of Africa and the silver of the Americas created the downpayment for its plantation economies that were integrated into the developing world capitalist system centered eventually around London. It was that capital from London that then re-entered the circuits of imperialism to finance infrastructural developments in Latin America to reinforce the structures of neocolonial extraction of wealth.²⁰ Among Spanish Marxists, there is consensus that capitalist social relations arrived later than in other parts of Europe, that the merchants of Spain worked within constraints set by the monarchy and remained weak, and that they only arose after the Napoleonic invasion in 1808.²¹ When Chibber says, “Spain and Portugal ought to have had the first transitions to capitalism”, he ignores the complex social history of the Iberian Peninsula, its links to Genoese capital, and the drawing of the American silver from the Iberian Peninsula to finance the Dutch and English trade and their transition to capitalism. This was not a national project, but a regional or continental one, and that is precisely what Chibber – who seems to have a methodological nationalism in play – does not see.²²
Notes:

1. Vivek Chibber interviewed by Melissa Nascheck: “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism”, Jacobin, December 14, 2025.
2. The debate inserted itself into the scholarly lines of different languages, including Japanese, Russian and Spanish. In Japan, the debate starts in the 1930s, predating Dobb – who was translated into Japanese in 1946 – with Naro Eitarõ’s The Developmental History of Japanese Capitalism (1930) and moving outward to Kanji Ishii: The Historical Structure of Capitalist Japan (2015). In the Soviet Union, the key writers were Evgeny Kosminsky and Boris Porshnev. Kosminsky’s books focused on the English experience with The English Village in the Thirteenth Century (1935) and Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (1947), while Porshnev published The Popular Uprisings in France from 1623 to 1648 (1948) and Feudalism and the Popular Masses (1964). Porshnev published a synthetic account in French: “Les problèmes de la crise du féodalisme”, Annales Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 13, no. 1 (1958). In Spanish, the extensive literature culminates in José Antonio Martínez Torres, “La transición del feudalismo al capitalism: ¿Un debate extinto?”, Revista de historia Jerónimo Zurita, no. 74 (1999).
3. The concept of superexploitation is rooted in Marx’s writings in Capital, where he writes of the excess profits from colonial extraction. This is later picked up by Lenin who, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), writes of “extra profits”. This idea is developed further by Charles Bettelheim, Calcul économique et formes de propriété (Paris: Maspero, 1970); Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialéctica de la dependencia (México: Era, 1973), also published by Monthly Review Press as Dialectics of Dependency; Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review, 1976); Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Dependency and Super-exploitation: The Relationship Between Foreign Capital and Social Struggles in Latin America, Dossier no. 67, August 2023.
4. Dadabhai Naoroji: Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901); B R Ambedkar: The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution (London: P. S. King and Son, 1923); Utsa Patnaik: “The Free Lunch: Transfers from the Tropical Colonies and Their Role in Capital Formation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution”, in Globalization Under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy, ed. K S Jomo (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik: “The Drain of Wealth: Colonialism before the First World War”, Monthly Review 72, no. 9 (February 2021): 1-19.
5. Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala: “Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960-2018”, New Political Economy 26, no. 6 (2021); and Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland and Intan Suwandi: “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990-2015”, Global Environmental Change 73 (March 2022). It is important to understand that unequal exchange based on the undervaluation of labour in the Global South does not encompass the entirety of the drain of surplus from the South. See John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark: “Introduction to the Updated Edition of Unequal Exchange”, Monthly Review 77, no. 8 (January 2025): 1-19.
6. Grieve Chelwa and Vijay Prashad: How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (Johannesburg: Inkani Books, 2026).
7. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: The Churning of the Global Order, Dossier no. 72, January 2024.
8. On settler colonialism, see the excellent essay by John Bellamy Foster: “Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory”, Monthly Review 76, no. 9 (February 2025): 1-21.
9. The classic account is E. P. Thompson: Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976). A decade and a half before Thompson, Ranajit Guha published a book about the “enclosure” movement in Bengal, which was not used by Thompson or brought into the debate. See Ranajit Guha: A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963). Thompson writes of the Black Act of 1723 and Guha of the Permanent Settlement of 1793.
10. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu: How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015).
11. Kwame Nkrumah: Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965); Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972).
12. The classic text is Maria Mies: Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1986), but also see Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
13. From Samir Amin: Les effets structurels de l’intégration internationale des économies précapitalistes, thesis, Paris, June 10, 1957; to Samir Amin: Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value: Monopoly Capital and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
14. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark: “The Rift of Éire”, Monthly Review 71, no. 11 (April 2020): 1-11.
15. In fact, Pablo Macera argues that the mita system shaped the labour relations into the contemporary era in Peru. This can be seen in two of his most important monographs, Trabajos de historia (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1977) and Visión histórica del Perú (Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 1978). This line of thought was further developed by Alberto Flores Galindo in Buscando un Inca (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1986).
16. Carlos Sempat Assadourian: El sistema de la economía colonial: Mercado interno, regiones y espacio económico (Lima: Instituto de Estuidios Peruanos, 1982).
17. Pierre Vilar: “Le temps du Quichotte”, Europe, no. 34 (1956), translated as “The Age of Don Quixote”, New Left Review, I/68 (July-August 1971).
18. Carlo Taviani, The Making of the Modern Corporation: The Casa di San Giorgio and Its Legacy, 1446-1720 (New York: Routledge, 2022).
19. Robin Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997). The most important work is by Vitorino Magalhães Godinho: Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 4 vols., 1963-1971).
20. The literature on this point is expansive. D C M Platt: Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Tulio Halperín Donghi: Una nación para el Desierto Argentino (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982); Hilda Sábato: La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna: Formación y características, 1860-1910 (Buenos Aires: CISEA/Sudamericana, 1988).
21. Josep Fontana: La quiebra de la monarquía absoluta, 1814-1820 (Barcelona: Ariel, 1971); Josep Fontana: Historia: análisis del pasado y proyecto social (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1982); Manuel Tuñón de Lara: La España del siglo XIX (Barcelona: Laia, 1974); Manuel Tuñón de Lara: El movimiento obrero en la historia de España (Madrid: Taurus, 1972); Jordi Nadal: El fracaso de la revolución industrial en España, 1814-1913 (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975).
22. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller: “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences”, Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 310-34.)

Courtesy Monthly Review, March 2026.

(To be continued)