David McNally

Social justice activism and scholarship are David McNally’s abiding passions. His lifelong interests in the history and economics of capitalism and racism—and his enduring belief that another world is possible—began when he marched as a teenager against the War in Vietnam and became a campus organizer for the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. Through his years of teaching and organizing, McNally has written eight books. His “Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism” won the 2012 Deutscher Memorial Award, and he received the 2012 Paul Sweezy Award for “Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance.”

Today, David teaches at the University of Houston, where he holds the NEH-Cullen Chair in History and Business and continues to indulge his love of jazz and baseball. His latest book, “Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History” (2025) is published by the University of California Press.

“Slavery and Capitalism” has been praised by prominent historians and social theorists. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of “Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class,” writes that the book offers “a new history of slavery that centers the enslaved—the chattel proletariat—not as ‘constant capital’ or fungible cogs in the machine but as its gravediggers.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of “Abolition Geography,” says, “This fresh historical understanding of past social reality can refocus our contemporary political analysis of racial capitalism." And Gargi Bhattacharyya, author of “Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival” adds of “Slavery and Capitalism” that it “is that rare object – writing that is scholarly and gripping, crammed with insight and the engaging detail of the best history writing. Reframing the non-debate about race and class to return to questions of agency, McNally reminds us that the question is how to become free.”