This is a collaborative project with Jokubas Salyga, aimed at rethinking the historiography of capitalism by revisiting the once-thriving historical materialist debate on the conceptualisation of the ‘mode of production’. While demonstrating the significance of this debate for the current generation of thinkers and activists, the edited volume calls for critical reflection on the notion of the mode of production to address three crucially absent elements in the debate: gender, race, and Eurocentrism.

To this end, the book puts the notion of mode of production in a productive dialogue with the other Marxist debates on domestic (household) labour, racial capitalism, and Eurocentric capitalist historiography. It thus uncovers four interrelated themes. First, it reexamines the concept of the mode of production by exploring various aspects of the debate, including the emergence and periodisation of capitalism, the schools of social formation/articulation, and the categories of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour. Second, it underscores the importance of the domestic labour debate for the notion of the mode of production by dissecting the connections between production and social reproduction, illustrating how household labour can be seen as constituting a site generative of value and surplus value. Third, it explores the utility of the category of race in enriching the notion of the mode of production through analyses of the intersection of class and race, the conceptualisation of plantation slavery, and the historical process of hierarchical reordering of the global subaltern in capitalism. Fourth, it evaluates the capacity of the concept of the mode of production for non-Eurocentric historiography concerning the ‘expansion’ of capitalism.

The co-edited volume includes contributions from the following scholars: Jairus Banaji, Marcel van der Linden, Silvia Federici, Andreas Bieler, Reinhart Kößler, Alessandra Mezzadri, Rohini Hensman, Sébastien Rioux, Andy Higginbottom, Tony Burns, Abigail Bakan, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Paolo Tedesco, Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche, Sai Englert, Leonardo Marques, Waldomiro Lourenço, and Kolja Linder.