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AbstractThis article argues that an infrastructural analysis of the early Portuguese slave trade permits a detailed account of the emergence of what Cedric Robinson called "racial capitalism." The early Portuguese slave ship is one of the clearest examples of how an infrastructure of accumulation accelerated the racialization of capitalism. As denounced by the 1684 Portuguese Law on Tonnage, the holds of the early slave ships created spatial regimes that regularly killed captives through asphyxiation, a unique form of death resulting from the reduction of human life to capital. If enslavement was defined by this spatial regime of suffocation, the early slave trade extended the grounds for racialization through extensive networks of credit and debt. This financial system established the parameters of enslavement and freedom, bridging shipboard and terrestrial social relations. Early slave ships included Black sailors, known as grumetes. A term that became adopted throughout the first region of the Portuguese slave trade in Africa, grumete referred to African wage laborers who worked with Luso-African traders. As wages were likely paid in credit that could only be cashed out by participating in the sale of humans, the freedom of the grumetes was constrained by the system of credit that financed the early trade. The infrastructure of the early slave trade was thus the nexus and conduit between interconnected financial modes, commodified life and debt, that together account for the racialization of the early Atlantic world.

Reviews the pertinent reflections on socialism of representative Soviet spokespersons in the light of Marx's relevant categories, which served as the basic framework of reference for these Marxists. Focuses on the economic content of these theoretical reflections, abstracting from policy issues of the epoch.

"The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is deeply embedded in the emergence of early modern economic and political institutions. Reckoning with Slavery resituates the early modern as the space out of which race, racial hierarchies, notions of value and trade, and ideas of gender and reproduction are mutually constituted. Through a study of numeracy, trade, counting, and commerce, the lives and experiences of enslaved women in the sixteenth and seventeenth century English Atlantic world come into focus. Rather than treating economy and culture as distinct aspects of social history, Reckoning with Slavery asks what we can come to know about kinship, family, and race through the archives of trade and commerce"--

Abstract
Sociology has benefited from inquiries into the theoretical potential in the writings associated with individual 'authors', as well as from the examination of research 'topics' through the works of two or more writers. Of these complementary approaches, the latter provides the basis for this essay. The focus here is on the 'spirit' of modern capitalism from the standpoint of the formulations by Veblen and Weber. These writers provide alternative hypotheses on the decisive variable instrumental to the spirit of capitalism, namely, technology and religion respectively. In most other respects there is remarkable similarity in the two writings. The present analysis has enabled the comprehension of the spirit of capitalism in terms of four sequential phases. These are: early capitalism (capitalism as spirit); early‐modern capitalism (capitalism as spirit and economic organization); late‐modern capitalism (spiritless capitalism); and post‐modernity (society in need of a spirit).