Abstract

This is the introduction to the symposium on Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, providing a brief summary of her book’s main contributions to the theory of racial capitalism. The book explores how the political struggles to establish popular sovereignty in contexts of empire and capitalist development, especially in the Anglo-European centres of power, became infused with racial capitalist logics. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of the avenues of critique posed in the symposium commentaries.