We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, “expect people to work for wages.” In
The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s–1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglement between race, capitalism, and colonialism. Instead, the transition to free wage labor accompanied the rise of scientific racism, the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, and heightened rivalries among competing empires.