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Appreciated this piece too, for its gestures towards decentering wage labor & technological innovation in the history of capitalism. However, I think we can go further. https://twitter.com/DavidpStein/status/1286350297015685122
In @andybliu's piece, capitalism's history is shown to include seemingly non-capitalist labor forms like bondage. However, this inclusion is still about *incorporation* i.e. bondage can be a capitalist labor form if it is incorporated into Euro-centric global accumulation
But could we think of capitalism's *origins* themselves differently? This is what the @thebafflermag piece about Tea Wars promised to do but didn't. To find capitalist integration in 19th century Asia is important but not a challenge to origin stories from the English countryside
To challenge those origin stories would, I'd imagine, require going further back in time and find intensifying circuits of accumulation in the 17th and 18th centuries which inaugurated not the commodification of labor power as much as the commodification of bondage itself.
In other words, a much more thoroughgoing decentering of the myth of 'free' labor is possible and necessary for a truly global history of capitalism. So glad this is now a conversation in public facing outlets, and hope we can keep pushing past Eurocentric periodizations
And a final point: it's important to position all of this conversation within debates "our elders" have had for decades rather than as innovations! Jairus Banaji & Tom Brass & Frank Perlin & David Ludden & Cedric Robinson & @abufelix12 have said much of what now seems new
