Tuesday 6 March 2012

Rise of Capitalism and the Witch-Hunts

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici (Autonomedia, 2004)

“Federici’s book is a crucial contribution to the long history of resistance to the violence of the global capitalist enclosures. The long-time anti-empire feminist activist and scholar situates the witch-hunts within a history of five centuries of capitalist globalization. The witch-hunts, her book argues, were as foundational to the production of the modern proletariat and modern capitalism as the expropriation of the European peasantry, the genocidal campaigns of colonization in the America, and the African slave trade.”
– Fiona Jeffries, ‘Rain Review of Books’

A witch rides a goat through the sky, causing a rain of fire.
Woodcut from Francesco-Maria Guazzo, ‘Compendium Maleficarum’ (1610).
p.217 in ‘Caliban and the Witch’

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