Could Capitalism Have Thrived Without Colonialism? A Commentary on Vivek Chibber's Jacobin Radio Interview

 

Vijay Prashad

In mid-December 2025, an interview with New York University sociologist Vivek Chibber was conducted by Democratic Socialists of America’s Melissa Naschek for the Confronting Capitalism podcast and then was published as a lightly edited transcript in Jacobin.1 I listened to the podcast and then read and re-read the transcript several times. Each time I read the transcript, I was surprised to see that Chibber, who is a professor of sociology and the editor of Catalyst journal, had decided to make such strong claims about the origins of capitalism and the minor role of colonialism in its origin as a podcast, and not as a major written text with citations.

Early into the interview, Chibber says that he is going to dismiss the “idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder,” which he says, “had been pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1980s and ’90s.” The argument I am advancing here is not that colonialism mechanically “created” capitalism, but that capitalism emerged as a global social relation (through the creation of an international division of labour) with internal dynamics in Europe that were inseparable from colonial expropriation, coerced labour, and machine-mediated production elsewhere.

Capitalism did not arise as a self-enclosed national system later projected outward. It emerged through global processes of dispossession, through the violent reorganisation of labour and nature across continents, and through the early deployment of machines in plantations, mines, and extractive complexes that disciplined labour long before the English factory became dominant. These were not peripheral episodes or mere “plunder,” but constitutive moments in the formation of capitalist social relations and the international division of labour.

The wealth of the Global North was not merely accelerated by empire; it was constituted through processes of dispossession that destroyed alternative paths of development, reorganised social reproduction, and locked much of the Global South into relations of dependency that persist through debt, trade, and financial domination.

To deny this is not simply to misread history, it is to disarm Marxism politically. A theory that severs capitalism from imperialism cannot account for the persistence of unequal development, racialised labour, and ongoing forms of primitive accumulation. A Marxism adequate to our world must therefore begin where capitalism itself began—not only in the English countryside, but in the plantation, the mine, the colony, and the machine.


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