On my shelf right now are two books that tell the history of the modern world from opposite directions: Reynaldo Anderson’s Afrofuturism and World Order (2025) and Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (2025). They stand in stark contrast, with dichotomous covers that butt up against each other and their contents locked in a polemic.
One asks how Black people imagined a future inside a system designed to deny them one. I would be remiss if I didn’t reaffirm that point: the ontic of today’s world is predicated on the subjection of Black bodies. The denial is an erasure, reducing melanated skin to Spillersian flesh. The other aims to map how that system came to be.
I am reading them together because I think Beckert gets something fundamental wrong, and Anderson inventive thought helps explain why. Beckert seems like a brilliant archivist, and his narrative voice makes his complex ideas accessible to the masses. He begins not in 1492 (the first expulsion of Muslims in Al-Andalus), or even 1776 (the Declaration of Independence), or 1800 (the peak of the Industrial Revolution), but in Yemen in 1150, with merchants who “stayed put and traded at a distance.” From there, he traces paper money, long-distance credit, and merchant networks through the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, arguing that capitalism represents a “fundamental break in human history” that was “always a world economy.” The claim, I assume, is deliberately provocative: capitalism was born global, and it was always about coercion and revolution.
This continuity, however, directly collides with the foundations of decolonial scholarship. Most notably, Aníbal Quijano’s framework of the Coloniality of Power. Quijano argues that we cannot talk about capitalism prior to modernity, and we cannot talk about modernity prior to 1492. For Quijano, capitalism is not simply markets, trade at a distance, or even violence in the service of profit. Those things have existed for millennia. Capitalism as a world-system only exists after the conquest of the Americas, because it is co-constituted with two inventions: coloniality and race. The conquest created a single world market for the first time and a new way of organising labour and humans within it. In Quijano’s famous formulation, European waged labour, Indigenous ‘serfdom’, and African slavery were not pre-capitalist residues that capitalism later swept away; they were built with the ideology of a racial division of labour that made capitalism possible. Race, not just class, is the organising principle. In this reading, modernity is not a European achievement that then expands. Modernity is coloniality.
If we accept this, and I certainly do, we can’t take the eggs out of the fully baked cake. Beckert’s periodisation becomes a problem. By starting in 12th-century Yemen, he tells a story of continuity, merchants, networks, coercion, innovation. It is a powerful global history, but it risks making capitalism an anachronism. It becomes a story about human greed, trade, and state power, rather than a specific historical rupture that begins when Europeans, through eurocentrism centred on a racial hierarchy, invent themselves as a Europe by inventing the colonised other as inferior through the original modality of Judeo-Christianity, all while covertly and hypocritically expropriating indigenous knowledge.
Anderson’s Afrofuturism and World Order refuses that continuity. Anderson traces Black speculative thought from the early twentieth century, from Du Bois and Amiri Baraka to Octavia Butler and the Black Arts Movement, as a response to precisely that rupture Quijano describes. For Anderson, Afrofuturism is not fiction, literature, or escapism. It is an epistemology that emerges when your legacy has been systematically erased. In my opinion, this happens when you are forced into a patrilineal, colonialist, racist capitalist system.
Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, articulates the situation in which one may be the progeny, as in Du Bois’s case, yet rejected and simultaneously owned by his father and master. This leads to the breakdown of all familial bonds of kinship but allows the kith of the resistance community to grow. The parallels are stark: one can be deserving in the meritocratic ideology, but the inscription that lands on the melanin is a denial in itself. Your present is structured by racial capitalism. You must theorise the future because official history leaves you no room to exist now, let alone tomorrow.
This is where Anderson extends Afrofuturism beyond cultural aesthetics into the cold mechanics of international relations and global governance. World Order (2025), which is about geopolitics and multipolarity, mirrors Quijano’s point. You cannot understand Black futures without understanding the world-system that made Blackness a category in the first place. Anderson argues that the contemporary world order is shifting away from Western unipolar dominance (of Western hegemony) toward a complex multipolarity. Emerging technologies, state rivalry, and resource crises drive this shift. Traditional statecraft remains trapped in colonial logic. Without a speculative infrastructure, multipolarity risks merely reconfiguring who enforces the racial division of labour. “The Master’s tool will never dismantle the Master’s house”. To make the point, a liberatory epistemology must include an imaginative leap into the abyss, away from the waters we swim in every day. A new ontology emerges from a point of view in which no one looks from nowhere or everywhere; the ubiquitous nature of Karen Barad’s agential realism is predetermined by the agency of bodies that intra-act, capitalism, coloniality and race.
Read together, then, the two books obviously do not complement each other. They argue. Beckert gives us the material infrastructure: how commodity, finance, and empire built a world economy through “an astounding amount of coercion.” Yet capitalism is distinctly posited as separate from race. Here there is a glaring issue. Capitalism uses race as a technology (Lentin, 2020). Anderson gives us the speculative infrastructure. How people subjected to that economy built counter-technologies of imagination and geopolitical strategy to survive it and construct alternative horizons. The flesh may have been denied the body’s psychological complexities (Viego, 2020); that doesn’t mean that the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic do not exist in a version of a decolonial psyche. Here lies the resistance that exists in a multitude of imaginative spaces; in a unipolar world, Afrofuturism begs for inclusion in the masters’ future. In a multipolar world, as hooks (1992) would put it, it dares to look where it was told not to, and in looking, it creates another world order entirely.
But Quijano reminds us to keep the order right. Without the colonial invention of race after 1492, there is no capitalism to be global. There are markets, there are merchants, there are empires, but there is no capitalism. I cannot follow Beckert back to 1150. Relata do not precede relations. Capitalism does not precede modernity. It is as much modernity, and modernity is today.
References
Anderson, R. (2025). Afrofuturism and world order. The Ohio State University Press.
Beckert, S. (2025). Capitalism: A global history. Penguin Press.
hooks, b. (1992). The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). South End Press.
Lentin, A. (2020). Why Race Still Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Viego, A. (2007). Dead Subjects: Toward a politics of loss in Latino studies. Duke University Press.
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