Caliban and the Witch
by Silvia Federici
The witch hunts built capitalism. Federici proves it.
For you if
you want to understand capitalism's origins through the bodies it destroyed to get started
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Federici's argument is both simple and explosive: the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were not medieval superstition but a deliberate campaign of terror against women, carried out as capitalism was being born, designed to destroy female autonomy, communal land rights, and reproductive control. The women burned as witches were herbalists, midwives, communal leaders — precisely the people standing between peasant communities and the enclosure of the commons. Federici connects the witch hunts to the Atlantic slave trade, to the colonization of the Americas, to the origins of the nuclear family as an economic unit. The most important feminist history book of the last thirty years. The book that shows capitalism didn't just emerge — it was built on specific bodies.
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