Silvia Federici is a Marxist-feminist historian, not a writer in the decolonial tradition strictly defined. But Caliban and the Witch — her history of the transition from European feudalism to capitalism, published in 2004 — does work that the decolonial canon needs: it documents the violence by which the European peasantry, and particularly European women, were dispossessed and disciplined into the wage relation, simultaneously with the violence by which African and Indigenous peoples were enslaved and dispossessed across the Atlantic.
Federici's central claim is that these two processes were not sequential but simultaneous; not coincidental but structural; not European events plus colonial side-effects but a single global operation. The witch hunts disciplined European women out of control of their bodies, reproduction, and the commons. The slave trade stripped African peoples of their bodies and labor. The colonial enclosures stripped Indigenous peoples of their lands. The same accumulation was happening in three registers at once.
It is a four-star read because the writing is dense and occasionally repetitive; the argument is five-star. Read it alongside Eric Williams and the picture sharpens.
Editorial commentary
Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) is a historical study of the early modern European witch trials and of the relationship between those trials and the broader transformation of European political-economic structure that Marxian historiography has called 'primitive accumulation.'
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American political theorist and historian who has been associated with the Wages for Housework movement since the 1970s and with the broader autonomist Marxist tradition. Caliban and the Witch (2004) is her central historical study; her subsequent work — Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018), Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (2020) — extends the analytical line in multiple directions.
Federici's analytical contribution rests on the argument that the witch trials were not an irrational outbreak of pre-modern religious violence, but a specific institutional instrument by which the emerging early-modern European political economy disciplined and reorganized the female labor force. The trials targeted, in disproportionate numbers, women whose social positions involved the transmission of reproductive knowledge and the management of common resources outside the emerging wage-labor economy.
The book has been received as a major contribution to feminist political theory and to the broader Marxian historiography of primitive accumulation. Federici's framework has been picked up by subsequent scholarship on the global history of reproductive labor, on the early modern political economy, and on the specific intersection of gendered domination and capitalist labor regimes.
The 2004 Autonomedia paperback is the standard contemporary edition; the 2021 Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new preface by Federici. Her subsequent work — Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (2020), Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) — extends the analytical work in multiple directions.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) is a historical study of the early modern European witch trials and of the relationship between those trials and the broader transformation of European political-economic structure that Marxian historiography has called 'primitive accumulation.'
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American political theorist and historian who has been associated with the Wages for Housework movement since the 1970s and with the broader autonomist Marxist tradition. Caliban and the Witch (2004) is her central historical study; her subsequent work — Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018), Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (2020) — extends the analytical line in multiple directions.
Federici's analytical contribution rests on the argument that the witch trials were not an irrational outbreak of pre-modern religious violence, but a specific institutional instrument by which the emerging early-modern European political economy disciplined and reorganized the female labor force. The trials targeted, in disproportionate numbers, women whose social positions involved the transmission of reproductive knowledge and the management of common resources outside the emerging wage-labor economy.
The book has been received as a major contribution to feminist political theory and to the broader Marxian historiography of primitive accumulation. Federici's framework has been picked up by subsequent scholarship on the global history of reproductive labor, on the early modern political economy, and on the specific intersection of gendered domination and capitalist labor regimes.
The 2004 Autonomedia paperback is the standard contemporary edition; the 2021 Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new preface by Federici. Her subsequent work — Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (2020), Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) — extends the analytical work in multiple directions.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.