Introduction : Political implications for the new history of capitalism

[Extract] Labour history, long a particular strength of historical studies in Australia, has always sustained a critical stance towards capitalism as a historical phenomenon. In recent years, such histories of capitalism have expanded and interacted with other sub-fields, such as cultural history, environmental history and settler colonial studies.1 In part, this work was prompted by evident global political economic upheaval, represented by the 2008 global financial crisis, a climate crisis felt keenly in the Pacific region and a global race crisis, the explanations for which reside in the “afterlives” of slavery and colonisation.2 In response, this collection considers the history of [End Page 1] capitalism as a distinctly political question. How might historians centre capitalism in our histories, without also naturalising it? How do we think about alternatives to capitalist economies through history and as the global economy changes?