Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010).Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).

This extraordinary collection brings together the study of law, history, sociology, and literature. Taken together, the included essays propose and exemplify new ways of thinking about global history, racial capitalism, and the strategies—legal and otherwise—ordinary people have used to shape, confound, and resist the roles they've been assigned in the history of capitalism. One by one, these rigorous essays revisit and revivify ongoing arguments and point the way to emergent questions.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Karen Engle and Neville HoadPart I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki NesiahPart II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer BairPart III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzić10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont’s Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a “Progressive” Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar García and Jorge González Jácome14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. EsquirolList of ContributorsIndex

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010).Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).

This extraordinary collection brings together the study of law, history, sociology, and literature. Taken together, the included essays propose and exemplify new ways of thinking about global history, racial capitalism, and the strategies—legal and otherwise—ordinary people have used to shape, confound, and resist the roles they've been assigned in the history of capitalism. One by one, these rigorous essays revisit and revivify ongoing arguments and point the way to emergent questions.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Karen Engle and Neville HoadPart I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki NesiahPart II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer BairPart III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzić10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont’s Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a “Progressive” Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar García and Jorge González Jácome14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. EsquirolList of ContributorsIndex

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010).Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).

This extraordinary collection brings together the study of law, history, sociology, and literature. Taken together, the included essays propose and exemplify new ways of thinking about global history, racial capitalism, and the strategies—legal and otherwise—ordinary people have used to shape, confound, and resist the roles they've been assigned in the history of capitalism. One by one, these rigorous essays revisit and revivify ongoing arguments and point the way to emergent questions.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Karen Engle and Neville HoadPart I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki NesiahPart II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer BairPart III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzić10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont’s Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a “Progressive” Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar García and Jorge González Jácome14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. EsquirolList of ContributorsIndex