The first edition of Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, published in 1999 and edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker P. Potter, helped define how historical archaeology and the study of capitalism are intertwined. The first edition's strength lies in how its chapters weave together a narrative focused on material culture, the historical record, and archaeological landscapes to show how archaeology contributes to the study of capitalism. The second edition, published by Springer as part of its Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology series, is edited by Mark P. Leone and Jocelyn E. Knauf and contains 19 new chapters divided into an introduction and four areas of the world (North America: East Coast; North America: West Coast; North Atlantic, Scandinavia, and Ireland; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Africa). Only Mark Leone has a chapter in both editions and, as the editors note in the Acknowledgments (p. v), the chapter authors are “the third generation of scholars in our field who are freed from the history of how the field begun.” This approach is refreshing; however, it would be interesting to see how the perspectives of more of the first edition authors changed over time. The introduction does an excellent job of bringing the reader up to speed on the current methods and theories of the archaeology of capitalism. The editors place the study of capitalism within categories of colonialism, social inequalities, resource control, critical theory, and Marxism.
The North America: East Coast section includes five chapters with a distinctive Middle Atlantic flavor as four of the five chapters focus on Maryland and Virginia. A diverse range of chapters look at urban, residential, industrial, and extraction sites. These chapters have the strongest Marxist approach in their studies and best exemplify the Marxist approach the editors discuss in the introduction.
The North America: West Coast section consists of two chapters that examine Asian and Asian-American sites. Laura Ng and Stacey Lynn Camp's chapter on consumption patterns seen in the material culture of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps is insightful and does a good job addressing a delicate political situation. Josh Molenda's chapter is also interesting, but seems out of place as it does not seem to incorporate a study of capitalism at Chinese sites in the western United States.
The North Atlantic, Scandinavia, and Ireland section includes four chapters that investigate colonization, exchange networks, industrial development, and prison power struggles and are excellent examples of how structural inequalities form within capitalism. I found these chapters engaging because they examine contexts that most U.S. archaeologists typically do not encounter.
The Latin America and Caribbean section includes five chapters, with three on Latin America (Mexico, Columbia, and Guatemala) and two on the Caribbean (Barbados and Dominica). These chapters examine how capitalism impacted global and local economies during the colonial period. The final section on Africa includes two chapters that also investigate the effects of colonialism through the lens of capitalism. The chapters in these two sections effectively highlight how, in colonial settings at the local scale, there may not be a capitalist mode of production in which local markets and production exist, but, at the larger scale, colonialism is driven by capitalism and global expansion. Guido Pezzarossi's chapter on the markets and antimarkets of colonial Guatemala is an effective discussion of this dichotomy.
In the Introduction, the volume editors state, “many archaeologists and nonarchaeologists alike now equate historical archaeology with the archaeology of capitalism” (p. 4). At first I felt that this line does an injustice to the studies of small-scale or internal economies, but the volume's chapters demonstrate that, during the recent past, small-scale economies operated within the larger global economies of capitalism and reflect the social inequalities of capitalism. The volume benefits from numerous chapters authored by researchers not based in North America, and the editors’ efforts to be inclusive to global archaeologies of capitalism are applauded. The one shortcoming I found in the second edition is the paucity of material culture analyses. Each chapter includes limited studies of artifacts and archaeological landscapes, but it many cases it seems that they are secondary to the historical narratives. Material objects are an important aspect of capitalism, and I feel that there should be a greater focus on material culture in studies of capitalism. Overall, the chapters in the second edition, much like the first, are well-formed narratives on capitalism, making this volume a significant contribution to the field.
