Alasia Nuti’s Injustice and the Reproduction of History is a superb intervention in the literature on historical injustice. Nuti not only reconceptualizes the question of temporality to avoid common objections to historical injustice claims but also recasts women’s oppression as belonging squarely in this genre, carefully theorizing how political change may follow. The book engages critical theory, feminist theory, and black political thought, literatures that are seldom found in traditional accounts of historical injustice, let alone together. Nuti argues that what makes unjust history matter normatively for considerations of justice is that it is present, in the sense that it “has been reproduced over time through different means” (p. 4). This understanding of historical injustice challenges—or “de-temporalises”—the divide between past and present injustice by casting certain current injustices as dependent on the “dynamic presence of history” (p. 9).

This insight, derived from Reinhart Kosselleck but substantiated in dialogue with black political thought, recasts existing debates on historical injustice and diffuses two central challenges to justice claims derived from past injustice. First, it shows that establishing that harm follows from historical injustice does not require proving that currently disadvantaged groups are biologically or otherwise connected with those formerly oppressed (the “non-identity problem”). History matters because the “unjust structural position was created and eventually occupied by someone else,” who is harmed regardless of their connection with past victims. Second, Nuti establishes that focusing on present injustices is insufficient absent a thorough understanding of the historical process that created current disadvantages. In other words, although it may be true that we should be most concerned about contemporary inequality, that concern necessarily translates into one about how to undo these formations, which requires understanding how they took shape and were sustained by banal and blatant mechanisms (pp. 41–43).

Nuti sustains these arguments through eight substantive chapters. The second chapter engages Kosselleck’s critique of the temporality of modernity, which the political theory of historical injustice uncritically embraces, to reconsider the main cleavages of this literature. This temporality relocates past and future with respect to each other, so that “past experience ceases to be the basis for the expectancy of the future” (p. 21), making the substantive presence of the past in the present unintelligible. But persistence and change are interdependent, because even when legal reforms make certain structures inviable, oppression often mutates rather than being overcome. Moreover, understanding these mutations is key for a future-oriented framework of justice. In this frame, long-term structures persist not because they are intact, but because they are conditions of possibility for the “new” (pp. 23–25). In other words, to understand persistence, it is necessary to understand change.

Nuti next develops her account of persistence through change (i.e., “historical-structural injustices”; chapter 3). These structures are sustained by informal and seemingly “banal” mechanisms like stereotypes; they are banal because they are trivial and naturalized, not for their lack of significance. Stereotypes have been found to be highly damaging for oppressed subjects, but, for Nuti’s purposes, they also normalize oppression by preventing the recognition of persisting injustice in “updated” institutions (p. 36). This account informs Nuti’s innovative typology of groups (chapter 4). Here, by conceptualizing historical structural groups (HSG)—collectives whose membership is nonvoluntary and for whom identity is not necessarily central—Nuti breaks new ground. Despite their lack of consent and self-identification, members occupy a common structural position in society that is indebted to historical forms of injustice, thus becoming “structural descendants” (p. 62). The group “women,*” in particular, is best conceptualized as an HSG (Chapter 5), because its members belong to an externally recognizable category that locates them in a “position of disadvantage within certain societal structures and in relation to ‘men’” (p. 98). This account improves on Iris Marion Young’s definition of seriality by overcoming problems of essentialism (because HSG membership does not require a common perspective) and more adeptly tackling intersectionality (by pointing us toward history and the intersection and mutual transformation of racial and gendered structures of oppression; pp. 101–3).

Nuti next engages actual contexts of oppression, a necessary theoretical step because historical structural injustice is not always legally sanctioned, as she shows through the experience of Nordic countries’ high levels of domestic violence, occupational segregation, and the domestic division of labor, which endure despite, as well as through, the establishment of egalitarian legal frameworks (chapter 6). Oppression endures through egalitarian laws because they mischaracterize intimate partner violence as a problem of interaction among equals, thereby minimizing its systematic and enduring character. This pathologizes women who stay with violent partners and mischaracterizes the latter’s violence as episodic, random, or due to addiction, mental illness, or immigration background. This framework also highlights the misguidedness of common policy solutions to intimate partner violence, the unequal division of domestic labor, and occupational segregation (chapter 7), which reinforce or fall short of addressing oppression. Nuti then turns to the politics of historical injustice, contesting the either/or approach to reparations and redress (chapter 8). Building on black feminist studies and the Movement for Black Lives, she argues that forward-looking responsibility for justice does “not cancel off the ‘compounding moral debt’” owed to African Americans for past injuries. Nuti’s framework highlights that agents singled out today as responsible for injustice are not called to answer for the injustices committed by their ancestors, but for their own “historical role in the reproduction of unjust history over time” (i.e., structural debt; p. 157). Even redress, moreover, cannot leave history behind, to the extent that understanding how the past is interwoven with contemporary institutions is required for interventions to truly halt the historical reproduction of injustice (p. 173). The concluding chapter considers one last question of substance— responsibility for unjust structures—which Nuti conceptualizes as unevenly distributed among subjects depending on their privilege and capacity to effect change. Although not required, oppressed groups’ solidarity and activism have historically empowered these groups and made them pivotal agents in the struggle for justice (pp. 189–92).

Nuti’s book sets a standard of its own, making clear that political theorists cannot just establish principles that ought to be implemented through legal reform. Building on black and black feminist thinkers, Nuti lays down a clear-sighted diagnosis both of the contextual character of unjust practices that pervades formally equal societies and the most productive policy and political paths out of this predicament. This intervention significantly advances the literature on historical injustices and joins other scholars in arguing that a fair characterization of the theoretical complexity of injustice, justice, and the transition between the two must engage with non-sanctioned, everyday injustice.

In this engagement, however, Nuti does not really attend to transnationalism—even if she consistently and parenthetically acknowledges that the (in)justice that occupies her is also transnational. It is hard to argue with her already impressive accomplishments, but a transnational lens would significantly amend the shape of racial and gender inequality in the West that Nuti outlines. Redress, moreover, also depends on broader transformations at the transnational level. Although African Americans in the United States “tend to be … aware of being part of an intergenerational group and of having inherited an unjust system” (p. 79), they are also aware of the transnational echoes of their condition. Their oppression through slavery was grounded in a transnational system that also reached the Caribbean and South America; their racial construction was parallel to that which justified colonialism in Africa centuries later; and their struggle against segregation, disenfranchisement, and state-sanctioned violence was not distant from that of other colonial subjects, notably Indians (W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly 115 (5), 1915; Dark Princess: A Romance, 2007 [1928]; Inés Valdez, Transnational Cosmopolitanism. Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, 2019). Black activists coalesced politically and jointly challenged domestic and international actors responsible for their condition. In Nuti's terms, transnationalism means acknowledging that sovereign states are the institutions that changed and masked the persistent imperial formations that truly ground racial oppression.

Finally, Nuti’s claims about the power of integration to undo stereotypes builds on Anderson’s contested account of integration. She argues that affirmative action to integrate women into certain professions “is needed to tackle the roots of enduring forms of group-based injustices” (p. 147), because it challenges the stereotypes and norms associated with an unjust history of formal exclusion. Although the formal integration of women into these occupations would be a start, integration without the appropriate transformations in intersubjective relations between men and women would still operate in a patriarchal context. Extrapolating from Sharon Stanley’s account of racial school integration as opposed to desegregation, integration requires men to “relinquish their claim to superior citizenship, which requires their psychic transformation” and abandoning ties of solidarity built around patriarchy (An Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the United States, 2017, pp. 51–52). Incorporating women who are not conscious of and able to counter the controlling images that will characterize their experience in male-dominated occupations may fall short of redress. Here, Nuti’s account of women as a historical structural group needs complementing. Although it is enough to define women as structurally and historically disadvantaged, a political conception of feminist solidarity and struggle is needed to raise their consciousness and that of men to transform desegregation into integration.

These two points do not detract from the innovation and erudition of Nuti’s Injustice and the Reproduction of History. Instead, they open paths toward an expanded research agenda for historical injustice, democracy, and feminism, paths on which this book should be required reading.