A comment on Dale Tomich’s exceptional world-historical research methodology

Abstract

This comment reviews Dale Tomich’s exceptional methodological contribution to world-historical analysis, from the perspective of a close collegial dialogue over the last 50 years. It focuses on Tomich’s preoccupation with what he calls historical theory, through his outstanding and consequential research on world-historic slave systems’ actualization of capital’s emergent world market. Aside from Tomich’s detailed research on slave systems in the New World, his opus embodies a sophisticated and original critical dialogue with Marxist orthodoxy on the dialectical relationship between theory and history.