Ricardo Vega León
Assistant Professor
Fields/Keywords
- Political Theory
- Political Economy
- Race and Empire
- Slavery and Abolition
Contact Information
- Office: Building 47, Room 11Q
- E-mail: rvegaleo@calpoly.edu
About Ricardo Vega Leon
My research focuses on the history of political thought and political economy, the political theory of empire and race, and the transnational history and politics of slavery and abolition. My book manuscript, tentatively titled Capitalist Abolitionism: Liberal Ideologies of Abolition and Racial Capitalism in Slavery's Aftermath, develops a conception of capitalist abolitionism to trace how the emancipation projects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal political economists ideologically reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism in the British and French Caribbean, Cuba, and the U.S. South. My work has been published in Modern Intellectual History, Theory & Event and Social Research.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst (2024)
Selected Publications
"Who Will Keep Cultivating Sugar? Harriet Martineau, the Haitian Revolution, and the Post-Emancipation Plantation Economy." Modern Intellectual History, First View (2026): 1-25.
“The Tensions of Abolitionism and Racial Capitalism.” Social Research 92, no. 4 (2025): 915-40.
“Tocqueville on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean: The Preemptive Dispossession and Proletarianization of Black Workers.” Theory & Event 27, no. 3 (2024): 481-509.