POLS Faculty Member wins the 2025 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award!

 

 

Assistant Professor Ricardo Vega León received the 2025 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award from the Caucus for a Critical Political Science of the American Political Science Association. In his dissertation, Capitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism after the End of Slavery, Ricardo brings together the study of the abolition of slavery, empire, liberal political economy, and racial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, he analyzes the anti-slavery ideologies and projects of liberal political economists such as Harriet Martineau, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others, to trace how they ideologically reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism in the Americas and Caribbean. Ricardo contends that while these liberal political economists strongly supported abolishing slavery, their conceptions of abolition relied on state coercion to keep former slaves landless, force them to remain in plantations, and transport Chinese and Indian laborers to the Caribbean. The award committee noted that Ricardo’s dissertation articulates “how the relationship between liberalism and enslavement reverberates in the present,” which makes it “critically oriented, historically rigorous, and with contemporary import.”

 

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: Racial Capitalism after the End of Slavery, develops a conception of capitalist abolitionism to explain 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 Theory & Event and is forthcoming in Social Research.