Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (1944), thus describing a global systemic order of dehumanization of the black subject for economic interests. Trabelsi discusses the primary texts supplying the material for his analyses, beginning with the writings of a tenth-century (CE) Arab geographer who travelled the world to locations including the Maghreb, the Sahara, Egypt, and southern Africa. His taxonomies began by distinguishing 'people by their customs and modes of governance', but 'ended with territories inhabited by blacks being seen as the representation and quintessence of the most radical kind of otherness'. These negative representations would be challenged by classical poet and scientist al-Jāhiz (c. 776-868, Basra, Iraq). He is identified as having developed a theory of evolution before Charles Darwin and expressing viewpoints in defence of black people that were deemed scandalous, even though he was himself of African descent. Trabelsi here fills an important research gap in terms of pejorative identifications of blackness in the period preceding fifteenthcentury transatlantic slavery. It is important to put this work in conversation with essays in the first section, specifically, Jesse Benjamin's 'North Africa and the origins of epistemic blackness' and Amon Saba Saakana's Conceptualizing colour representation in antiquity: from Kmt and the Greco-Roman world to the Middle Ages. It definitely also provides an important historical backstory to the twentieth-century definitions of blackness in the Americas, as offered by Michelle M. Wright and Agustín Laó-Montes. Common ground is the economic benefit for those who construct these definitions of otherness and the ways in which resources (physical and natural) were appropriated.