Caliban and the Witch
Silvia Federici, 2004
This book argues that the standard account of capitalism’s origins is missing a body count. Enclosure happened to land, yes — but it also happened to people, to knowledge, to networks of communal care. Caliban and the Witch is where Federici demonstrates that in careful historical detail.
The Witch Trials as History
The European witch trials of the 15th through 17th centuries are usually treated as an episode of irrational mass hysteria — what happens when fear and superstition overwhelm reason. Federici refuses this framing. She reads the trials as a targeted campaign.
In Federici’s account (one many historians of the trials dispute), the women accused of witchcraft were disproportionately healers, midwives, herbalists — people who held communal knowledge about bodies, plants, and the management of village life. This knowledge was both practically important (in a world without professional medicine, the local healer was the healthcare system) and socially powerful (it created networks of obligation and trust that operated outside the emerging market economy). The trials didn’t just kill individuals. They destroyed those networks, made women’s social authority dangerous to claim, and drove reproductive work into the invisible private household.
This is enclosure at its fullest extent. Not just land but knowledge. Not just fields but the relationships and practices that made communal life possible.
The Body as Commons
Federici’s deeper argument is that capitalism required not just the enclosure of land but a new relationship to the body itself — specifically to the female body as a site of production (reproduction) that capital could not afford to let be self-governing.
The “Caliban” in the title is Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest — the colonized body, dispossessed and forced to labor. The “Witch” is the European counterpart: the woman whose communal authority had to be destroyed so that reproductive labor could be reorganized and made invisible. These aren’t separate histories; they’re parallel movements in the same project.
shadow-work — Illich’s term for the unpaid labor that industrial economies externalize — names the outcome. Federici names the history of how it was achieved.
Connections
- Silvia Federici — author; her earlier and later work bracket this
- enclosure — the land argument that this extends
- commons — what was enclosed and what can be rebuilt
- shadow-work — Illich’s parallel analysis of invisible labor
- embodied-knowledge — what’s lost when knowledge networks are destroyed
- cooperative-movement — collective institutions that resist the enclosure pattern
- reciprocity-with-land — what communal relationship to place actually requires