Mahdi Amel (1936-87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. Born in south Lebanon, he studied, taught, and wrote on Marxist philosophy in relation to colonialism and national liberation in France, Algeria and Lebanon. He was assassinated in 1987.

Hicham Safieddine is lecturer in the history of the Modern Middle East at King's College London and author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (SUP, 2019). He is co-founder of Al-Akhbar English and The Legal Agenda English Edition.

Angela Giordani, Ph.D (2020), Columbia University in the City of New York, is an intellectual historian of the modern Arabic-speaking world. Her translations have appeared in Jadaliyya and The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (ed. Tarek El-Ariss, 2018).

Mahdi Amel (1936-87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. This first-time English translation of his selected writings sheds light on his notable contributions to the study of capitalism in a colonial context.