In the last few decades and especially since the 2008 financial crisis, critics have taken up Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation in order to think through the neoliberal turn, the rise of finance, and the history of racial capitalism. Marx introduces this concept at the end of the first volume of Capital to explain the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism and to theorize the process by which one system becomes another. Notably, this is one of the few places where European and specifically Spanish and Portuguese colonialism enters into his analysis: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent . . . and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation” (915). This seminar traces debates about the concept of primitive accumulation and the rise of capitalism with an eye to the historical and theoretical significance of colonial Latin America, and the Iberian empires more broadly, in these processes—as well as their implications for understanding the capitalist present.