Some of the most comprehensive recent histories of race confirm the link between racism – the systematic oppression of groups on the basis of supposedly biological, inherent qualities readable in external characteristics – and capitalism. Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery uses extensive, detailed research to reveal that racism is modern and traceable to a specific phase in capitalism's development: the institutionalization of racial slavery in the colonial Americas. Blackburn provides an important key to understanding the character of the link between capitalism, slavery and racism when he places the concept of modernity at the heart of his analysis. He writes of the plantation slavery of the New World:

These “processes” develop over several centuries and only reach maturity with capitalism's hegemony. Because of its transitional nature – no longer clearly feudal, not yet fully capitalist – the early modern period provides particularly rich fodder for investigating the emergence of structures and ideologies associated with capitalist modernity.